Reply #37: Explanation.

[gatts]

could bring down a helicopter.

I'm sure it could. Helicopters have been routinely taken down by animals flying into the tail rotor, and I don't see a six foot length of metal being less problematic, no matter what shape it was in.

But if we go back to talking bullets, rather than throwing the rifle itself in, chances are pretty damned low, and get lower the further away you get. For starters, the air currents around a helicopter are a mess at best. Helicopters and planes are also legally required to stay pretty high up once they leave an airport, putting you on the far range of what a human can even perceive. The vulnerable target areas are fairly small -- you can't even rely on taking out the engine, as any helicopter over 500' or moving more than 65kph is capable of landing safely in even a complete engine failure. The useful targets would mostly be the pilot, central connector on the main rotors, or a control line, neither of which are going to be easy to hit. It's possible, but so is taking out a helicopter with a potato 'cannon'. Helicopters have been lost over flying birds or kicked-up rocks. From a risk assessment viewpoint, it'd be more important to ban geese near airports (multiple confirmed kills) than .50 BMGs in general.

You have to remember, while the .50 BMG had military usage against aircraft, it also took an average 20,000 bullets per confirmed down from ground-based machine guns. Those guys had radar and pretty high-end optics on their side. Even if a civilian gun owner could replicate that feat -- not likely, in my experience, what with the lackluster availability of full size long-barrel mounted machine guns today -- we'd be talking more than 100,000 USD average per kill, ignoring the cost of a mounted 50 BMG machine gun. Barret's civilian offerings just aren't going to do it; you'd be lucky to get one shot off in five seconds, and that's leaving your chances of hitting a target somewhere south of vanishingly small. You might as well just buy a Cessna and ram the target.

Why would anyone need a gun that big.

It's rather useful for taking down very large game animals, for one example. The Makah tribe in Washington State use them to kill large game animals, and it's one of the few weapons on a very short list capable of doing so humanely (and even then requires very close range and multiple shots). I think the .577 Tyrannosaur gets used more, but it's highly regulated on a federal level, so for a lot of people the .50 BMG is the next best choice. Bears are another example, an unpleasant but often necessary option. The .50 BMG's not the best option for close range (the guns weigh too much), in which case a powerful (and, ironically enough, wider caliber) shotgun slug is usually used, but getting in close range with a bear is something that's usually not ideal.

But the main use is certainly target shooting, and there are a lot of people that use these guns for such. Civilian marksmanship programs like the Fifty Caliber Shooters Association are a simple and easily verifiable fact, and used to run nation-wide. The .50 BMG's power and ballistics, and the design of guns designed for it, make an ideal long-range target shooter.

You can use other ammunition for this same purpose, of course, but that's the same for any actually unlawful uses of the ammo. There's nothing especially deadly about the .50 BMG that isn't a problem for the .416 Barret, a round with similar kinetic energy and ballistics. If you want to ban that (and everything apparently above .415), you're going to ban the single most successful self-defense chambering in the world, the .45 ACP, and the most popular shotgun shells (12 gauge is equal to .729 caliber). Even that wouldn't stop people from noticing the rather similar .408 Chey Tac.