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The gun

Page history last edited by Andrew Alder 3 years, 4 months ago Saved with comment

A page on the JFK shooting   

 

I've had some interesting correspondence about the AR-15 carried by the Secret Service on the day of the JFK assassination.

 

It seems beyond doubt that it was an AR-15 model 601, which has two modes of fire:

  • Fully automatic... pull the trigger and hold it and it will fire until it jams or runs out of ammunition. In this mode, it functions as a machine-gun.
  • Semi automatic... pull the trigger and it fires one shot and loads another round up the spout, ready to fire again. In this mode, it functions as a self-loading rifle.

 

Other models have had another mode, in which when the trigger is pulled three rounds only are fired. This is a very useful mode in military use. It conserves ammunition, obviously, and has many of the advantages of fully automatic. Experts on the Bren light machine gun (on which I trained and which has exactly the same modes of fire as the model 601) were taught to fire singles, doubles and triples while in fully automatic mode. The triple was both the most difficult and the most useful. First shot misses, second hits, third kills. But it has another more subtle advantage. A burst of three somehow doesn't sound like a machine gun. Four does, but two or three the brain tends to think of as individual shots... perhaps surprisingly in the case of three. So a burst of three doesn't give away the presence of the fully automatic weapon to the enemy. And this may make the difference between you killing them and them killing you. Or that's what we were told.

 

AR-15 weapons are all selective fire, in that they have more than one mode of operation. Some have single and fully automatic, some single and triple, some all three. But the 601 has just single and fully automatic. 

 

In Australia, that weapon would be known as a "machine gun" and a "fully automatic" weapon; The presence of the single-shot mode doesn't change that. But there seems some variation to this usage in the United States. The AR-15 used (the model 601) has been described as a "machine gun" but has also been described as "semi automatic", presumably because of the presence of the single-shot mode. Whether these people would also describe the Bren as "semi-automatic", they don't in my experience want to say. (They're similarly reticent about six star rank.)

 

The important thing is just to understand, when an American says "semi automatic", they may mean a selective fire machine gun like the AR-15 model 601, or presumably the Bren or M60. These three weapons have identical modes of fire.

 

See also The Howard Donahue theory on the JFK assassination 

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