Hilarious fear-mongering

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Jan 022013

O Noes! There’s a Welsh company that sells .22 rifles that *look* like an AR-15! Panic!

Massacre guns on sale in the UK

“Frightening.” Hmm. This… is a freakin’ .22. A round used for taking down *rodents.* A weaker round is unlikely to be found.

And hey… isn’t the scope on backwards?

I understand the Sun is a muck-raking sensationalist tabloid of low character, kinda like the National Enquirer, the Weekly World News or the New York Times. But still, come on… freaking out over a .22?

Posted by admin at 11:21 am
  • gormanao

    Brenda Ann Spencer famously used a “semi” automatic .22 to very effectively kill a couple of people and wound a bunch of kids. A .22 is a real gun, not some airsoft or paintballer toy.

    • Anonymous

      Call me back when the military – ANY military – replaces .223 with .22.

      .22 is good for killing rats. The fact that it can, with some effort, be used to kill humans means no more than rat poison can be used to kill humans.

      • Mike Carlin

        You’re right about the rat poison but people don’t go into a corner shop, slam a box of rat poison on the counter and shout “Gimme all your money”. But replace “box of rat poison” with “.22 rifle” and you would have a very different result. You don’t have to kill someone with a firearm to commit a serious criminal offence.

        In the UK, “Possession of firearm with intent to cause fear of violence” carries a custodial sentence of up to 10 years. Using a firearm to resist arrest and you’re looking at life imprisonment.

        (Damn; there goes my new year’s resolution to not get drawn into the “firearms” debate).

        • Anonymous

          > You don’t have to kill someone with a firearm to commit a serious criminal offence.

          So… the fact that someone might wave a .22 around means they should be banned. But more importantly, the fact that this .22 looks like a big scary “assault weapon” makes it more dangerous, I guess?

          • Mike Carlin

            You misunderstand me, Scott. I never mentioned banned and neither did the quote you showed from The Sun. What I was attempting to say was that your average smo in the UK probably wouldn’t recognise a .22 from any larger calibre (I wouldn’t) especially when it’s being waved threateningly in your face.

          • Anonymous

            > I never mentioned banned and neither did the quote you showed from The Sun.

            Errrrmmm… “Why are they legal here?” The point of the Sun’s “journalism” is to question why such things as .22 varmint guns should be legal… i.e. arguing for them to *not* be legal. Thus, a ban.

            > your average smo in the UK probably wouldn’t recognise a .22 from any
            larger calibre (I wouldn’t) especially when it’s being waved
            threateningly in your face.

            And the question then becomes “yeah, and?” A well-made replica wholly incapable of firing a bullet, perhaps molded from a solid lump of hard rubber, would be equally indistinguishable under the circumstances. But if public hysteria over molded lumps of hard rubber gets to the point where those are banned… it’s really time to just pack it in, curl up in a thumb-sucking ball and wait for some invaders from across the sea to take over and install a new, better, more vibrant and less easily terrified culture.

  • David Winfrey

    JFK was shot with a .268 calibre. The fact that such can, without any effort, be used to kill rodents means no more than one’s hands can caress or kill.

    • Anonymous

      > JFK was shot with a .268 calibre.

      Not sure of the relevance. The 6.5X52mm Carcano (i.e. .268) was a 162 grain bullet moving at about 2300 ft/sec, producing 1903 ft/lbs of energy. The .22 LR is typically a 40 grain solid lead bullet moving at 1080 ft/sec producing a measly 104 ft/lbs. In contrast, the 5.56x45mm (i.e. .223, round used by the AR-15) is a 62 grain bullet moving at 3,200 ft/sec, producing 1400 ft/lbs.

      In real contrast, the 7.62X51mm NATO (used on the M-14 and M-60) is a 150 grain bullet moving at 2800 ft/sec, generating 2611 ft/lbs.

      The .22 has only 7.4% the muzzle energy of the .223 round, 5.5% that of the .268 and 4% that of the 7.62.

      Handgun ammo:

      .45 ACP (a manstopper):185 grain, 1225 fps = 616 ft/lbs

      9mm (more-or-less adequate): 115 grain, 1300 fps = 432 ft/lbs

      .380 (AKA 9mm Kurz…weak): 90 grain, 1000 fps = 200 ft/lbs

      .32 ACP (very weak, not recommended for a defensive weapon): 65 grain, 925 ft/sec = 123 ft/lbs

      • Kent135

        Sounds like I need to get a bigger gun for my son to bring to school.

      • Anonymous

        President Reagan was nearly killed, and James Brady paralyzed when Hinckley fired six shots from a 22 revolver. Pure chance left the President alive as the round spun crazily through his chest. Note, no large capacity magazine or high powered military round, just a cheap, ordinary non-military handgun.

