Fisking Marcotte is Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

But here goes anyway:

National Review Writer Doubts the Power of the Bushmaster AR-15
By Amanda Marcotte

If you, like many red-blooded Americans, plan on joining the gun shopping spree that mass shootings usually inspire,

It is not the mass shooting that inspires gun shopping, it is the fear that the predictible hysteria will lead to a ban. So, it is prudent to buy while you still can.

The fact that he successfully killed 27 women and children with only one target escaping with an injury certainly suggests that the gun does what it was designed to do: kill a whole bunch of people in a short period of time.

There is a lot of history behind the development of the .223 Remington. To sum it up, the earlier cartridge types were more powerful than they needed to be. The 30.06 could be fatal at ranges of up to 800 yards while most soldiers lack the skill to make a hit beyond 200 yards. Further, it is better in a battlefield situation to wound (badly) than to kill outright. The logic is that a wounded soldier needs assistance while a dead one can wait for attention, so you remove more of the enemy by wounding them than by killing. Further advantages are that smaller lighter ammunition allows for more rounds to be carried and the lighter recoil helps with accuracy. Many states do not allow big game hunting with .223 Win because it is not deemed powerful enough. We err on the side of overkill for hunting because it is inhumane to inflict a wound which will kill, but only slowly.

But before you rush to give Bushmaster your hard-earned dollars, let me present a second opinion on the gun's manhood-bolstering capabilities from Robert VerBruggen, courtesy of the (sic) National Review Online, who argues that Lanza's weapon is too weak to bother banning:

VerBruggen's logic is not exactly difficult to follow: Gun control people claim that they are not after hunting weapons, but want to ban "powerful" "assault weapons". Hunting rifles are much more powerful than so-called assault weapons. So if you want to make a limit on how powerful civilian weapons can be, you will end up banning all large game rifles.