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Notes -
My thought was that the main tactical advantage of machine guns, suppression, was poorly served by small magazines. Wikipedia seemed to agree:
It does mention that one of those “special purposes” is close-quarters, indoor combat. And notes that the more practical machine pistols sort of converge on submachine guns, adding foregrips or detachable stocks.
I’d overlooked shooting from a moving vehicle (drive-by, or the mythical Texas helicopter hunting).
The trick with handguns is that they aren't actually all that great at ending threats- they aren't quite powerful enough to do this reliably and tend to require multiple rounds (the price for concealability). So you give a pistol more rounds per trigger press; this was the idea behind the pistols that fire limited bursts rather than dumping the entire magazine, but they're more mechanically complex (whereas the Glock solution is just engaging a tab that pushes the sear back down when the slide closes all the way).
Basically, machine pistols give you a less powerful but far more compact shotgun equivalent (shotguns themselves fire the equivalent of 8 rounds of 9mm per trigger press- this is usually enough) that by its nature is pinpoint accurate when needed. The best example of this is Eastern European criminal use of vz. 61 Skorpions- they're even smaller than a cut-down double-barrel shotgun is yet offer just as much firepower; dump half the 20-round mag into something and the results are not meaningfully different from what a single shell of #00 buckshot does. You have to be closer to the target for this to work with 9mm handguns, though.
Guntube doesn't really understand that point and tend to be more "dump the entire mag to blow up some watermelons, also magdumping means half your rounds are over the target" though- they're specialist weapons that basically don't exist outside of rental ranges and video games and as such the knowledge base about how they're actually used is limited to a book I've only read a review of. There are a couple things that should make the community's understanding of this concept a bit more mature, but one of them is limited to 3D printing and the willingness to file SBR paperwork and the other one isn't on the market yet.
Hm. Thanks for the write up.
Out of curiosity, from that Reddit Skorpion link…is “bottle opener” a euphemism?
There are a few ways to convert an AR-15 with one or two drop-in parts such that it will fire in full-auto. Most of them superficially resemble the plane-type or the claw-type of bottle opener- the former also has a piece that sticks up to be pushed by the bolt carrier.
The general solution to achieving full-auto fire is "hammer must stay back until the bolt is fully closed, once it is, trip the hammer"; these parts are a mechanical linkage that makes that process possible.
It's possible to prevent this, but while it's a very low technical bar to go from semi-auto to full-auto, that trivial inconvenience is generally sufficient to stop criminals from doing that.
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Yes.
...He might be referencing some other device, but this is the one in the news, after it got two gun guys convicted of selling "machine guns" that were actually engraved pictures on a flat metal card. not "engraved" in the sense that you could pop it out by hand, but the exact equivalent of a paper template pasted on top.
In any case, he's saying that the ATF will fuck you just as hard for a DIY binary trigger as for a full-auto converter, so why go for the lesser option?
Ohh yeah. I had a feeling something like that would be the case.
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Sure, and even the drive-by scenario would be better served by a using heavier calibers, longer barrels, and larger magazines (or belt-feed, if feasible). I was comparing the advantage of full-auto strictly to a semi-auto pistol without respect to whether there are better weapons still on the basis that concealability was strictly required.
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