January 14, 2005

The phone rang one Friday night:

"Hello?"

"Tant, it's Mace. Hi ya doing?"

Mace is an old friend of mine, a rather soft-spoken former Airborne Ranger and something of a gun aficionado. He's the guy who helped me pick out my first handgun. He also has an odd habit of making the "How" in "How ya doing" sound like "Hi."

"Heya Mace, what's up?"

"I just got a new rifle I think you might like. Come on over tomorrow...You HAVE to try this out."

"Aw, man...I'm supposed to help my wife pick out some window treatments for.....um, I mean, yeah I'll see you tomorrow."

So the next day I get to his place (a rather large spread in a, shall we say, rather rural area) and Mace is carrying a HUGE box. He pulls off the cover and....

You ever see the movie Alien 2? When Ripley has that huge, eff-off gun? Well, Mace's new rifle put a movie prop to shame. The barrel was roughly the same diameter as Kate Moss' neck. On end, it was about a foot shy of my six foot height. It was large. It was heavy. It looked like he pulled it off an X-wing fighter. It was a Barrett M82A1 .50 BMG rifle.

I say "rifle" in the loosest of terms, of course. When you think "rifle," you tend to think of that little .22 your grandfather gave you, or a .30-06 carried by your hunter buddy. However, when you think of a Barrett in no way does the word "little" become at all relevant in the discussion.

"Mace, what IS this?!?"

"Well, I came into a little extra money and decided to treat myself. This thing is totally wang. Check it out."

So we did. We took turns shooting it until we got tired. Although the barrel has a muzzle brake, and the gun is a semi-automatic (both of which help cushion the recoil), we were still a little fatigued after about an hour of shooting (It was how you feel after shooting clays with a 12-ga. for an hour...). But it was a blast to shoot, especially at targets roughly 600-800 yards away. Of course, it's a totally impractical rifle. I mean, where the hell would I use something like that outside of a VERY spacious area? It's not like I could take it to the local indoor range, or any local outdoor range for that matter. I'd only be able to really shoot it at Mace's place. And this gun weighs almost 30 pounds. It wasn't exactly balanced for off-hand shooting. Home defense? Frankly, it would barely fit in my living room. Plus, using it for hunting would, well...forget it. There are very few areas in the world where hunting with a .50 BMG round would be considered "safe," even in the loosest interpretation of the word.

No, strictly something for target shooting. And indeed, there are numerous clubs where guys go out and indulge in target shooting competitions (for example, the Fifty Caliber Shooters Association.). So why do I bring this up now? Well, it's in the wake of a recent Sixty Minutes story talking about the banning of .50 BMG rifles and how dangerous they are. See, they have no practical purpose, we're told...and so the Brady camp would prefer they be banned. Of course, the Brady people would prefer all guns be banned, but that's beside the point.

But there's something interesting going on here. On one hand we're told by the anti-gun crowd that it's OK to have guns as long as they are sporting...ie no fully automatic weapons or anything like that. Well, what can be more sporting than shooting a rifle in a competition where the spread between 1st and 4th place is about one inch at 1,000 yards? Particularly if the rifle in question has no other real use other than in these sorts of competitions? But now we're being told by the anti-group that because this gun has no practical purpose (in other words, is a sporting arm), it must be banned. I can't keep all of this straight!

I think what's getting lost in all of this are the numbers involved. A brand new Barrett M82A1 runs almost eight thousand dollars. And that's just the rifle. You want a scope, something that's going to allow you to shoot at a tiny little 'X' at 1,000 yards while standing up to the heavy recoil of the rifle, it's going to cost you more. Mace had a nice Swarovski scope he said cost around two large. So that's ten grand and we aren't even out the door yet. Gotta get ammo, and .50 BMG rounds aren't cheap. If you can get them for a dollar per round for practice ammo, you're doing well. Specially tuned target ammo can run, well, about as much as you can stand to pay for it. So figure you just bought a rifle that costs half as much as a Jeep Wrangler and costs you at least a buck (and usually more) each time you pull the trigger. And that's just the equipment. If you're going to compete with this thing, you have to keep it in rather tip-top shape, which means regular, fastidious, purely anal-retentive maintenance from the owner. So with all that, you have to figure the target customer for this rifle is someone affluent enough to afford a ten thousand dollar toy who had enough attention to detail to get that way...and isn't it the libs who keep telling us poverty begets violent crime?!?

That's why I liken .50 BMG precision shooting to Formula One racing. The equipment involved is so specialized and so costly that the people using it simply don't fit the profile of your average 7-11 robbing thug. And just as a Formula One car will blow the doors off that 98 Riceboy Civic with the big fartcan, a .50 rifle will have much more power than a .30-06 round at any point on the ballistic chart. But does that mean we need to crack down on Formula One cars on our highways? Or is the market somewhat self-correcting in that regard?

I'd say the latter. Take a wild guess how many .50 BMG rifles have been used in crimes in this country, and I don't want to keep seeing the same hands. Yep. Zero. Never ever. Not once. And I hate to get all class-conscious here, but the kind of guy who is going to buy a gun like this is NOT the kind of guy who gets jollies by holding up people.

Now I'm told Sixty Minutes was going to air special memos from 1983 showing that these guns are extra-specially dangerous, but CBS has taken Bill Burkett off their speed dial. So sadly, we're left with the facts. And it's not like we're seeing violent crime escalate. Barrett started making these things in 1983. If the Brady Bunch's theory is correct, after 22 years these things would be flooding the streets and we'd be hearing daily reports about long range shots killing people in their cars. But I bet very few people reading this have ever seen one live and in person. As for the crime wave...fuhgeddaboutit. Violent crime has been on the decline for a long time now, despite the dire warnings of doom about the so-called Assault Weapons Ban expiring. And this decline is despite (John Lott would say "because of") increased gun ownership. Bottom line...this is not a weapon that has ever figured into violent crime, nor will it
ever figure into it.

But it's damned fun to shoot. And maybe that's exactly what the Libs have against it. Instead of having fun blowing things up, I guess instead we're all supposed to sit at Manhattan tea parties and pretend Christo is an artistic genius.

I'm sorry...who were the egalitarian ones again?!?

Update: Speak of the devil...John Lott offers up some thoughts on the Sixty Minutes story and on the .50 BMG in general.

Posted by John Tant at January 14, 2005 07:42 AM

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