About today's Cooper QotD

Today's Cooper Qotd is about the common (dare I say, intentional?!) misconception that full-auto weapons are the weapons that criminals prefer.

Automatic weapons are a military invention that civilians (and criminals) have used. In military use, automatic weapons can certainly kill you, but that's not necessarily how they're employed.

Automatic weapons (machine guns, if you will) a generally used for suppressive fire, that is to keep the bad guy's heads down. Now, this is accomplished by the threat of being hit by a bullet, and gunners do indeed aim at the bad guys, but no one expects them to get hits. While machine gunners are suppressing enemy activity, the rest of the squad maneuvers to where they can kill the bad guys, probably with assault weapons, which are intended to be fired in short bursts (if at all ... M16A2's and variants have a 3-rd burst capability to limit the waste of ammo).

Skilled machine gunners can use their weapons in a stand-alone role for very short periods of time, but they are better utilized as crew-served weapons (as they were intended, the SAW being the notable exception).

And skilled civilians can accurately shoot full-auto weapons .... note I said skilled (meaning having a lot of practice, or well-regulated!). Criminals are rarely skilled (notable exception). Bad thing about bullets is that once they're gone, you can't call them back, and that't the sledgehammer that the anti-firearms crowd use to keep them highly regulated.

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