  • http://twitter.com/tonyt787 tony taylor

    Given that it looks like a much more serious weapon is probably the reason, it could be easily mistaken by the postmaster of a local Post Office for the real thing. Our gun laws in the uk mean that very few people would know it was a rat killer. BTW Rat poison is a controlled substance in the UK and has been for years, there is a famous legal case that hinged on the murderer signing the poison register.
    Said gun could also be dangerous for the user if Armed Police were not very carefully trained.

    • Anonymous

      > it could be easily mistaken by the postmaster of a local Post Office for the real thing.

      Then that would seem adequate reason to not show it to the postmaster. None of his dman business anyway.

      >Rat poison is a controlled substance in the UK … signing the
      poison register.

      Yer shittin’ me. I buy rat poison at the grocery store. Same store I buy shotgun and pistol ammo (I’d buy .223 ammo there too, but I don’t have a .223).

      > Said gun could also be dangerous for the user if Armed Police were not very carefully trained.

      *Any* gun would be dangerous if the police were armed. Might just chase you down in a subway and cap you in the back of the head.

      • http://twitter.com/tonyt787 tony taylor

        Gun control works in the UK because there never were many guns in circulation, I have in 58 years never met anyone I could say I knew had a gun. It’s a good idea. BUT the USA is like a supersaturated solution where guns are concerned, it’s going to take a lot of effort to enforce better control. The size of the population is such that there will be leakage. The population size also means that those who say its a rare occasion when an unstable man gets hold of an assault rifle legally owned are misled, the amount of people in the US means it will happen more than in the UK.

        • Anonymous

          > Gun control works in the UK because there never were many guns in circulation

          No, gun control works because:

          A) your government spent the better part of a century slowly and secretly removing guns from its citizens, one small step at a time ( http://www.guncite.com/journals/okslip.html )

          B) Yes, you guys were never as well armed as Americans, and for a few obvious reasons:

          1) Whatever “frontier” you had was closed centuries before the advent of firearms

          2) For centuries y’all have accepted the idea of monarchy, royalty, strict social strata where most people were little more than serfs or replaceable cogs

          While the US was built *on* a frontier by millions of people who rejected the idea that anybody else was naturally their “betters.”

          C)Britain, even with its Londoners and Cockneys and Welsh and Scots and whatnot is a virtual monoculture compared to the US. It’s not PC to say, but the simple fact is that violence – not just gun violence – is often highly variable across cultural and ethnic lines. In the US, we have a higher-than-yours murder rate. But when you break it down by ethnicity, some trends become blisteringly obvious:http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/01/european-murder-rates-compared-to.html

          The white American murder rate is 1.52 per 100,000. The UK murder rate is 1.2. This is not such big difference.

          • http://twitter.com/tonyt787 tony taylor

            Anyone who thinks thebUK is a monoculture hasn’t lived here. When we had the Olympics every single country that took part had home support.
            Where I work in Wales we are possibly less diverse than London but my customers come from ever part of the Globe.

          • Anonymous

            Ahem: “compared to the US.” We are a majority white nation. But we have cities that are majority non-white, and have had for a very long time. What major cities does Britain have that a majority non-white?

            I suppose a Britainlander might argue that a recent influx of Poles and/or Russians is a cause to proclaim diversity. Hell, son, Chicago has had more Poles than Warsaw for, what, a century?

    • BSabre

      “Said gun could also be dangerous for the user if Armed Police were not very carefully trained.”

      If the Armed Police aren’t very well trained, they’re a danger to everybody, whether they have a gun or not. I believe New York’s Finest shot a man for carrying a package of curtain rods which somebody else had thought was a gun.

  • Rick

    I spent almst three years scrimping and saving to build a .22LR target rifle off of a AR multicaliber lower, a Tactical Solutions AR22LT upper, added a muzzle brake/compensator and Magpul PRS stock. With a huge scope calibrated for 36 and 40 grain rounds. Sure I make a smaller hole at 100-plus yards, but I can do it all day for $50 (even at todays prices) where the 5.56 or 7.62 guys have to go home after an hour or so.

    But yeah, even though I’ve been a contributing, working, taxpaying citizen since I was 17 (now 40) with NO criminal record and less than a half dozen speeding/parking tickets, Feinstein wants to make me a felon or confiscate my rifle. I even carried concealed in a state where it was legal for three years. Not one of my weapons has been fired outside of the range or drawn in anger or fear.

    Why is it that the legitimate citizen gets punished *more* for a firearms violation alone than the gangster who kills over drugs, has multiple felonies, and a stolen firearm with hicap magazines in his possession at the time of arrest? But if I were to assemble a hi cap magazine and that was found during a routine traffic stop, I would spend more time in jail?

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