Machine Gun Hill Gun Shoot Funny
The Big, Bad, Fun Gun The .50-caliber sniper rifle can blow a hole through an armored car. You call that recreational?
By BRUCE PORTER
Long Shot: A 54-inch .50-caliber rifle costs about $5,000. Photograph by Dan Forbes for The New York Times.
he Black Rock Desert, about 100 miles north of Reno, Nev., gets its name from lava rocks the size of soccer balls that litter the desert floor. It is a vast and mountainous region, and few people venture here without a purpose. Mine was to join three guys trying to hit a rock, from two miles away, with a .50-caliber sniper rifle, the most powerful gun you can buy.
When I arrived, the shooting party was camped near Crutcher's Spring, so named for a dribble of water that sustains the few local range cattle and the feral mustangs in the hills. Shooting benches with guns chocked on them had been set out in a line, and a camper's awning was pulled out to provide shelter from the 110-degree sun. Sitting at the head of the valley, 3,500 yards away, was a pockmarked lava rock, 15 feet high and 12 feet across. The next morning, at first light, we planned on cutting loose at that rock. "I'm not standing here telling you no one else in the world has ever shot two miles and hit what he aimed at," said Skip Talbot, 58, a short, wiry man from Fallon, Nev., just east of Reno. "We're just not aware of anyone else who's ever done what we're doing."
Talbot has pursued a variety of endeavors over the years -- broncobusting in New Mexico, ranching in Arizona, outboard motorboat racing in California. But he made his mark in target shooting, where he set the 200-yard record with the .44-magnum pistol, Dirty Harry's weapon of choice. The pistol has such a fierce recoil that after about 30,000 rounds the tendons in Talbot's right hand collapsed. So he moved on to the .50-caliber rifle, and in April 1999 set the world record at 1,000 yards, putting five rounds together in a space 2.6 inches across.
Bruce Porter teaches journalism and is special assistant to the dean at the Columbia University School of Journalism.
Standing in the shade of the awning, Talbot explained in his taut Western twang that early morning is the best time for long-distance shooting in the desert. "The desert has cooled off and the sun almost wants to clear that hill over there so it illuminates the target," he said. "The first rush of wind comes in, but then it suddenly goes quiet, so you get maybe 45 minutes of the sweetest conditions you can possibly imagine."
hen it comes to the .50-caliber rifle, Talbot's view of things in the Black Rock Desert is considerably more positive than the view of many in Washington, D.C. There, antigun activists have been trying to get the weapon recognized as a threat to national security and, consequently, banned from general circulation. The main reason for concern is the sheer power of the cartridge it fires -- the Browning machine gun round. Developed to penetrate German armor during World War I, the cartridge wasn't really used until World War II, when it served as standard ammo for the heavy M2 belt-fed machine guns. Nearly half a foot long and weighing about a third of a pound, the cartridge is five times the size of the high-power .30-06. Fired from single-shot or semiautomatic rifles, it exits the muzzle at about 3,000 feet per second, has an effective range of 7,500 yards -- or more than four miles -- and at interim distances can do a stupendous amount of damage.
Last year, an instructor at the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School at Quantico, Va., demonstrated the weapon's firepower for staff members of the House Subcommittee on Government Reform. Firing at 200 yards, he put a .50-caliber bullet clear through the one-inch rolled steel used on most armored military vehicles, then through a three-and-a-half-inch-thick cast-iron manhole cover, and finally through a piece of three-quarter-inch bullet-resistant glass. Using a semiautomatic rifle, he also fired 10 rounds in rapid succession completely through a 600-pound safe. As Maj. John L. Plaster, Army Reserve, retired, wrote in "The Ultimate Sniper," a bible of sorts for would-be soldiers of fortune, "How can anyone exaggerate .50-caliber performance?" The major goes on to tell of a man from Michigan who fired his own .50-caliber ammo at simulated wooden frame houses and found they blew completely through six of them. "Not six walls," Plaster emphasizes, "six houses."
Despite its awesome power, the .50-cal is no more difficult to obtain than a .22-caliber squirrel rifle.
