Originally Posted By: Astro14
Rifles are rifles. Body armor (of the soft kind that cops wear) is generally only effective against handguns.
Same with military body armor, the U.S. service personnel in Iraq were the most armor clad ones in history, and they still suffered horrific gunshot wounds from the pedestrian AK. They also inflicted equally horrific ones with those "varmint" killers...
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ANY rifle round will penetrate it along with car doors. Regular hunting rifles have a lot more power (mostly from bullet mass) than an AR-15. What makes the AR-15 easy to shoot is its LOW recoil, a result of LOW power in a lightweight rifle.
Then whey don't U.S. troops carry regular hunting rifles into battle? Why no .60 caliber musket balls? Thems real man's ammo!
But as someone who shot them often, they are "easy" to shoot, especially in prolonged engagements. It is lightweight, allowing the user to carry far more ammo then previous service weapons. And the bullet itself is hardly "low power." It flies at over 1000 meters per second at higher velocity than larger caliber rounds such as the .30-06. The slug is small, but the yawing effect can be rather horrific and led to investigations as to why numbers of North Vietnamese soldiers would often flee after being shot and found dead while appearing to be hiding after - because the bullets would often break apart causing them to internally hemorrhage to death. Much the same way Union and Confederate soldiers used to pull off their clothes before dying to try to pull out the massive musket balls they could feel killing them...
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The USAF (and soon after, the Army) bought the M-16 (andAR-15) because it was higher capacity, lightweight and EASY to shoot...not because of the power or effectiveness of its caliber.
The first M-16's were not "higher capacity", they had 20-round box magazines like the M-14 did. I'm not sure if you get your history from "The Manuel of the Disingenuous" or from somewhere else. The weapon was ordered after General Curtis LeMay saw a demonstration of them ripping apart watermelons and everything else they hit at a Fourth of July picnic. He was pleased because the Springfield factory could simply not produce nearly enough M-14 rifles, which meant that up into the mid-1960's, many U.S. servicemen would be carrying obsolete M-1 Garands, Carbines, and Grease-guns into combat against Soviet troops operating AK-47's. The M-16 survived the best attempts to kill it by conservative 'one-shot, one-kill' officers because it was a very effective and it was needed in the jungles of Vietnam.
The weapon was born out of numerous experiences and research including that conducted by the British, Germans, and the U.S. Army after WWII that full caliber "hunting rounds" were superfluous; and that solders rarely shot each other at ranges beyond 200m, maybe 300m max.
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They knew then that the .223 was far lower power than the .308 that it replaced in the M-14 but the decision was to buy a lighter, higher capacity rifle.
The 5.56mm generates quite a bit more muzzle velocity than the 7,62X51mm. It's also because special operations troops tested the first M-16's in Vietnam, and loved them. They also found that in early small unit infantry engagements, the U.S. Army and Marines were often coming off for the worse against frontline formations of the North Vietnamese Peoples Army armed with AK's, because in the unmacho, unglamorous world of actual combat, the truth is that the unit that gets the most rounds out usually wins the engagement. As mentioned, the rate of M-14 production was too slow to arm the U.S. military adequately. Also, many senior infantry officers had been junior officers during Korea, and had had bad experiences of entire small units of U.S, infantry being wiped out in night engagements by the Chinese "Volunteer" units armed entirely with Soviet PPSh-41's - and even Thompson sub-machine-guns that were supplied to China's previous Nationalist gov't, while their troops were frantically trying to reload their M-1's. The M-16's were also more compact and easier to wield around in enclosed spaces of cities and jungles during actual combat. This is why the British troops in Northern Ireland often felt at a bit of a disadvantage against IRA members carrying "Armalites" in the 1970's.
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But the press uses words like "high power" for their sensational effect...without knowing what they mean...or caring about technical accuracy....and those terms get parroted....again without understanding...
Just like some belittle others' intelligence with silly aphorisms without acknowledging that nearly every major military uses "small caliber" assault rifles for one reason: they are simply the most efficient means to kill people at combat ranges and have been proven in nearly every major conflict since the 1970's. That's not to say that weapons like the M-14 (and SOCOM derivatives), FAL, G-3, etc. aren't excellent rifles that have their place situationally on the battlefield. But weapons like the M-4, FA-MAS, Enfield, or Steyr are superior for general usage...
