>> "...a matte-black assault rifle — a new Colt M16 .22LR... roadside assault-rifle sales ...you could walk away from Eduardo's car with the kind of high-powered weapon used by Marines in Afghanistan.<<ROTFLMAO! Maybe "Nancy-boy" Marines in Afghanistan use a gun like this, but its most-common use in that theater is probably shooting rats.
The Colt M16 .22LR chambers a standard .22LR cartridge that produces a muzzle velocity of about 1200fps with a 40-grain bullet. At 100 yards, it's rated at about 90 foot-pounds of force.A Colt M-16 (or its more common variant, the M-4) fires a .223 caliber 55-grain bullet at 3240 fps and is rated at 1000+ foot-pounds at 100 yards. The M-16 packs about 7 times the wallop at 100 yards that the M-16 .22LR does at the muzzle. In effect, the M-16 .22LR is the next step up from a high-end pellet gun (7 grain pellet, 1000fps). There are less powerful cartridges - but they are few.
Beyond that, the .223 Remington cartridge used in M-16M-4 is at the low-end of "high-powered" weapons. The military ball .30-06 round, first used over 100 years ago in the 1903 Springfield, is a 165 grain bullet traveling at 2800fps with a 100-yard force level of 2426 foot-pounds - more than twice the 'punch' of the M-16 and almost 27 times as much as your "high-powered" weapon example.Tim, I think you've just established a new low for the definition of "high-powered weapon". Can slingshots and BB guns be far behind?
