Asinine. This CNN clip starts out as ignorant anti-gun agi-prop and devolves into a fantasy land where a round known to be one of the least effective military cartridges on human targets can magically take down the world’s largest land animal by virtue of the fact that it goes really, really fast. Not as fast as actual elephant gun rounds mind you, but fast nonetheless.

You can watch the video by clicking the pic. CNN disabled embedding after it began making the rounds and every gun owner in American began fisking this tool who is passing himself off as an expert:

The .223 began life as a varmint cartridge and still excels at killing small predators like foxes, coyotes, and feral dogs. It is known to produce casualties as opposed to quick kills in humans and was largely adopted because of its mild recoil (it’s really a pleasure to shoot) and the light weight of the rounds which means individual soldiers can carry more ammunition than the rounds that preceded it.

The .223 fires a .22 caliber bullet weighing around 55 grains. No experienced hunter or shooter would ever claim that the .223 was designed for large game. It is considered too small a round to use even on the moderately sized black bear in America. Elephants are taken with rifles that push bullets of at least 400 grains at velocities sometimes greater than the .223. Even that would be considered bare minimum. Winchester offers a 500 grain load in .458 which is considered a decent elephant cartridge. That round pushes those 500 grains at over 2000 feet per second.That’s considered a load with which a good shot might be able to kill an elephant.

You need not be a physicist or firearms expert to know that the .223 and its 55 grain bullet will not come close to the power needed to kill a animal an elephant’s size. A .223 might not be able to even penetrate the thick hide of an elephant, and if it did the tiny hole it made would not kill the creature. Most people shot with the .223 don’t die if they receive medical attention. A firearms “expert” should know that.

But Dan Austin makes several other blunders here. One is he claims guns can’t fire accidentally without pulling the trigger which is false. Anyone who has ever handled the old M-16 A2 can tell you that a sharp blow to the butt of the weapon would slam the bolt forward and fire a round that was chambered. I have no experience with the Galil clones he’s talking about, but I assume many semi-autos can have the same failing.

This “expert” suggests several times that no one has a legitimate use for a semi-auto rifle which sounds less like a professional opinion and more like lefty disarmament politics to me. CNN says Austin has worked in over 300 court cases and I would suggest that a good defense attorney could use his obvious unfamiliarity with firearms to turn those cases over.

So what’s his agenda? He could have easily read up on this stuff, or hit a range. He clearly has never done either so why is he on CNN lecturing America about guns?

h/t Zombie Squad Forums. Yeah, I’m a member. So what?