In one of his eponymous lectures, Richard Feynman told a story about a lady who was pulled over for speeding. Told that she was going 60 miles per hour, she replied that she’d only been driving for seven minutes.
‘How can I go 60 miles an hour when I wasn’t going for an hour?’
I couldn’t help thinking of this recently when I heard an ATF agent, Tommy Estevan, talk about a ‘switch’ that
turns a semi-automatic firearm into, essentially, a machine gun. So, instead of one round being discharged from a firearm with the single pull of the trigger, when the switch is installed onto a firearm, you’re looking at 1200 rounds with the single pull of the trigger within a minute.
Boy, that sounds like a lot of rounds! But as Feynman’s driver might ask: How can I fire 1200 rounds within a minute if I don’t have 1200 rounds? ¹
With a decent semi-automatic pistol, it’s not difficult to get 5 shots off in 2 seconds. That translates to 150 rounds per minute. Which seems kind of slow, compared to 1200 rounds per minute.
But all of this ignores replacing empty magazines. It’s not like there are belt-fed handguns. ²
So a more reasonable way to think about it is this: If your gun doesn’t have ‘the switch’, you can empty a ‘high capacity’ 15-round magazine in six seconds. With ‘the switch’, you can do that in one second. And then, in either case, you have to reload.
One second, versus six seconds, to get off the same number of shots. Somehow, it sounds less scary when you put it that way.
But scaring you is a big part of ATF’s mission. And we can expect them to ramp up the scare stories now that Republicans in Congress have introduced a bill to repeal the NFA (which would give ATF no taxes to collect, and thus no reason to exist), and another bill to abolish the ATF.
It will be interesting to see which other Republicans support — and which RINOs oppose — these bills.
¹ Which, if we’re talking about 9mm rounds, would weigh at least 32 pounds, about as much as two bowling balls.
² Although I hope someone out there is working on that project!
