The Scenario
So there I was on facebook, was looking at the divisive gun debate after drinking some Chivas. Chivas shown below. And I got into speaking with a random person about the firing rate of an AR-15 with a bump stock. Can you realistically fire an AR-15 at 700rpm? hrmmm.... well let's see.
What is a Bump Stock.
Well it's an addon to an AR-15 that will let you increase your rate of fire. From some of the literature online I've seen that they claim you can shoot some 14 rounds a second with one. Here's a video of an AR being fired with a bump stock.
Actual rate of fire.
So in the conversation we got into some numbers. Choosing the largest magazine for an AR-15 which is 150 rounds.
We had a fire rate of 14 rounds per second. That gave us a time of 11 seconds to empty the clip. And we then agreed upon a 4 second reload time.
- 15 seconds to fire 150 rounds
- 30 seconds to fire 300 rounds
- 45 seconds to fire 450 rounds
- 60 seconds to fire 600 rounds
This was assuming that everything went perfectly. Perfect use of the bump stock, perfect reload. And of course the gas tube not exploding or barrel melting on you.
Conclusion
My initial thoughts on the matter were that a high rate of fire with the AR-15 wasn't possible. However after the discussion I came to find that it certainly was. 600 rounds a minute with a large capacity magazine is theoretically possible. But you do run in to limitations with the weapon itself because of heat generated. So the actual rate of fire would still be somewhat lower. But even if you could only do 400 rounds per minute in practice. That's still a lot of rounds to be moving through what is supposed to be a semi automatic weapon.
Thank you for reading this and I look forward to comments below.