Military weapons - Should they be illegal?

Military weapons - Should they be illegal?
A common phrase I hear is that "military weapons", somehow distinguished from other weapons not used by the military, should be banned. That it's not the average person's firearm that should be banned, but just, those super-deadly weapons used by the military that no civilian should have! While I certainly enjoy the sentiment, the argument unfortunately falls flat when it tries to call out weapons such as the AR-15 or Ak-47, being unaware that the weapons aren't necessarily more lethal, even in a mass shooting, than many other firearms. To put things shortly, something should not be banned because it's in use by the military or conversely, shouldn't be legal just because the military doesn't use it. What determines whether or not something should be legal is entirely dependent on the level of danger it presents to society. Something may only remain available to the military if it's considered too dangerous, but something shouldn't be only relegated to the military, because it's only relegated to the military. This is known as circular reasoning, where a person uses the justification of something existing to justify it's existence. The argument essentially goes that because the weapon is banned, it's justified to being banned. Hopefully, when determining the laws for hundreds of millions of people, more substance will be present in an argument that does so, making this one usually not very effective. Furthermore, there are knives, hunting rifles, brass knuckles, even non-lethal weapons such as tear gas or pepper spray in use by the military, which don't present a tremendous danger simply by virtue of them being a military weapon, and that shouldn't necessarily be illegal. You would need to prove the danger of the weapon itself irregardless of who else used it, which. To say that use by the military should make it illegal by itself, is another common type of fallacy, known as an association fallacy, where simply being associated with something makes it bad (which obviously, isn't true).

For example, nuclear weapons are not needed by civilians and have no practical purpose for self defense. They can destroy an entire city in a single go and can irradiate the land for many years to come. The collateral damage is too immense and if terrorists or North Korea got ahold of good nuclear weapons, they could literally bring about the end to the world as we know it. There's also the fact that anything nuclear is producing nuclear radiation at all times in any case so, it's even dangerous to own and never use as it's constantly leaking out nuclear radiation at all times and just by owning one, you or even your neighbors could die. So, nuclear weapons ought to be banned. Only the military should be allowed to have them because there's no use in every day society or in self defense, and their danger is so great as to limit ownership. Now, in this same argument when someone presents another "military weapon" you'd expect them to explain why it's dangerous. Instead, all they say is that "it's used by the military", and that's the end of their argument. This is an argument without substance, an appeal to association or circular reasoning logic which, unfortunately in most cases a fallacy.

So, why should these weapons be illegal? While I may be able to infer what you mean, if you can't actually prove it, it likely isn't an issue that actually exists. In fact if you can't even name the features that should make it illegal, you have absolutely nothing to your entire argument which is predicated on vague, meaningless rhetoric and quite frankly nothing else. Things should only be made illegal if they've been demonstrated to disproportionately harm society and have no tangible benefit to potentially offset it. If you have failed to do so, it shouldn't be illegal, irregardless of what the subject is. Plenty of military weapons exist that aren't particularly deadly or designed for mass murder, so, simply saying it's a military weapon doesn't hold much water. However, generally speaking I know what people are referring to when they say "military weapon". They actually mean an assault rifle, which is actually already illegal as fully automatic weapons are already illegal. However, they likely believe that a weapon that looks like said assault rifle should be illegal as well, and aren't aware what's in the assault weapon bill or what the actual details contain.

