Gov. Christie refuses to sign 3 gun bills, including version of weapon ban he called for

[rrneck]

49. Ms. Maddow is wrong.

She is a talking head on television that makes a living telling people what they want to hear.

I googled certain terms like "bullet hole in airplane" and found the following. Research online is pretty easy if you take the time to do it. Apparently Ms. Maddow needs to beef up her research staff. Maybe she could send some of her public relations and marketing people to help.

This a bullet hole in an airplane.

http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2013-05/rear-seat-gunners-midway

National Naval Aviation Museum, Pensacola, FL - As Aviation Radioman Second Class Oral “Slim” Moore looks on, Ensign William Carter points to friendly fire damage their Dauntless suffered over Midway on 4 June. Low on fuel, the pair were forced to land on the atoll’s Eastern Island after a fruitless search for the Japanese task force that day.

This is Aloha Airlines 243 that suffered extensive structural damage when the roof of the cabin blew off at 24,000 feet. It made it home.


There is no way in hell a semi automatic rifle can cause enough structural damage to a commercial aircraft to bring it down. The only way to even approach the problem is to make the aircraft unflyable. That means damage the systems that operate the control surfaces of the aircraft or the engines that power it. Commercial aircraft employ system redundancy to ensure that if one system fails, another will be there to take its place. So, for example, there isn't just one hydraulic system, there are three. So if you want to disable the electrical or hydraulic systems of a 747, you would have to have to put a half inch wide bullet in exactly the right spot on a three hundred ton two hundred and forty foot long airplane going two hundred miles an hour three times.

Now, about this rifle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_M82
The long effective range, over 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) (1.1 miles), along with high energy and availability of highly effective ammunition such as API and Raufoss Mk 211, allows for effective operations against targets like radar cabins, trucks, parked aircraft and the like.

If you want to shoot down an airplane in flight, the mechanics are really no different from upland game hunting. You're just shooting at a moving target in the air. So if you're shooting at a phesant, or a clay target if you prefer, if the target is moving laterally across your field of vision you have to "lead" it, which is to say you have to shoot where it's going to be rather than where it actually is. Of course, if you want to minimize that effect, you could always get in front of the airplane and shoot at it that way, but other problems arise.

If you shoot the plane before it has progressed down the runway too far to stop, the pilot will just hit the brakes and do exactly that. If you wait too long to shoot the plane to try to make it crash in a flaming heap of terroristic horror, it will be going about two hundred miles an hour and rising into the sky, thus creating the moving target problem again. That creates a very narrow window of opportunity to take aim and make your three impossible shots. Not to mention the fact that you have just disabled a three hundred ton airplane heading straight for you. Now, you can always exploit the long range capability of the .50 to reduce the parallax between you and the target, but if you move far enough away to do that your target, meaning the exact spot you have to hit on the plane three times, will be smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

Of course, all this assumes you will be able to find somebody that can actually shoot that accurately. And that person will have to establish a position from which to do his marksman magic. Have you ever been to an airport? People tend to notice guys walking around the neighborhood with a five foot long thirty pound rifle. So if you want to get close enough to make your impossible shot, you'll have a lot of explaining to do, and if you get far enough away for proper concealment, the shot will not just be impossible, but the entire notion becomes silly.

If fact, the entire notion is silly anyway. And just a few minutes with google proves it.