A Slate column by Saul Cornell contains a stunning — and, you will not be surprised to learn, preposterously untrue — claim about the rifle used by the killer in the Buffalo massacre: that it was 200 times more lethal than the muskets used in the American Revolution.
This is, of course, pure poppycock.
Cornell’s column links to a post by the Duke Center for Firearms Law, which says nothing about AR-style rifles of the kind used in Buffalo. It does contain a claim that “compared to a revolutionary-era flintlock musket . . . a World War II-era machine gun was more than 100 times as lethal.” Setting aside, for the moment, the issue of quantifying lethality in some meaningful way (I will return to it), crediting these numbers at all would mean that a modern sporting rifle (reported by Cornell to be 200 times more lethal than an 18th-century musket) is twice as deadly as a World War II machine gun (reported by Duke to be only 100 times as lethal as an 18th-century musket). Our friend John Hillen is the expert on vintage military weapons, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say: That is patently absurd.
There were, of course, more than a dozen different machine guns used in World War II, and they varied greatly in firepower, so estimating the lethality of a “World War II-era machine gun” is a meaningless exercise. But even if we just consider the most common U.S. machine gun of that era, the Browning M2 (“Ma Deuce”), the claim that a modern AR-style rifle is something twice as lethal is impossible to take seriously. The M2 was chambered for the .30-06 Springfield cartridge, which in common loadings is roughly twice as powerful (as measured by muzzle energy) as the common 5.56mm NATO round used in most modern sporting rifles, including the one used in Buffalo. (CORRECTION: The M2 was a .50-caliber machine gun, meaning considerably more powerful than indicated above; it was the earlier M1919 that was chambered for the .30-06. Military loadings of the .30-06 were sometimes designated M2, which was the source of my confusion. My error understated my case.) An AR-style rifle is semiautomatic, meaning that it fires one round every time the trigger is squeezed, with a well-trained shooter using 30-round magazines (as in Buffalo) able to take possibly 50 reasonably well-aimed shots in a minute; the M2, by comparison, has a rate of fire of more than 1,200 rounds per minute. The U.S. military estimates the effective range of its 5.56mm rifles at 600 yards; the effective range of the M2 is more than 1,000 yards. Or, to put it qualitatively rather than quantitatively, the 5.56mm rifle used in Buffalo is widely considered insufficiently powerful even for deer hunting (and in some jurisdictions it has been prohibited for that purpose for that reason) while the M2 was used to shoot down airplanes and to disable light-armored vehicles. The idea that a semiautomatic 5.56mm rifle is twice as lethal as a World War II–era machine gun — and there were bigger and more powerful machine guns than the M2 on the battlefield — is preposterous.
And it is not a claim that the Duke Center for Firearms Law makes, as far as I can tell. The Duke post cites the work of military historian Trevor N. Dupuy, who proposed to established a standard measure of lethality for military weapons. Never mind that Dupuy’s estimates were intended to apply to battlefield conditions — which are, presumably, different from grocery-store conditions — his work was published in 1964, a decade before the 5.56mm round used in the Buffalo shooter’s rifle was actually developed. (The 5.56mm NATO is similar to, but not identical with, the .223 Remington.) Dupuy’s study, linked by the Duke Center, makes no mention of the AR-15 or the 5.56mm round it uses.
Saul Cornell’s reporting is by all appearances erroneous if not fictitious, and one might even be forgiven for believing it to be meaningless bullsh**. Slate should either document the claim, in which case I will be happy to be corrected and very interested in the underlying data, or retract it.