In recent years, largely because of the awestruck attention paid to the .50-caliber by gun magazines, acquiring the weapon has taken on the nature of a cult quest. The critical event in this regard occurred in 1991, when the Barrett Firearms Manufacturing company of Murfreesboro, Tenn., a major manufacturer of .50-caliber rifles, sold 100 of its Model 82A1 semiautomatics to the Marines for use in the gulf war. There, the gun achieved a mythic reputation. In one trumpeted account, Sgt. Kenneth Terry of the Third Battalion, First Marines, is said to have disabled an Iraqi armored personnel carrier from just under a mile away with two incendiary rounds fired from a Barrett, terrifying the occupants of two other vehicles in the column into promptly surrendering. After the war, sales of the gun, which is now being manufactured by about a dozen companies, increased from a handful a year to the point where an estimated 20,000 are now in the possession of . . . well, nobody really knows who.
The reason the owners of these weapons are unknown is that the .50-cal, despite its awesome power, is no more difficult to obtain than a .22-caliber squirrel rifle. Anyone at least 18 years old can walk into a gun shop, place an order for the weapon and, when it arrives a few days later, carry it out of the store. He need only pass the federal Brady test, required for the purchase of any rifle, which asks among other things whether the purchaser has ever been arrested for a felony or committed against his will to a mental institution. The federal records are then destroyed, preserving the gun owner's anonymity.
For those in the national security business, this is a full-blown nightmare. "I may have a bias toward security," says Eljay Bowron, director of the Secret Service from 1993 to 1997, "but I think the public needs a certain amount of protection from people who aren't responsible and who aren't necessarily balanced from having such easy access to stuff that is so deadly from such a great distance." In protecting public officials, Bowron says, the standard procedure is to examine locations where someone with a rifle could pose a threat -- bridge overpasses, rooftops, windows. "But we're not looking at two miles away," he adds. "And normally you're relatively secure when you're out of sight. You say, 'Well, we'll just go around the corner of this building.' But this is a weapon that can shoot right through the corner of the building."
In 1993, it was the .50-caliber Barretts possessed by the Branch Davidians that influenced the F.B.I.'s decision to launch a military-style siege of the Waco compound, using Bradley fighting vehicles borrowed from the Army. "We got varying reports from the Army about the B.F.V.," says Chris Whitcomb, an agent on duty for the hostage rescue team. "Some said, 'Yes, it can take a .50-caliber,' and some said, 'Well, we don't think it can.' "The bureau wasn't about to find out for itself.
To get a sense of who it is that owns this gun, I spent part of last summer going to places where it was likely to turn up. My first stop was the Hiram Maxim Machine Gun Shoot, which is held every July in a rented gravel pit three miles south of Dover-Foxcroft, Me. The three-day festival honors the inventor of the machine gun used in World War I, and resembles a large flea market cloaked in olive drab. Army tents were bursting at the seams with machine guns, rifles, pistols and shotguns for sale, as well as a plethora of ammo, gun parts and bayonets. Political-action booths promoted the Second Amendment, one displaying a poster that showed an American soldier shooting at a body, draped with the American flag, that lay dead on the ground. The caption read: "Your Future Under Gun Control."
But the real action was up on the firing line. About 200 men and a handful of women were preparing to decimate five automobiles, along with some porcelain toilets stacked one on the other. Even with ear protectors, the roar was deafening when the shooting commenced. People were blazing away with AK-47's and Uzis and tommy guns and Chinese assault weapons with barrel clips. Others were frantically belt-feeding ammo into their voracious Browning .30-caliber light machine guns, set up on chest-high tripods. Someone was even grinding out rounds with a replicated old Gatling gun, until it exploded on Day 2 of the event, making a mess of the owner's inner thigh.
Above the racket, occasionally and very distinctly, there occurred a single BOOM. This was the .50-cal. I'd been warned about its noise on the drive up by a gun-shop owner in Brunswick, Me. He told me of a man who permanently lost hearing on one side when a friend demonstrated a .50 for him but neglected to tell him to put his fingers in his ears. Keeping that in mind, I walked up onto a little rise to observe the .50 in action. Its owner was a forklift repairman from Bangor named Paul Raysik, whose .50 was a scoped, single-shot model purchased for $2,000 from the State Arms Gun Company of Waunakee, Wis. He had set it up with a bipod on a ground tarp, next to the two-and-a-half-ton Army truck he bought a couple of years ago and painted desert camouflage to mark its use in the gulf war.
