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Comment by 15155 | Hacker News Reader

> Some ammunition can take out a helicopter or blow straight through an armored tank followed by a concrete building, out the other side, then explode, hitting targets 18 football fields away.

I stopped reading here. What magical ammunition is this? An Abrams tank with a DU APFSDS penetrator isn't doing this. No ammunition that can "blow straight through an armored tank" is exploding on the other side.

> "Congress knew almost 100 years ago, in the days of Al Capone, that fully automatic weapons were unusually dangerous," ATF Director Steven Dettelbach said a public address on Feb. 28, 2023. "They have no place in our communities."

Or, Congress knew they needed a way to prosecute these folks, so they created convenient laws to fit and simultaneously expand their state monopoly on the use of force.

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I'm not sure why journalists continually feel the need to ruin their own credibility with this sort of hyperbolic nonsense, but the overall story seems legit.

I have wondered the same. Do they crank out lots of stories fast, and then the editor picks one to publish? Then I could almost understand.

But if they are actually spending some time on each article (which they should) it seems like it wouldn't be hard to actually do their job and talk to -if not an expert- at least a local enthusiast/hobbyist.

It’s worth considering why some writers feel the need to puff themselves up with ridiculous macho fantasies about munitions. It reeks of insecurity like they’re trying to cosplay as Sebastian Junger.

This journalist has written extensively about guns and gun control for the past several years. They have no excuses to be misinformed.

News as we all think about it, is dead. It's just propaganda now and it's pretty obvious.

If you read the entire article, the police officers are sometimes quite directly selling guns to cartels and criminals. That would seem like a worrying pattern, no?

I sent this article to someone a few days ago because it was such a weird mix of outright goofy exaggeration of everything to do with guns and other weapons while at the same time ostensibly being about an actual problem with law enforcement. (We were amused by some of the quotes like one from previous commenter.) It's a very strangely written article.

That said, many folks who know things about guns have a tendency to assume that if they wrote wild things about weaponry that don't really make sense, the article overall isn't trustworthy.

It might just as well be that cops tell exaggerated shit to journalists and they lack the knowledge to know they're being fed shit.

DARE and other anti drug campaigns follow the exact same playbook, just with children on the receiving end - no, smoking 4/20 is not a direct pathway to ending up homeless and with a heroin needle sticking out your arm. Or religious anti-sex campaigns - no, having sex with people will not make you a whore or whatnot.

Perhaps it's actually just a problem with legislation: if there were no artificial scarcity on these devices, they wouldn't be worth selling.

I do think the prices of legal machines guns relative to the simplicity of creating one suggest that there should be some kind of NFA legal way to obtain new manufacture machine guns. Could imagine even a huge tax might strike a better incentive balance for reducing behaviors alluded to in the article.

A huge tax might prevent undesirable folks from voting, too.

I mean "preventing folks from voting" is, at least in normal times, assuming normal methods, clearly on the side of not legal, undesirable, and against the law.

Meanwhile, "preventing people from owning machine guns" is widely accepted as legal, at least if they're made after a specific date.

I agree that there's probably not a strong reason to assume that moving modern manufacture machine guns to a tax stamp regime with a huge tax wouldn't trigger some kind of litigation, but that seems mostly like a tangent. (And I think by default you'd assume there's no reason for the court to seconds guess the tax level of a tax without questioning the current tax stamp regime too.)

It is, but we should still expect news services to do a good job.

The claims about the weapons effects (at least in the context of typical small arms) are on a similar even of magical effectiveness as the Supermicro allegations.

It's painful to see reporting something that is obviously (ethically and legally) wrong (law enforcement should not be trafficing firearms, regardless of your stance on 2A rights or automatic weapons bans), intermixed with factually dubious claims (or at least incredibly misleading claims).

They're probably talking about the Mk.211 round:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raufoss_Mk_211

Unsurprisingly, the description is exaggerated. It could probably do a subset of those things at the same time, provided the "tank" is using pot metal armor or something.

Must be a thin concrete wall, too, then?

Most tanks are low to the ground, as are most concrete walls: it's impossible for any "ammunition" fired at ground level to penetrate a bunch of ground level objects and then fly 18 football fields away ... and then explode.

Is this ACME ammunition?

Probably a concrete block wall.

Journalists use the term tank extremely loosely.

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