Gun Control and the Illusion of Security

A fifty cal sniper rifle is a work of art able to hit targets at well over a mile and anyone into long range rifle shooting would likely love to own one.

A fifty cal is a little overkill on any game animal in North American to say the least.

Still large range target shooting I can see.

Elk and moose hunters use them for long range shots in areas with lots of wind gusts.

Also, Native American tribes that engage in whaling have one



mounted in the bow of their boat to kill the whales with

I would have thought that the Colorado massacre
would have shown the obvious benefits of gun control - if guns were registered - the govt
would have known the nutcase was stockpiling them....

At least one western state has banned the Browning .50.
Too many people were taking cross canyon shots,
and not being able to get to whatever they had shot.

oralloy wrote:

Elk and moose hunters use them for long range shots in areas with lots of wind gusts.

any moose hunter who needs a 50 cal to make a "Long range shot" should have his license revoked. A safe hunter is not one who shoots over long distances unless they have an assured background and moose and elk are mostly forest and savannah game where you can always have other hunters behind them and in your LOF

The days when 300 yards was considered extremely long range are over. Now, thanks to better rifles, scopes, rangefinders, and bullets, 500 yards is more like it. But there is a small subculture of shooters to whom 500 yards is a piddling distance scarcely worth a round of ammunition. These are the people who have harnessed the power of the immense .50 Browning Machine Gun cartridge and transformed it into an instrument capable of shooting with eerie precision at distances that are usually associated with track meets rather than riflery.

John Yenason and Wendy Henry belong to the fraternity of .50 BMG shooters, where everything is oversize, hyper-powered, and far, far away. Yenason is a wiry, dark-haired heavy-equipment contractor who took up the .50 in 1992. He shoots one in benchrest matches at 1,000 yards and hunts with it, too. Wendy Henry, his fiancée, is a tall, willowy woman who walks with the toes-out waddle of the ballerina she has been all her life. With no prior shooting experience, she took up the .50 in 1998. She competes and hunts alongside John. I had a chance to visit and shoot with them at their home in rural Pennsylvania, and they took me on a tour of their arcane world, where glory lies way out yonder.

. . . .

There can be mishaps as well. Some years ago, John was hunting elk on a day when the thermometer registered 10 below zero. This was a cows-only hunt, and he found a monster lady elk at over 1,000 yards. But he had to shoot that same LAR Grizzly from an unsteady rest, and the scope whacked him so hard that his right eyebrow fell down over his eye. The shot missed, and so he held his detached eyebrow in place with his hand and got back on the gun. Once again the shot missed, and the scope smote him in precisely the same place. To make matters worse, the elk moved, and John had to wait, his cheek on the steel stock, forehead gushing, until he got a third shot. This one was good, but by now his cheek had frozen to the rifle. You can still see the stain on the steel where he had to tear himself away.

http://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/guns/rifles/ammunition/2007/01/way-out-there-shooting-and-hunting-50-caliber-browning
http://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/guns/rifles/ammunition/2007/01/way-out-there-shooting-and-hunting-50-caliber-browning?photo=1
http://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/guns/rifles/ammunition/2007/01/way-out-there-shooting-and-hunting-50-caliber-browning?photo=2
http://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/guns/rifles/ammunition/2007/01/way-out-there-shooting-and-hunting-50-caliber-browning?photo=3
http://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/guns/rifles/ammunition/2007/01/way-out-there-shooting-and-hunting-50-caliber-browning?photo=4

oralloy wrote:

Also, Native American tribes that engage in whaling have one mounted in the bow of their boat to kill the whales with.

Hows all that whaling going for you. Are you a licensed subsistance/aboriginal hunter?

OmSigDAVID wrote:

The obvious question is:
HOW can u convince a mass murderer
to obay gun control laws ?????

By denying him the right to own a semiautomatic rifle with 3, 30 shot magazines.

Damn, David! You got any idea what one of them suckers costs?
At a guess, I would say none.

By denying him the right to own a semiautomatic rifle with 3, 30 shot magazines.

One the issues the US faces (if it were to consider uniform federal level gun control laws) is the lapse time it would take for them to become effective, which may be several years to a decade. It would also need to sort out how to prevent illicit importation.

R U accusing the multiple murderers
of being stingy, skinflint, cheapskates ???????????? Is that PC ????

R U accusing the multiple murderers
of being stingy, skinflint, cheapskates ???????????? Is that PC ????

The last I hear David the damn things cost around 10 thousand dollars.