Additionally, the Vegas Shooting remains the only occurrence of semi-automatic weapons modified to simulate or approach automatic fire by use of external devices and those devices (bump-stocks) have since been banned. There have only been three reported incidents of full-automatic weapons used in crimes since 1934 and none of these incidents were mass shootings. The highly complicated process for acquiring one of the little over 500,000 existing automatic weapons in the hands of civilians is so complicated and rigorous that their use in crime is virtually non-existent. Manufacturing full-automatic weapons for general civilian use is already banned and the sale of existing full-automatic weapons is highly regulated. However, if the limit of our definition of “military-grade” is only on the capability for full-auto fire, the debate would be closed. This also allows us, generally, to classify a semi-automatic weapon modified in some way to simulate or approach full-auto fire as a “military-grade weapon”. This allows us to classify, based on existing law, Light Machine Guns, Assault Rifles, and Submachine Guns as military-grade weapons (legally, they are classified as machine guns ). Area weapons fall into a broader category of weapons that are considered mass casualty devices, meaning their design fulfills a specific military need to cause mass casualties in an opposing force.īecause the civilian application of a firearm for self-defense falls quite exclusively into situations requiring what are called point weapons, firearms designed to deliver purposeful, precise, and controlled gunfire, there is an established tradition in American law that civilians do not have a protected right by nature of the second amendment for area weapons and mass casualty devices. That’s because a full-automatic weapon is what’s considered an area weapon, meaning it’s designed to saturate an area with gunfire far beyond what’s possible with manual pulls of the trigger. The problem? Sometimes continuous wave lasers, often in the kilowatt class, need to focus on a single point on a target for a few seconds to work properly.The most obvious firearm feature that we can universally consider “military-grade" is the capacity for full-auto fire or the ability to simulate or approach full-auto fire. Continuous wave lasers need that blast because they effectively work like blowtorches, heating the surface of a target-say, a flying drone-until a part melts off, inducing aerodynamic failure and a crash, or the fuel or explosive payload explodes. Most military lasers are continuous wave lasers, or those that blast a target with a continuous beam of energy. The Army believes it can merely aim the laser at a drone to both damage it and fry its electronic guts. The service posted a notice for the prospective new weapon at the Pentagon’s Small Business Investment Research website, calling the weapon the Tactical Ultrashort Pulsed Laser for Army Platforms. Army wants to develop a new laser weapon that is more powerful than existing weapons by nearly three orders of magnitude, but lasts just a fraction as long.
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