"Colt Manufacturing, which had the military contract for the M-16, recognized that there could also be a civilian market for this rifle. So they developed what they called the AR-15, which was actually the original developmental designation of the rifle. The only difference between these rifles that are sold on the civilian market and the rifles that are issued to our soldiers and soldiers all over the world is that the purely military rifle is capable of firing what's called fully automatic fire. That means if you pull the trigger and hold it down, the gun will continue to fire until it expends all the ammunition in what is known as the magazine, the thing that holds the bullets. Machine guns have been outlawed in the United States, effectively, for civilian use since the mid-1980s. So what these guns need to be configured to be are semiautomatic. That means you must pull the trigger for each round fired. There's a question about rate of fire which the industry and the NRA and other advocates of having these guns in civilian hands make, and it goes like this: Well, the military guns are fully automatic, therefore they're technically machine guns, but the civilians guns are not. They're semiautomatic, and therefore they're not assault rifles. That's a distinction without a difference, as many writers on the gun side noted in the early 1980s, when even the industry called them assault rifles, until they became involved in unfortunate incidents...The reason I say it's a distinction without a difference is that the trigger can be pulled at a very rapid rate in semiautomatic fire, and it's actually more accurate...in automatic fire the gun has a tendency to rise upward, to travel. If you go to shooting ranges where automatic weapons are used, you'll often see, in the ceiling, bullet holes because you pull the trigger and the characteristic sounds of - bbrruppp - the gun will rise. Semiautomatic fire doesn't do that, which is why the military encourages soldiers to shoot semiautomatic rather than automatic whenever possible."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Tom Diaz ().
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Colt_AR-15
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Colt AR-15
25 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Colt AR-15 →
Related Quotes
"In the early morning hours of September 25, 1982, George Emil Banks, appellant, went on a rampage in and near the Cit…"
"On September 25, 1982 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Banks shot fourteen people with a Colt AR 15 semi-automatic rifl…"
"The federal complaint said Bowers was armed with three Glock .357 handguns and a Colt AR-15 assault rifle during the …"
"What do James Holmes, Adam Lanza, and Omar Mateen have in common? Besides being the perpetrators of three of the dead…"
"No outer trauma or inner demon can justify the worst mass killing in northeast Pennsylvania — one of the deadliest sp…"
"Back in the 1980s, I wrote a long detailed article about the design concepts that the AR-15’s creator, Eugene Stoner,…"
"When did the AR-15 first become available to civilians?... Colt sent a pilot model rifle (serial no. GX4968) to the B…"
"The AR-15 was developed in the late 1950s as a civilian weapon by Eugene Stoner, a former Marine working for small Ca…"
"Light, precise and with little recoil, Colt Armalite Rifle-15 Sporter hit the market in the early 1960s as the first …"
"If the cutoff point is set at 10 or more victims killed in a single incident, the cases become rare and the majority …"