stagpanther
New member
Though I never served--this is pretty much how I see things. Excellent job of bracketing the various concerns.somewhere in these two threads that are going along it was stated that it took an average of 8 rounds to stop an enemy combatant with 5.56. Part of my belief is that if young soldiers were armed with a light carbine firing 7.62 NATO there might be a lot more misses all else being equal.
It is also known that most soldiers aren’t high-speed-low-drag door-kickers with stylish beards, basket-ball sized biceps and sunglasses as pop-culture would have people to believe; most soldiers are scared, skinny teenagers who just touched a rifle a few weeks or months prior to deployment.
Anyway, controllability of the weapon is just one of the factors taken into consideration for governmental entities when they choose these 22ish caliber intermediate cartridges. We’ve discussed all the other factors that has resulted in the widespread use of the cartridge. It’s a hard cartridge to find a suitable replacement for.
There are a lot better performing cartridges out there, but there are always trade-offs. The great killing enterprises around the world have settled on the 5.56 as the basic individual weapon or something very similar after millennia of experience in killing; until the appearance of lightweight effective body armor on the battlefield it did a decent enough job. Now it’s requiring what I consider to be a massive leap forward to replace 5.56 with something that can defeat body armor while retaining the other desirable qualities such as: physical size and weight of the cartridge/weapon.
If size and weight of the cartridge didn’t matter in war, we could simply just revert back to 30.06… but we know it’s not that simple.
In short, the cartridge worked well enough for nearly 60 years, a very long time in US history. Body armor is a new thing on the battlefield.
the only thing I would add to this is that the OP mentioned the use as "personal protection"--which I assume means civilian use in a non-combat civilian mode. There are other potentially legal limitations to think about.
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