Vincent J. Curtis
23 Oct 2017
Susan Clairmont is a reporter for the Hamilton Spectator, and covers the police/major crime beat. Today, she wrote a column that reported the desire of the HPS to replace their 12 gauge shotguns with C8 (assault) rifles in police cruisers, and tried to explain why the police wanted the change.
Clairmont does understand much about guns, and, perhaps not wishing to burn her police sources, merely copy-typed the police description of the C8 as being "high-powered" and "short-barrelled." The C8 is a variant of the M-16, and is about the size of an M-4. Hence, the description of "short-barrelled" is correct, but the "high-powered" part is a wonder, especially when you compare the power of the 5.56 NATO cartridge to that of 00-buck 12 gauge. What are the police up to by describing a 5.56 NATO firing weapon as "high-powered?"
So I asked Clairmont:
I read your column of today, headlined “Front-line police
waiting for bigger guns.” Throughout the piece, you referred to the
particular rifle the police wanted, the C8, as “high-powered,” and I had to
wonder what game the police were playing by describing this weapon as
“high-powered.” In the world of rifles, it is not high-powered.
The C8 is a variation of the C7 rifle, the standard infantry
rifle of the Canadian army. Other variants of this rifle include the
M-16, and the M-4. The semi-automatic version sold on the civilian market
is the AR-15. (The AR stands for Armalite, not Assault Rifle.
Armalite was the company that developed it and the AR-10 in the 1950s.)
The C8 is capable of fully automatic fire.
Whether a rifle is considered “high-powered” or not depends
on the cartridge it fires. The cartridge fired by the C8/C7/M-16/M-4/AR-15
is the .223 Remington, or the 5.56 mm NATO, and this is an intermediate powered
cartridge. What would be considered “high-powered” are the older style
military cartridges, such as the 7.62 NATO/.308 Winchester, the .303 British,
the 30-06, the 8 mm Mauser, 7.62 X 54R Russian, and so forth. The AR-10 would
be a high-powered rifle since it fires the 7.62/.308 cartridge.
The advantage of chambering a rifle with an intermediate
cartridge is the lower recoil, and therefore better controllability when firing.
The standard C8 magazine holds 30 rounds, whereas a police shotgun might hold
five in its tubular magazine, and that, combined with full automatic fire, is
another advantage of the C8 over a 12 gauge shotgun.
The 12 gauge pump-action shotgun presently carried in police
cars is comparable in power to the “high-powered” rifle cartridges, with all
the blast the recoil. It is much shorter, however, in effective range
than any of the rifle cartridges, high or intermediate powered.
It is odd that the police would consistently refer to the C8
as “high-powered”. The “short-barrelled” part is certainly true, and
being short barrelled it tends to reduce the power of the bullet coming out of
the business end of the rifle as well as the longer-range accuracy of the
weapon (i.e. at 100 m or more distance. A police shotgun would not reach
out that far.)
In sum, it is deceptive to refer to the C8 as a
“high-powered” rifle, especially in comparison to a 12 gauge shotgun. In
terms of size, the C8 is roughly the same as a Model 870 pump-action shotgun.
I am not opposed to Hamilton’s police being issued
C8s. But what I have to wonder is what game is being played here by
mischaracterizing the C8 as being “high-powered?” The police have enough
firearms experts to know everything I told you above – so why were they being
deliberately inaccurate to you? Is it because the AR-15 is so popular
among gun-owners, and the police officials wanted to plant seeds in the mind of
the wider public? And if the police really didn’t know – then that itself
is another problem.
The alarm bells of gun owners go off when authorities
deliberately mischaracterize firearms to make them seem more sinister.
And that is what was being done in your column.
-30-
Her reply was to thank me for my feed-back, and to suggest I write a letter to the editor.
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