On top of the windshield of the truck, he had mounted a Browning light machine gun, so he could riddle the cars from his driver's seat and then climb down and open up with the .50 on the ground. Using the .50, Raysik had already single-handedly set two of the vehicles on fire by shooting blazing tracer ammo into the flammable plastic upholstery. "Other guys, with the machine guns, were trying to do that, too, but they were going all over the place," he told me. "I put the rounds right where you need to."
To the rear of the firing line was a booth manned by Frank Watson, a gun collector from West Virginia. Watson was selling specially made .50 barrels manufactured by a gun maker in Michigan. One advantage of this barrel was that it was relatively cheap, $1,095 as opposed to $3,000 to $7,000 for one of the Barretts. The other great advantage was that you could buy one and thus own a .50 without having to undergo the pesky Brady check. What Watson was selling, technically, was an "upper," which had been machined so that it could receive the contours of a .50 cartridge. You purchased this upper, then fitted it onto a "lower," the pistol grip and trigger assembly for an AR-15, which fires a bullet not much bigger than a .22. To buy your AR-15, you would have already
passed a Brady test, but switching barrels is considered simply a minor adjustment, and needn't concern the U.S. Government. "It's extremely accurate," Frank told prospective customers, "and you don't have to go through any paperwork to purchase it."
Watson hails from north central West Virginia, where he takes his .50 out to hunt deer and woodchucks. "I like to sit up on a high hill," he said, "where you can see 1,000 to 1,200 yards, put up a shooting bench with a bipod and spotting scope, and when I see what I want, I pop it." He got his last deer at 900 yards, more than half a mile away, and he caught him head-on in the chest. The bullet he used was a special incendiary round with a primer inside that goes off in soft material, causing the casing to come apart in the body. "It was kind of an experimental thing," Watson said. "I just wanted to know what it would do to a deer. The one I shot, it went through the whole body from the chest and hit the right hind leg and almost totally destroyed it. But there was plenty still left to eat." I asked Watson why he went hunting with a .50 when a lesser caliber would do the job, and he said it was because of the adrenaline rush he got just from firing it. "It's something you do in contrast to what you do every other day of your existence." To drive home his point, he added: "I tell you what, let's make it easy. Want to shoot one?"
Watson's gun was big and black and weighed 37 pounds, as opposed to the 9 pounds of the average big-game rifle. It's the barrel on .50's that accounts for their added weight; the gun needs extra-thick steel to accommodate the large explosion. The rifle was also five and a half feet long, too unwieldy to carry horizontally like a normal gun; instead, you walked with it poking up in the air, which was how people could tell when a .50 was coming onto the line.
It had been raining, and the shooting mats were wet and muddy; tens of thousands of casings covered the ground. I lay down on the mat and set the gun up on its bipod, shoved a cartridge into the chamber and closed the bolt. The .50 is all steel and carbon fiber, and has none of the smooth, oiled walnut that I remembered from old hunting experiences. Watson hadn't put the scope on this one, so I looked down the length of the barrel and used a little metal spur as a sight. By now the target vehicles were all charred and black, and seemed to have more holes in them than metal. This hadn't stopped the shooters on the line, though; to my left and right they were enfilading like mad, as if they were about to be overrun by enemy hordes.
I shoved the butt of Watson's .50 tight into my shoulder and aimed at a brake drum, still intact. I took a deep breath and put some pressure on the trigger. BLAAM.
The noise, despite extra Styrofoam stuffed into my ear protectors, was painfully loud, and the recoil shoved me backward, even as I lay on the ground. The concussion from gases thrown out by the muzzle break at the end of the barrel enveloped me in a strange, unfriendly blast of air. I felt as if I had survived something, but I wasn't quite sure what. As for my target, I really couldn't say. The brake drum stood there, defiant. With all the other damage, I couldn't tell what, if anything, I'd hit. And besides, my eyes had been closed when I shot.
Now that I'd fired the .50, I wanted to find out for for myself just what it could do, penetration-wise. I'd met a man at the shoot named John Campbell, who runs a painting and decorating business in western Massachusetts. Campbell said he owned a single-shot .50 and offered to take me to a private spot, as long as I promised not to reveal its whereabouts and to provide the steel plate and ammunition.
