You might ask, although I've sort of given the answer, why are AR-15 so
popular amongst mass shooters?
And there's actually a couple of compelling explanations as to that.
So when you talk to the mass shooters or read their manifestos, some of them
are very explicit about why they're such big fans of this style of weapon.
The Buffalo mass shooter said this.
We're hiding the name, obviously, to avoid copycats.
But the Buffalo mass shooter said, the AR-15 and its variants are very deadly
when used properly, which is the reason why I picked one.
High capacity magazines and
ammunition that causes enough ballistic damage to kill effectively will be used.
Now, even in the case of that mass shooter, in his extended writings,
he also seemed to indicate that he liked adding extra controversy over the AR-15,
and that might have played into his choice to use that style of gun.
But we also know that he wanted to kill as many people as possible, and so
that feels like the more compelling explanation.
But whether it's individually the actual cause for him,
his reasoning actually bears out.
They are more dangerous, both because you can get such high capacity magazines and
also because bullet for bullet with certain calibers,
because AR-15s are available in multiple calibers, they do a lot more damage.
In fact, I wanna demonstrate once again a video that we've shown before comparing
a sort of standard pistol ammunition,
the damage it does to a body with what can be done with an AR-15.
Take a look at this.
>> [SOUND]
>> Wow, look at all that.
Look at that big hole right there.
My gosh [LAUGH].
That is disgusting.
There's literally just a hole here in the block.
There you go [LAUGH].
That is awful.
And here's the other slice.
Look at all these lead fragments and jacket fragments.
>> Okay, apologies, we're gonna get to that other video in a second.
But you see there how much damage it can be done when you're firing as fast
as you are.
He was very impressed with the number of lead fragments and
how much it had been chewed up.
Now, that was just a block of ballistic gel.
Imagine if that was the chest cavity of a 13-year-old.
We don't have to imagine.
We've had that experience as a country many, many times, and
probably will within a week or two of this video being released.
It is very, very deadly.
A typical AR-15 bullet, by the way,
leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster and thus imparting more
than three times the energy of a typical 9 millimeter bullet from a handgun.
An AR-15 rifle outfitted with a magazine with 50 rounds allows many more lethal
bolts to be delivered quickly without reloading.
And I think that's important to point out because not everybody uses guns, and not
everybody who uses guns thinks that much about how guns defer from one another.
You might think, well, a gun is a gun, a bullet is a bullet, you shoot the bullet,
it goes out.
No, no, bullets defer widely.
The actual velocity of the bullet, the force that's imparted is very different
depending on what sort of ammunition, what sort of gun you're using.
And so now I wanna turn to the actual direct comparison.
What happens to a human body when these different sorts of ammunition hit it?
Take a look at this.
[MUSIC]
What you saw,
9 millimeter ammunition versus a standard shot from an AR-15 surface level.
The body was penetrated by both.
The actual experience for the body, though, very different, because the sheer
amount of force that is imparted does not simply penetrate the body.
It does not simply carve a path through flesh and bone.
It blows a channel through it.
A single shot produces, in short, a shockwave, effectively,
that is what's actually being done to the flesh.
Shock is imparting through the body, blowing parts of the body apart.
It can blow apart a skull, it can demolish vital organs.
What could be just sort of a glancing blow with other ammunition can cause
enough internal damage to kill.
And that's with one bullet.
And these are, of course, guns that are not designed to simply shoot one or two or
three bullets.
They can generally have magazine capacities that are much higher than
the less individually damaging shots of handguns.
And that isn't the only issue.
The magazine capacity and the force imparted by the bullet,
both of those are concerning.
And both of those come stock with an AR-15, which is, of course,
definitionally a semiautomatic rifle, meaning that one pull of the trigger gets
one bullet to be fired, the way that it's commonly sold, but
not the way that it necessarily ends up for some people.
There are a lot of different ways we have found out and
will not spread the specifics of to convert your semiautomatic AR-15 to
a fully automatic AR-15, effectively making it much closer to an M-16,
one of the actual weapons used by the armed forces of the United States.
The AR-15 is derivative from it.
It is similar in many ways.
It is not technically the same thing, but the gap can be narrowed with a little
bit of searching online products that are sold information.
You don't even have to go to the dark web to find some of this stuff.
We're not gonna help you do it.
But you should be concerned about that,
particularly because these sorts of techniques have been used to log
much higher death counts in some of the mass shootings that we talked about.
We mentioned the shooting in Las Vegas, that was done with an AR-15 that had
an attachment that's referred to as a bump stock.
It's a way to effectively simulate the effect of a fully automatic rifle.
Now, in the wake of that, that was actually banned.
It was banned, by the way, under the Donald Trump administration.
So very minimal credit there to him.
They saw this specific thing being done that has no legitimate use, just used to
kill even more people than AR-15 is typically able to do, and they banned it.
But that lapsed after four years.
Now they are available once again, at least in Texas.
And were you to try to ban them again, God only knows what the Judges in America,
what the Supreme Court would end up doing, and
you don't even necessarily need to use that.
Even if they do successfully ban the bump stocks once again,
that is not the only way to make this sort of conversion.
Whatever the hell this is, where the metal clothes hanger is, the Internet
tells us all it takes to convert an AR-15 into an even more deadly weapon of war.
And so that is a lot of what goes into people's fear about this weapon.
They know how uniquely devastating it is, and its ability to put more bullets down
range in a short period of time than almost any other gun, and the ability for
each of those individual bullets to potentially blow a human body apart.
[MUSIC]