So, not all weapons in use by the military are designed to kill lots of random, unarmed innocent people; in fact, few if any weapons have this stated objective. What of the U.S. military's primary assault rifle; surely, that was designed as "powerful" death machine with an arbitrary power level over 9,000 that can certainly be used not only to defeat something with a weapon of equal power (whatever that means), but that consequently must have the ability to kill lots and lots of people. The simple reality is that the military doesn't design it's weapons for mass murder. Not only is mass murder illegal and immoral, and so the military seeks to avoid it focusing on precision guided weapons such as cruise missiles or heat-seeking missiles etc., but firearms are not particularly well suited for mass murder when compared to other weapons such as say, explosives.With guns, you have to fire one shot at a time, at a single target, and can at best kill one person at a time. It's rather large and loud, and you have to be there in person which gives away your presence immediately and gives the police a chance to kill you in return. Comparatively an explosive can be detonated why you are not even there, such as with a wireless detonator or a timer, and thus you can be out of the country before the bomb even goes off and kills people. It goes off in a matter of seconds, giving no time to mount a defense (unlike a shooter who can be shot) and can kill far more people in that time. The deadliest mass shooting in America, while tragic, killed approximately 50 people, and injured another 50. The deadliest mass bombing, known as 9/11, killed 3,000 people, and injured another 3,000. Looking at the death tolls, explosives not only are on average much more likely to kill far more people, but in the most extreme cases could literally kill over 60 times as many as the deadliest mass shooting, ever, in the U.S. They didn't even use a bomb like a fertilizer bomb or pressure cooker, they literally just hijacked a plane which is a flying bomb in and of itself. So, if a mass murderer used another weapon other than a gun, far more people could die. Particularly, explosives are perhaps the deadliest weapons of choice, but arson, poison, or vehicles tend to be more deadlier than guns. There's no guarantee that a murderer might switch to a less deadly weapon instead, and may instead switch to another weapon entirely, which are generally easier to obtain than a gun. In wars, it's generally explosives which are the biggest killer, not guns, as the power of an artillery shell or 500 pound bomb is far greater than that of a single firearm.

So if the military wants to eliminate 500 enemy targets in a 400 square yard area, do they send in a bunch of men with rifles and shoot one person at a time with their own soldiers having a chance of being shot and killed in the process or, do they simply drop a bomb and annihilate the entire area? The simple reality is they more often than not choose the bomb. Regulations on explosives seem reasonable, as after all it's hard to imagine how a weapon that would blow up me, my family, and my neighbors would have a tangible benefit for home defense, but guns which can be used to take down just one person at a time do not seem very reasonable. So, what are firearms designed for, by the military? Well, the primary purpose of firearms in use with the military tends to be precision and self defense. When a hostage situation occurs, they send in the Navy Seals not because they are the deadliest unit in the U.S. military- quite frankly, a single pilot with one bomb would likely kill more than any navy seal in their lifetime- but due to their precision. A bomb that effects too wide of an area, such as an explosive, would kill everyone in the area, including the hostages, making the weapon ineffective. Instead, they send in soldiers who risk their lives to take down each of the bad guys one by one, person by person, to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. A bullet is generally less than an inch wide, and thus will only impact an area about this size. When it hits a person, it creates a small hole in them, which gets down to the internal organs, and usually is enough to incapacitate or stun someone when combined with the secondary shock effects of the energy transfer. The military doesn't send in infantry for mass murder, they send them in primarily to specifically target individuals, as explosives could kill too many people. Infantry make good occupying forces as you can take territory without killing everyone in the region, and therefore liberate or save the local people you're trying to protect.

