Omar Mateen used a Sig Sauer AR-15 rifle, and also a Glock handgun, in his murder of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday, according to the FBI. He shot more than 100 people, including survivors, before he was gunned down by police. UPDATE: After this story was published, officials specified that the guns used in the Orlando shooting were a Sig Sauer MCX assault-style rifle, which uses standard AR-15 magazines and ammunition, and a Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol. The AR-15, which has been used by the U.S. military in every war since Vietnam, has also served as a murder weapon in some of the most horrific mass shootings. AR-15s were used to kill and maim crowds of innocent people at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut; a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; and a workplace party in San Bernardino, California. It wasn't supposed to be this way, of course. The AR-15 was developed by Eugene Stoner, a former Marine, for a California startup in the 1950s called ArmaLite.
AR stands for Armalite, not assault rifle. Armalite, which has been bought and sold by various gun companies over the decades, is still producing AR-15s to this day. The Nazis invented the assault rifle with a weapon called the sturmgewehr, and Soviet engineer Mikhail Kalashnikov followed that up with the AK-47, now the most widely used assault rifle in the world. The burly AK, with its 30-round magazines, is what the U.S. military was competing with in the Cold War. Stoner's AR-15 was America's answer to the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. It was tweaked into the M-16, a lightweight rifle with a plastic stock and a funky-looking handle on the top, that shot relatively low caliber bullets (.223.) No one had ever seen anything like it. Guns weren't supposed to look like that. In his book "The Gun," New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers calls the M-16 "synthetically futuristic." Chivers continues: "To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking. Critics saw it as an ugly little toy."
The M-16 was used by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. It was initially notorious for jamming during combat, but it has evolved over the years into a modern firearm favored by soldiers and civilians. AR-15-style rifles are made by many companies and come in many shapes and sizes. U.S. soldiers and Marines source many of their AR-15s from Colt, which produces the M4, a short, squat version of its M-16 ancestor. Smith & Wesson (SWHC) is also a prominent manufacturer, with its M&P (military & police) line of AR-15s. Daniel Defense also supplies its own style of AR-inspired rifles to the military and law enforcement. Makers of AR-style guns also include Sturm Ruger (RGR), Remington, Bushmaster, Century Arms, Stag Arms, and many others. Civilians like AR-15s not only because they're legal in many states, but because they pack serious firepower and they're user friendly. They have limited recoil, which helps with accuracy. Gun enthusiasts, who often shoot for sport at ranges, use the term "modular" when describing ARs because they can be easily modified with a plethora of add-ons including sights, silencers, handles, bipods, sling mounts, lights, bayonet lugs and Lego-like rails to attach even more add-ons.
More importantly, AR-15s can use high-capacity magazines, defined as any magazine that contains more than 10 rounds. They're illegal in New York, Connecticut and several other states, but they're legal in most. High capacity banana-shaped magazines typically contain 30 rounds, putting them on par with AK-47s. The Florida magazine company TorkMag makes them even bigger, containing 35 or 50 rounds. Drum-shaped magazines can contain 100 rounds, like the weapon used by James Holmes, who shot 82 people at a movie theater in Colorado in 2012, killing 12 of them. Unfortunately, the compact, easy-to-use lethality of the AR-15 has made it the weapon of choice in mass shootings.Two Enthusiasts Podcast – Episode 14 – Collectibles Apologies for the long delay on Episode 14 of the Two Enthusiasts Podcast, we don’t have a good excuse for the delay, so we won’t bore you with a bad one. To try and make it up to you though, we have a plethora of shows that we have recorded, which we will be releasing in a flurry over the next couple of weeks.
So we hope you enjoy Episode 14, it’s all about collecting motorcycles, motorcycles as investments, and what two-wheeled machines Quentin and I would like to see in our dream garages today, and in the future.As always, you can listen to the show via the embedded SoundCloud player, after the jump, or you can find the show on iTunes (please leave a review) or this RSS feed. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well. How About Some Halo Bike Spec-Sheet Racing? With the Honda RC213V-S debuting at Catalunya last week, much has already been said about Big Red’s road-going GP bike…especially in terms of how it compares to other halo bike motorcycles that have been 0r currently are on the market.So, in the interest of exploring solely the most basic attributes from a motorcycle’s technical specification sheet, we have compiled a spreadsheet to see how the Honda RC213V-S stacks up against its most analogous street bikes.As such, we have compiled the horsepower, dry weight, and cost of the the Ducati Desmosedici RR, Ducati 1199 Superleggera, Kawasaki Ninja H2R, MV Agusta F4 RC, EBR 1190RS, and Yamaha YZF-R1 motorcycles — you can see the easy-to-read chart (after the jump), and make your own comparisons to the RC213V-S.