The steel wasn't hard to come by. A friend who is a sculptor cut me a piece of three-quarter-inch from his welding stock, and at a scrap yard on 27th Street in Manhattan I bought a slab of hot-rolled steel, one and a half inches thick. The piece weighed 60 pounds, and the guys cutting it up scoffed at the idea that any rifle bullet could get through something that thick.
Acquiring the ammo proved just as easy. Campbell thought we should try both armor piercing rounds (A.P.) and armor piercing incendiary (A.P.I.), which are tipped with phosphorous that explodes on impact and burns at 3,000 degrees. The bullet will touch off most any fuel it encounters, and if shot into a tree it will set the tree on fire. I'd already bought a few A.P.I. rounds at the shoot (it turns out that it's a Class A misdemeanor to bring them into New York State), so I ordered 60 rounds of straight A.P. from an ammo company in Phoenix. The clerk on the telephone asked me if there was any law in New York that prohibited me from receiving the shipment. None that I knew about, I told her. She said they had Israeli A.P. stock and also American stuff, which was cleaner. I told her I'd take the American, she took my credit card number and 12 hours later it arrived via Federal Express.
In the political debate over the .50, the easy availability of armor-piercing ammo worries antigun activists as much as the guns. Last year, when Representative Waxman's subcommittee was looking into the situation, he asked the special investigations unit of the Government Accounting Office to make some bogus calls to ammunition dealers to see what they were willing to ship out, and to whom. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of one conversation with a dealer from Nebraska:
G.A.O.: O.K., let me ask you this now. This ammo will go through, say, metal, won't it?
Dealer: Uh, yeah, it'll go through metal. Yeah, it's incendiary. . . .
G.A.O.: O.K., do you think it will go through, like, an armored limousine?
Dealer: Oh, well, I think it would (laughing).
G.A.O.: How about, like, bulletproof glass?
Dealer: Oh, yeah, it'll go through that.
G.A.O.: O.K. Now, I live on the East Coast. Can you send that to me?
Dealer: Uh, yeah, we ship to the East Coast. Whereabouts do you live?
G.A.O.: O.K., I live in Virginia, but I'd like it shipped to Washington, D.C. . . .
Dealer: O.K.
When Campbell and I arrived at the secret range, it was drizzling slightly as we set the slabs of steel into a dirt bank (he'd also brought along a 15-inch-square piece of 2-inch hot-rolled steel that must have weighed 90 pounds), and we mounted his .50 on a shooting bench 100 yards away.
We fired the A.P. first, into each of the three targets, then walked up to examine the damage. The bullet had ripped through the sculptor's piece of three-quarter-inch steel as if it were cardboard. It did the same with the one-and-a-half-inch rolled steel, hitting it with such force that it blew the flanges of the hole back toward us, rather than out the other side. The two-inch plate, however, finally stopped it. The A.P. round blasted through to within a quarter-inch of the far side, where it caused a bump-out, but then flagged. The two-incher also stood up to the incendiary ammo, which made a hole with a dark burn mark, but couldn't get through.
"Well, it's an impressive caliber," Campbell announced solemnly at the end of the shoot. "But what we did here dispels one of the inaccuracies about the gun. People say it will go through a tank. It won't go through a tank. We know that now."
Campbell had etched the letters RKBA into his gun, for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, a right he believes is under assault. The .50 owners I met share his point of view. As Randy Dierks, a 41-year-old gunsmith near Reno, Nev., put it, "My wife and I meet people when we travel, and when they ask what we do, and we say we build guns, well, they sometimes get up and leave the table." Dierks went on about how people in metropolitan areas don't understand guns. "The soccer moms of Bethesda, Md.," he said, "they're the ones who are making decisions about my rights."
s we rolled out of our bags at 5 a.m. in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, it wasn't so hard to empathize with Dierks. The sand had drunk up the night's rain as if not a drop had fallen. We were surrounded by silence and a lunar beauty; urban pressures seemed impossibly far off. Aside from Dead-Eye Skip Talbot, the others here for the two-mile shoot were John Burtt, 55, a retired burglary detective from Riverside, Calif., and a lobbyist for the .50-Caliber Shooter's Association, and Roy Douglas, 68, a retired water resource expert from Palestine, Tex. Their guns were match-grade rifles, locked down in vises to prevent lateral movement but allowing them to move from front to back with the recoil. Match .50's weigh up to 125 pounds, owing to an even thicker-than-usual barrel. The heavier the barrel, the less it wavers when the bullet goes through it, and the straighter it shoots.