The weapons in use by the military aren't designed to eliminate as many people as possible in as short an amount of time and especially not, firearms. The military generally speaking expects to face a relatively equal sized military in force. They almost never at least expect to be seriously outnumbered in a fight; if anything, the U.S. military is perhaps among the largest military in the world, so we would actually likely be larger in size than our enemies. It's usually about a 1 to 1 ratio when fighting the enemy as even if you have less numbers in total, you wouldn't engage the enemy in an unequal setting. You won't choose to send 40 guys to fight 1,000, you'd call in back-up for reinforcements. The military weapons are designed to target specific, hardened targets not massacre as many innocent, unarmed people as possible. Our most expensive weapons, such as missiles, are precision guided bombs to prevent collateral damage. It is cheaper and easier to drop 100 2,500 dollar bombs and just blow everything up than it is to send in a much smaller 500,000 missile to target just the bad guys and have just enough explosive to blow up their compound. Certain particular features are designed by military weapons over simple mass murder; in fact this is something that would be completely useless for the military in most firearms. For instance, there was an emphasis on armor penetration in the military for the development of the M16. They liked the maneuverability that submachine guns afforded, but didn't like the short range and lack of armor penetration. At long ranges they were failing to penetrate even thick clothing, and common barriers such as a brick wall or a tree that soldiers could take cover behind weren't being penetrated, as well. By WWII, most soldiers were wearing body armor of some kind, such as a combat helmet, and given that the head was often only what was exposed to the enemy, a much harder target to take down with a pistol. At the same time, even though submachine guns did remarkably well in close quarters combat due to the allowed maneuverability of the weapons, they did rather poor at long ranges. Pistol rounds simply don't have the range of a rifle, and even with the new fancy faster shooting guns, they were completely helpless against a guy with a good bolt action rifle. Even when you had a guy in your unit with such a rifle, it was usually just one guy, and him taking on 50 guys was generally seen as being generally unexpected.

So, the military's idea was to specialize. Find a gun that's just good enough at long ranges to be competitive with the long range bolt actions and capable of piercing armor just well enough to be able to fight against the body armor at the time, and also be able to have the maneuverability and low-weight of a submachine gun. In comes the assault rifle, not the deadliest weapon or really the best at everything. In fact, it was designed deliberately to be a jack of all trades. A weapon that every soldier could be armed with, and if needed to shoot out to long ranges, close ranges or whatever, could fulfill every role. Not the best in every role; less accurate than a sniper rifle, less firepower than a machine gun or submachine gun, but just comparable enough to where an entire squad of soldiers wouldn't be wiped out by a squad that happened to have bolt actions or submachine guns while the squad had the opposite. It avoided a sort of rock-papers-scissors scenario where a squad armed with bolt actions was useless against a squad with submachine guns at close range, but a squad with submachine guns was useless against bolt actions at long range. Every soldier now could at least remain competitive with their firearms, even if it consumed more ammo or wasn't as efficient. These weapons are generally designed to defeat specific targets such as, body armor, which most civilians don't wear and therefore, the risk of weapons that can pierce body armor, to civilians, is generally non-existent. Specific, military targets isn't really the same, being able to kill lots of untrained, unequipped, defenseless people with no armor. The geneva convention requires that bullets used by the military not cause superfluous injuries and be more likely to maim than to kill, meaning that, they generally speaking are not designed to produce lots of deaths. It's actually was chosen for humanitarian reasons. Actual military bullets by law are regulated to prevent deaths, to not be as deadly as powerful. The idea was that bullets should cause injuries, and not deaths; while death is still common, it's far less common with actual military cartridges. So if a civilian used them in a mass murder, in actuality, less people would likely actually die.

Military rifles were designed as general purpose, jack-of-all trade weapons that weren't the best at anything but could be used in any situation. For someone in self defense who doesn't want to kill his whole family or even necessarily the bad guy, but who just wants to injure them enough not to be killed themselves (or have other innocent people killed), guns certainly look appealing. With a military "style" weapon, or perhaps more aptly an assault rifle, you can be ready for any circumstance, which as civilians simply don't know when they're going to be attacked or where, seems appealing to have a general-purpose rifle, like an assault rifle. Other features included are resistance to bad environments, reliability and being light weight, not exactly features that enhance lethality, but do increase usability. In short, even military assault rifles are not actually designed to commit mass murder. And weapons available to civilians are not actually real military rifles in any case. The idea that a weapon is inherently deadly because it's used by the military is a bit arbitrary. Other deadly things like say, chlorine or uranium, aren't currently used by the military and yet their natural toxicity means they should be illegal, irregardless of who uses them. Banning something because the military uses it isn't a very good rule of thumb to understand what's deadly or not, and can be banning both safe weapons, and not banning deadly substances that perhaps aren't weapons at all, but could be used like them.