None dare call it faith-promoting rumor...

[Straw Man]

6. Somebody clearly ...

Last edited Sun Jun 12, 2016, 03:26 AM - Edit history (1)

An AR is capable for 700/minute and being reloaded in less than a second.

... doesn't understand cyclic rate of fire vs. actual rate of fire.

For starters, an AR is not full-auto. The trigger must be pulled once to fire one round. Can you pull a trigger 700 times in one minute? I highly doubt it.

The 700/minute figure is an extrapolation from the time it takes to fire one magazine on full auto. Standard M16/M4 magazine is 30 rounds. That means it would take a 23.3 magazines to fire 700 rounds. Magazine changes take more than a second -- more like two or three seconds -- so the magazine changes alone would eat up most or all or your minute.

But the real limiting factor is overheating. Firing 700 rounds in a minute, even it were physically possible, would leave your barrel literally red-hot: it would be glowing and might actually deform. The only automatic weapons made for sustained full-auto fire are belt-fed heavy machine guns, and they use water-cooling to deal with this problem.

The actual rate of fire of weapons like the AR-15 is between 70 and 90 rounds per minute. Saying an AR can fire 700 rounds a minute is like saying that because my car is capable of going 100 mph, if I drive it for an hour I will have traveled 100 miles.