Friday, September 30, 2011

So, was the NYPD guy just full of crap,

buying into the EEEVILLLEEEEEE .50-cal bullcrap, or trying to sound even more important/dangerous/bigshot than usual?
Turns out that the NYPD commish bought his own bullshit, and was referred to the Barrett .50 cals in his department’s inventories.

2 comments:

Windy Wilson said...

Or so he says now as damage control for the nutter thing he said earlier.

markm said...

Firehand, that should say "was referring" for "was referred". If it's not a direct quote, you don't need to cut and paste your source's grammatical errors.

I've seen from multiple sources that he was referring to .50 rifles in the department inventory, not machine guns. He surely beclowned himself. One trouble with shooting at aircraft in flight is that nearly all the time, you've got to lead them so far that your front sights aren't in your sight picture. To hit an airplane with the M2 (machine gun), you use tracers, get the tracers out in front of your target, and then try to bring the tracers and target together. You can't do that in semi-auto, and WWII machine gunners trained in this technique still missed most of the time. At 600 rounds per minute, there is 0.1 seconds between rounds. A small aircraft crossing in front of you at 150mph covers 22 feet in 0.1 seconds. If you're aiming your machine gun perfectly, you get one hit somewhere between the nose and the tail, but most likely you're a few feet off to one side or the other and miss everything. And, while a single .50 hit will be noticed, it's probably not crippling.

The exception is if they're coming straight towards you or flying straight away - but then you have very little time to line up your shot. At least it's so for any case other than following a Piper Cub with a chopper, if the chopper is a stable gun platform, which I doubt. Even then it's only the first shot that would be relatively easy.