Alan Grayson makes idiotic remarks about rifle firing ‘700 rounds a minute’
Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson made a shameful case against assault rifles after the terrorist attack in his Orlando district, stating that the gun’s rate of fire is what made the death toll so catastrophic. Grayson even stated Islamist Omar Mateen “was not able to buy a weapon that shoots off 700 rounds in a minute, a lot of those people would still be alive,” Grayson said June 12, in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.
“If somebody like him had nothing worse to deal with than a glock pistol which was his other weapon today, he might have killed three or four people and not 50,” Grayson said.
The gun shop owner who sold Mateen the weapon told the New York Post it was a Sig Sauer MCX rifle, prompting Grayson to say he was referring to the AR-15, a model which is NOT automatic and requires the shooter to pull the trigger every time.
photo/ donkeyhotey
Experts said that firing 700 rounds per minute is unrealistic due to the time it would take for a shooter to reload magazines and because the gun would overheat.
Grayson clarified his specific claim in other interviews to say that rifle Mateen used was only capable of 700 rounds per minute when modified to become an automatic weapon, such as the M16 military version of the civilian AR-15.
Grayson told PolitiFact that there are various ways of converting weapons from semi-automatic to automatic, some legal (purchasing a shoulder mount) and others illegal (“machining” the weapon).
Army documents list the M16 as having a “cyclic rate of fire” of 700-900 rounds per minute. However, the “cyclic” rate of fire is a theoretical measurement of speed, not how many rounds could actually be shot out of the gun in 1 minute, said Michael O’Shea, a constitutional law professor at Oklahoma City University.
“That only means how rapidly the firing mechanism operates while there is ammunition in the gun,” O’Shea said. “It is not the same as being able to actually discharge 700 rounds of ammunition from the gun in 60 seconds.”
Grayson told PolitiFact that there are videos online of people shooting at 700-900 rounds per minute, but those videos actually confirmed O’Shea’s point.
Even if you could overcome the need to reload — by installing a belt of ammunition — reaching 700 rounds in one minute remains infeasible, said Steven Howard, a lawyer and gun expert who has consulted with various law enforcement agencies.
“In reality, you’ll get to 500 rounds and the gun will just melt,” Howard said.
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