Actual Size: The .50's bullets are six inches long and have a range of four miles. Photograph by Dan Forbes for The New York Times.At 6 a.m., things happened just as Talbot predicted: first, the little breeze, then dead calm as the sun began peeking over the ridge. Burtt went up to the line first, and the rest of us prepared to watch through our spotting scopes. Once the gun goes off, the bullet takes exactly seven seconds to reach the target, which is when you look for sand kicking up or for fragments splintering off the rock face.
"I'm hot," said Burtt, signaling that he was within two or three seconds of firing. Then: BLAAM. Seven seconds later, on the dot, a little divot flew up about 70 yards to the lower left of the rock, at about 8 o'clock. His second shot was closer, his third low but directly on line. Burtt adjusted the elevation, then asked if I wanted to give his gun a try.
Through the 17-power scope I could see the lava rock wavering slightly in the oncoming desert heat. I cranked up the dot so it settled about two-thirds up the rock. "I'm hot," I announced, and then fired. Again that tremendous report, and a huge flame shot out horizontally from the gas break. I began counting . . . thousand six, thousand seven, my eye to the scope. There -- a little puff on the rock face itself. Score! Cheers went up from the guys watching through their spotting scopes. Even though they'd set me up for it, I felt a surge of triumph at actually hitting the thing. I mean, two miles!
Whatever fun they have in the desert, the .50-cal crowd feels a little beleaguered when they return to civilization. As a lobbyist for the .50-Cal Association, Burtt travels to Washington once a month to fight efforts to restrict access to the gun. Back in California, however, Burtt sometimes finds himself on the defensive. At a lunch following the desert shoot, he let a certain plaintiveness seep into his standard rap about gun owners' rights. "We are responsible, intelligent, educated people, and what we are doing is absolutely harmless," he said. "We aren't hurting anyone. We have a sport we enjoy, and all we are trying to do is enjoy our sport and to be left alone."
The bullet ripped through the steel with such force that it blew the flanges back toward us, not out the other side.
Skip Talbot, on the other hand, is more calamity-ready, and he confronts the gun-control issue, and everything else, with the attitude of Be Prepared. In his attache case, along with insulin paraphernalia for his diabetes, he keeps copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and an N.R.A. handbook on how to win arguments concerning the Second Amendment. Back in Fallon, he and his wife live in a neatly furnished bungalow that sits under cottonwoods on a pretty acre of lawn. In case of an emergency -- anything from a temporary blackout to a nuclear attack by Islamic extremists -- he's ready, with a spare 5,000-kilowatt generator and eight months' worth of food and water stored underground.
The crisis Talbot envisions most vividly involves the U.S. government, which he regards as an unfriendly foreign power. He imagines a time when the president, for any number of reasons, declares martial law and suspends all forms of civil rights. "If that happens," he says, "it's the Federal Emergency Management Administration that runs it all. Go back through and look at what they can really do, what's in the fine print. If FEMA comes in, they can split your family up and take all your food and your cars and put you to work anywhere they want to."
Whatever they do, they should stay clear of Talbot's gun shed. He has a dozen .50's locked up in metal cabinets, along with dozens of rifles, shotguns and pistols. Except for the .50's, he keeps everything loaded. "The only time you get hurt is with an 'unloaded' gun," he said. "So if all my guns are loaded, I'll never treat one like it isn't. The other reason is, if I ever find anyone in my shop, I'm going to do my best to kill him, because I'll know that everything he's got is loaded."
Despite what he says, it's hard to spend time with Talbot and imagine him hurting anyone. And standing there in his gun shed, I found myself thinking that sniping at rocks in the desert or decimating cars in Maine is a pretty harmless form of recreation, nothing other than a highly organized and thoroughly regimented hobby. But then I considered all the firepower under his roof, enough to arm a small band of rebels with some very destructive weaponry. And no matter how soccer mom-ish it might seem, I think I'd just as soon the F.B.I. or the Secret Service knew a little more than they know today about who it is exactly who has possession of all this stuff.
Table of Contents
November 26, 2000
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001126mag-rifle.html
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