friends,

i am gonna post some "shoot to destruction" videos, showing ar-15's and ak-47's firing full automatics being fired. generally speaking, the guns go to about 8 minutes of fire, and then suffer failures of one sort or another. the guns, which are generally described as firing 600 rounds a minute, are actually capable of firing about 100 rounds sustained fire, over a period of minutes.

follows a letter to a friend.--

c:

an ar-15, shot to barrel burst. about 9 minutes of full auto fire, app. 830 rounds fired in that time.

c:

an ak-47, fired to failure, the barrel drooping. 265 rounds fired, in about 3 minutes or so.

rebuild the ak-47, give in another try.

this ak47 failed at about 8 or 9 minutes, 895 rounds fired. the barrel drooped, pulled the gas block crooked, and the gas system would not function any longer, locking up the action.

another ar-15 fired to failure, 833 rounds. about 9 minutes

what you should take away from this. much is made about the firing rate of auto weapons, in the neighborhood of 6 or 700 rounds a minute. yet these rifles, fired as fast as possible with magazines on a table and at the ready, could only fire at an effective rate of about 100 rounds a minute. the fact is, they have to be reloaded magazine by magazine, and that takes time. lots of time.

just watch.

and, that effective rate of about 100 rounds a minute was enough to cook all of them. the american ar-15, and the soviet ak-47, all get extremely hot when fired at that rate. american steel, russian steel, .... , it all gets hot when exposed on a continuous basis to the combustion of gun powder. watch the ejection ports .... they are filled with flame. think of the barrel, which contains the flame at 50 to 60,000 lbs of pressure.

you will notice that the guy doing this was wearing eye protection (he sure as hell was after the ar-15 barrel blew up!!!), and he was wearing heavy welders gloves. and, if you will notice, after about a minute or two, he was not handling the rifles by the fore-end grips, but was holding it with the trigger guard grip and the front of the receiver or the magazine.

they get hot. the ak-47 caught on fire.

our man in las vegas . our man in las vegas had a couple minutes per gun where he could fire and handle it. then, he had to replace it, just to hang onto it. even doing so, having to change magazines and all that, he had about 100 rounds a minute for effective fire. just shooting it as fast as he could.

aimed fire. you will notice that the shooting here was not done looking through the sights on the gun. it was not aimed fire. you will also note that aimed fire in any fully auto weapon is very problematic. it is just not gonna happen. you wanna aim, you gotta stop firing for a bit. the most effective fire with a fully automatic weapon is in short bursts: in the military, machine gunners usually fire about 7 or 8 round bursts, not a whole lot more.

this calls into question a single gun/shooter scenario . i just don't think a single shooter was responsible for the las vegas shootings. even changing weapons to try and mitigate the matter of heat, it would not be possible for him to have fired continuously. and, even at maximum speed, not much more than 100 rounds a minute, or perhaps more.

to my mind, there was more than one shooter, perhaps as many as 3 or 4.

well see as this gets investigated.

john jay @ 10/2/2017