NEW GUN FIRES 600,000 ROUNDS PER MINUTE

Plain ol’ hand guns, fir­ing one bul­let at a time, can be plenty deadly. So imag­ine how dan­ger­ous a new gun capa­ble of fir­ing up to 600,000 rounds per minute could be. The Daily Standard looks at this fear­some new weapon, “Metal Storm.“
The gun would be more than just a way to mow down enemy troops, the Standard says. Metal Storm’s hail of bul­lets could one day replace land­mines as a defen­sive mea­sure. Or the gun could be placed on unmanned com­bat vehi­cles, for ultra-​​precise robotic strikes. Yikes.
THERE’S MORE: “Oh, sure, (Metal Storm) is a neato idea. But I’m hard pressed to find a use for the sys­tem except as a curi­ousity,” says James Rummel.
“Those pesky Australians have been try­ing to mar­ket their sys­tem for some time now,” he writes. “The main prob­lem with the sys­tem is that it increases the main­te­nance load, expense and com­plex­ity over con­ven­tional weapon sys­tems with­out offer­ing any sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage. Sure, they put out a lot of lead in a short period of time, but there’s not many jobs that need that kind of bliz­zard that can’t be done with the guns that we already have.”

July 17th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.