Can someone who’s more into gun stuff tell me why people are always talking about the number of guns someone has?
What makes 23 different guns better than one good one? I can see the point of having like two, in case the first jams, but based on my (limited) experience I would much rather have a single HK416 than a dozen of anything else.
Also with fewer guns you need fewer ammo types (unless you for some reason have 23 guns with the same ammo, which to me makes even less sense).
Can someone who’s more into gun stuff tell me why people are always talking about the number of guns someone has?
Can be one of several things, or usually a combination:
- to show how prepared they were
- to imply the person was crazy because they had that many guns
- to imply people having that many guns somehow itself makes them more dangerous
A lot of it is just rhetoric
But it also does raise the question: why did the shooter think he needed a lot of guns?
He brought all those guns to the hotel room he shot from. I imagine it was so he could shoot as many rounds as possible at the crowd with out the need to reload.
But that really makes no sense. Unless you have them all set up in a row pointed exactly where you want, you’re probably not even saving half a second vs reloading. The old “switching is faster than reloading” thing doesn’t apply nearly as much when you’re at a static position and can have all your mags out in the open at arm’s reach.
He was operating a significant number of his weapons on bump stocks. Bump stocks allow firing at a much higher rate than the weapons were designed for. Operating at a higher rate causes the weapons to overheat. Overheating causes misfires and jams (and inaccuracy and can permanently damage weapons, but I doubt he was particularly concerned about those things). He did have them all set up in a row and many on mounts. He broke out the overlooking windows of his hotel room before he started shooting. It seems he was shooting with one until it jammed and then moving on to the next rather than trying to clear misfires.
Because it grabs attention and sounds scary, which really what media outlets care about. My other favorite is when they talk about someone having being caught with “hundreds of rounds of ammunition”, which clearly indicates that’s how many people they were planning on murdering, and isn’t just a pretty typical range day, or in the case of reallly common stuff like 9mm, 22LR, or even 223, can literally be a single box of ammo.
The guy just had a lot of guns. He had 23 with him and he had like another 20 at home.
But I would also imagine that him having them all loaded put into a row each mounted on its own bipod in his suite is faster than reloading.
A lot of people this thing about reloading, but honestly, my reload time after a couple weeks of basic training was under the five seconds you need to pass, and after a couple months of service plenty of people were closer to three seconds. I have a hard time imagining that swapping weapons is quicker. I guess the reloading thing might be the reason to have many guns, but it strikes me as a strange one.
And really, I’m not only talking about this specific case, I get the feeling that people that are into guns will often focus on the number of guns someone has, also outside this case, which seems a bit of a strange metric to be talking about in general.
