Stoner was no Browning

Suddenly I’m thinking about firearms and personal protection. I’m thinking about it because I just saw part of a surprising rap video taking up for Kyle Rittenhouse.

One of the many, many lies told about Rittenhouse is that he is a white supremacist. No idea where that comes from. He shot a Jewish pedophile in self-defense, and then he shot two more white people who were trying to harm him. One had an illegal pistol in his hand when Rittenhouse shot his arm nearly off.

Somehow that person, Gaige Grosskreutz, now known as Paul Prediger, never got charged with anything.

Anyway, it surprised me to see a rap song standing up for the victim, Kyle Rittenhouse, because in this country, black people are supposed to be against him for no reason.

A comment beneath the video mentioned something I had forgotten: Rittenhouse’s AR-15 rifle jammed while he was on the ground trying to protect himself.

Rittenhouse did a very impressive job of self-defense. He shot one attacker and then ran to tell the police, which was the correct, lawful, responsible move. Then he was attacked by a lynch mob, and they knocked him to the ground. His gun jammed. He cleared it. Then he shot two people who were trying to kill him, killing one and disabling both. After that, he resumed running toward the police, whom he eventually reached.

He did everything right. He only fired when his life was in imminent danger. He fired effectively, hitting what he aimed at. He stopped firing when the threats were neutralized, so he never crossed the line between self-defense and illegal retaliation. He also cleared a jammed weapon.

He did everything right, except for one thing. He bought the wrong rifle.

If you look at the history of AR-15 shootings, you will notice a common thread: rifles that jammed at critical moments. It has happened to criminals and also innocent people. It has also been a huge problem with the automatic versions of the AR-15 used by soldiers.

Some people get mad if you call an M16 or an M4 an AR-15. It is. It is. Shut up. No one says a semiautomatic Tommy gun is a different rifle from the automatic version. Just shut it.

Here’s a Google search for you.

I saw an Internet commenter saying AR-15 jams had saved countless lives. Pretty funny, but also true.

Try and find similar stories about AK variants or any other commonly-used semiautomatic rifles. Good luck. It won’t happen. There are millions of AK’s out there, and in a giant statistical sample, unlikely things will happen, but there is no long history of AK’s letting people down when it mattered.

Imagine what Rittenhouse went through. You’ve just been attacked by a child rapist who chased you down and tried to take your gun so he could kill you. People are firing shots around you (not often mentioned). They’re yelling, “Get him!” You’ve been knocked to the ground, your chest has been stamped on, and you’ve been assaulted with a deadly weapon (a heavy skateboard). A lowlife with an illegal Glock is running up to you. You’re on your back. And your new rifle is jammed.

It’s a wonder he lived.

I don’t get the AR self-defense craze. They’re all sorts of fun for targets and hunting, but why would you trust a gun which is famous for failure?

People blame the users. “Inexperienced.” “Untrained.” That’s really stupid. If you have to be trained in order to make a gun do what every other gun does for untrained people, you should buy a different gun.

They say poor maintenance is to blame. Good luck, trying to make an AK jam with poor maintenance.

I am an AR owner. Not for survival. Just for fun. I had to buy a special brush to clean the chamber. Never had to do that before. Where is my special AK chamber brush? They don’t exist. No need.

What happens if my AR chamber gets too dirty? It may hold onto a round so tightly it will not come out of the gun without tools. Show me where this is a problem with any other firearm.

I saw a guy on Youtube using hydraulic pressure and a special fitting to force a live round out of an AR-15. He threaded the fitting onto his muzzle, attached a grease gun, and pumped. He was a very knowledgeable guy, and he had tried everything else.

The round finally flew out and dented the wall of his shop.

What are you going to do if this happens to you while undocumented guests are rambling through your house at 3 a.m.? Short answer: surrender and possibly be raped or die.

Maybe you could use the grease gun to shoot the entire cartridge at the burglars.

A standard AR even has a feature that helps you jam it beyond field repair. It has a little thing you push to force stubborn rounds into your chamber. It’s called a forward assist. It was not part of the original design, but the military insisted it be added.

Hello…if a round is too fat to fit, the last thing you want is to force it. The proper thing is to eject the round and throw it out so you never try to use it again. If you use the forward assist, you’ll probably save the 25 cents you paid for the round, but if it gets stuck, you may be murdered by an assailant who realizes you are disarmed. Who bets a life against a quarter?

They should call it a burglar assist.

You can say, probably incorrectly, that your AR-15 will work great because you maintain and use it perfectly, so people who hate AR-15’s are stupid. First of all, you may be overestimating yourself and the gun, and second, wouldn’t you rather have a gun that works even when you screw up? I do. I want a gun I can throw to my untrained wife in an emergency.

The final thing I don’t like about the AR-15 is that it’s usually chambered in a bad cartridge: the .223/5.56. I will treat these calibers as though they were the same, because they nearly are. This cartridge has inferior stopping power compared to the AK’s standard 7.62. When you choose a rifle over a pistol, the single biggest reason is improved stopping power. Why choose a weak round over a strong one?

The 7.62 round is legal for deer hunting, probably everywhere. Go Google and read about deer and the .223. Many states will not let you use it. Why? Because it’s cruel to wound animals without killing them. State governments know the .223 is much weaker than the 7.62. How much more proof do you need?

The AR platform just isn’t very good. No one wants to admit it, but it’s obvious.

Why won’t they admit it?

I know why people continue to insist the AR-15 is a great gun. The main reason is that it’s really neat. It looks great; it makes you feel like a military guy holding a machine gun, instead of a fat Walmart employee with Cheez Doodle particles in his beard. It’s fun to customize. There are a billion parts and accessories you can install on your own.

Products people think are cool are almost always more popular than products that work.

There is also a certain amount of American pride out there. “WE BUILD GUNS BETTER THAN COMMIES!” No, we really don’t. The AK platform is a masterpiece, and the AR platform is a collection of compromises and corrections.

The AR-15 is like the Porsche 911, which was, and still is, a bad idea. Hitler had the VW Beetle designed by Ferdinand Porsche, and Porsche kept the same basic concept when he got into sports cars. Then his company held onto the butt-heavy, hard-to-drive, rear-engine format instead of moving forward like other companies. Just like Americans holding onto the AR-15. The result is that Porsches are still uglier, more dangerous, and harder to operate than other expensive sports cars, and Top Gear’s famous lap time board only has two Porsches in the top 15.

And Porsche is really trying, believe me. They don’t sit in front of the TV in Stuttgart and say, “Ze important sing is zat ve participated.”

People will rationalize in order to justify their prejudices. There are people out there right now telling pollsters Joe Biden is a fantastic president. When people claim the AR-15 is better than an AK, often, they are acting like lawyers. They look for anything they can say to bolster their case, and they forget about the truth.

I got a red dot for an AR-15. I figure it’s better to have it rigged up for self-defense than not, even if it’s my 4th choice. I mean, a golf club isn’t a weapon, but if you have one, you might put it next to the bed anyway.

I don’t have a laser on it. Those are for reliable guns.

I’m honest about the AK/AR debate. I think AR’s are really neat. I wish they worked well. I would prefer to be on the AR side because the primitive bits of my brain like them. But I’m not an idiot.

It’s sad that the AR-15 is so popular for self-defense, because intramural factional violence is going to get worse, and a lot of people who are in the right and who trust unreliable guns are going to get shot needlessly.