Why do people like “military-style” guns?

Many people find it alarming that guns that look at least vaguely like modern military firearms are popular. They think anyone who wants such a gun must have a nefarious (or at least dubious) purpose in mind, or have some kind of closet “Rambo complex”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Gun owners, like other people, have widely divergent tastes. Personally such guns don’t appeal to me, mostly because I like old-fashioned wood and steel, and the plastic that appears on most such guns is not to my taste. I have owned a few of these guns at times, and have fired lots of them, but buying the old-fashioned ones that I find aesthetically more appealing keeps me broke enough that I probably won’t end up with many (or any) in my collection.

I do, however, find it completely understandable and not in the least worrying that others do like them. In fact, I find it easier to understand a taste for these guns than many other modern trends, like tattoos and body piercings. That is because there are functional as well as aesthetic reasons for liking them.

Let’s look first at the aesthetic reasons. Aesthetics are a very personal matter. I already mentioned that I don’t especially like the look of “black guns”, another term for these military-style firearms (since they often use a lot of black plastic furniture). They look too modern and utilitarian to me. On the other hand, I also don’t like the look of very heavily engraved custom guns with gold inlays and the like. Too fancy and busy for me. In both cases I can see the artistry and, in principle, the appeal. They’re just not for me. I also don’t like the styling of most modern cars (I drive a 1987 Volvo wagon). But I understand that there are people who do.

I am not sure why I like the looks of the guns I do, but I suspect it is due to the same reason that many of our preferences get “fixed”, early conditioning. When I was a kid, the guns I saw and the cars I saw had a certain appearance, and I wanted them, badly. Those “ideals” got fixed in my brain and so when the idea of a car or a gun comes to mind now, they are what I visualize.

Other people, especially those who are younger, got exposed to different, more modern styles, and that is what they desire: what they have seen in movies, video games, etc. I think a lot of our tastes get fixed this way, based on early exposure, whether it is food, clothes, cars, guns or whatever. It seems pretty clear that aesthetics plays a big part in many people’s gun preferences, because you can get kits to make almost any gun look like one of these “modern military guns”, even ancient bolt-action rifles that were made as much as 125 years ago. Personally I find these kits to be kind of sacrilegious, like hot-rodding a pristine 1930s coupe, but clearly there is a market for them and it has to be based mostly on aesthetics, because they don’t change the functionality much, if at all.

What about functionality of modern military styles, then? Here I have to concede that lovers of these designs have a point. The plastic furniture I dislike does have some advantages in terms of durability. It’s less likely to get scratched or chip or break. Some designs are more flexible in terms of being reconfigured for different users or uses. For example, the stock may be adjustable in terms of length or the height of a cheek rest, or the type of front grip (horizontal versus vertical), or they may be convertible in terms of calibre, right handed versus left-handedness or even action type (semi-automatic versus pump action). Many are designed so a wide variety of accessories can be attached, such as different types of sights and other bells and whistles. None of these things are necessarily completely modern innovations (nothing new under the sun), but the modern designs usually accommodate a wider degree of easy customization. This is why they are so popular with hunters and target shooters, and why they would be even more popular if not for various ill-conceived regulatory issues.

Two aspects of functionality, magazine capacity and speed of firing, get a lot of attention from the media and gun-haters, but are pretty much red-herrings. In Canada, centre-fire rifles are legally limited to five-round magazines, though some legal ten-round pistol magazines will fit some rifles. Thus for a law-abiding Canadian, magazine capacity doesn’t really enter into the equation. Speed of firing is in most cases not materially greater than older designs (remember, these are semi-automatic designs, not fully automatic ones). These two factors get a lot of media attention because gun-haters like to suggest that they enable rampage-shooters to do more damage, but the sad fact is that anyone evil enough to start shooting at innocent people has such an advantage if the latter are unarmed that the type of gun used or its magazine capacity has little relevance to the invariably tragic outcome (I will expand on this issue more fully in a separate essay). The only place where the marginal improvements possible in modern guns are truly useful is in competition, or a few types of hunting where multiple targets may need to be engaged quickly (e.g. varmints/pests). The only reasons I might foresee acquiring such a gun would be if I got back into competitive shooting in a discipline where some of these features of a more modern design would be useful, if I took one temporarily in a trade, or to preserve my options if it looked like the government was going to follow its time-tested pattern of “prohibit-and-grandfather”.

You might be wondering by now why I have used the rather cumbersome term “military-style firearms” rather than the term commonly used media term “assault rifle/assault weapon”. Many firearms aficionados jump on the use of this term for the rather pedantic reason that what the media are almost always referring to does not fit a very technical definition of the term, which originally referred to military rifles that were capable of fully automatic fire, fired a medium-power cartridge, etc. That is true enough, but more important to my mind is the fact that this term has acquired an emotion-laden, pejorative connotation that I feel is completely undeserved. To me it is like using the N-word: it reveals more about the user than it does about the referent.

Finally, you might also wonder why so many of the villains in mass-shooting incidents use various military-style firearms. Doesn’t that reveal something about the “evil nature” of these guns? The short answer is no, it does not. These guns are very popular with the public in general, and are probably close to if not at the top of the sales charts anywhere they can legally be sold. They are common with all kinds of users for the reasons outlined above, and blaming these guns for rampages is like blaming SUVs for bank robberies because they are popular as getaway vehicles (just as they are popular with commuters, soccer moms and residents of snowy rural areas). But that’s a topic for another essay…

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