“Black Polygon” Desmosedici RR by Death Spray Custom The latest and greatest from Bologna might be the Ducati 1199 Superleggera, but our heartstrings still find themselves tugged hardest by the Ducati Desmosedici RR.Based off Ducati’s MotoGP racing machine, there is just a certain street-worthy craziness that comes from the Desmosedici RR, which the production-based Superleggera lacks. They’re both fine machines, to be certain, but that’s just where we find ourselves in the hyperbike category.Taking that crazy to a whole new level is this “Black Polygon” Desmosedici RR by Death Spray Custom. A simple, yet effective departure from the Rosso Corsa found on the original D16, the desaturated and angular work by DSC is a stark contrast to what came out of Borgo Panigale. XXX: Ducati Desmosedici RR Before Honda started working on its road-going version of its V4 MotoGP race bike, there was the Ducati Desmosedici RR. A fairly close approximation to its namesake, 1,500 units of the Desmosedici RR were built by the Bologna Brand, with the coup de grâce being the hyperbike’s $72,000 price tag.
Despite its racing pedigree, with a MotoGP World Championship at the hands of Casey Stoner too boot, sales for the Ducati Desmosedici RR were surprisingly sluggish. You can even find a few remaining models still on the showroom floors of some select Ducati dealerships.Maybe it was the price tag, maybe it was the public’s less-than-adoring relationship with the new MotoGP Champion, or maybe it was the fact that the production-based Ducati Superbike 1098R was said to be faster than the RR around certain tracks (Motorcyclist & MCN). Maybe it was a function of all the above.However, in our eyes, the Ducati Desmosedici RR remains one of the most drool-worthy sport bikes produced in the past decade — after all, it really is as close as you’re going to get to a road-going GP machine…besides the Aprilia RSV4 Factory APRC.After Ducati completed its production run of the Ducati Desmosedici RR, many began to speculate as to the company’s encore uber-exclusive model. Despite Ducati’s internal belief that the Desmosedici RR was a relative failure as a model (it would be safe to say that Ducati didn’t expect sales of the RR to take nearly as long as they did), as far as halo products go, the Desmosedici RR ticks all the right boxes, and begs for a next-generation.
In many ways, the Ducati 1199 Panigale is the company’s follow-up to the Desmo, and interestingly enough, the Panigale is now also beginning to struggle with sales, admittedly not to the same extent as the RR.Looking at the photos after the jump, you can see a lot of the Panigale in the Desmosedici, which is of course due to the Ducati 1199 Panigale’s MotoGP-inspired “frameless” chassis design that uses the motor as the basis for the motorcycle’s structure.Building the headstock/airbox off the forward-facing cylinder head, and the tail/rear-subframe off the rearward cylinder head on the Panigale, we see the same design elements in the Ducati Desmosedici RR, except maybe one or two generations behind the current superbike (Ducati went from a steel trellis design, to a carbon design, to an aluminum design, and now rests on a aluminum perimeter-frame design).Allowing Ducati to make a ridiculously light motorcycle, the design philosophy holds some serious strong potential. We don’t imagine the thought process on this chassis is over just quite yet, regardless of what is occurring in MotoGP right now, though Ducati Corse certainly has its work cutout for itself in that arena.
Is there a point to all this? Maybe not, beyond something to mull over on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Daydreaming fodder is after the jump. Roland Sands Desmo Tracker Begins to Take Form We’ve had our fair share of controversial articles here on Asphalt & Rubber, with some posts dealing with hot-button topics, while others were designed to stir the pot a bit. Usually though we know what sort of trouble we’re getting ourselves into, even before the first comment is left by a reader, but no article caught us by surprise more than our initial coverage of Roland Sands’s latest custom project: the RSD Desmo Tracker. A flat track bike with a Desmosedici RR heart, there’s something about taking the MotoGP replica and turning it into a steel-shoe racer that elicits a very visceral response from Ducatisti and flat trackers alike.Maybe it’s because those two parts of the motorcycle world are just that far apart — one is reserved for dentists having a mid-life crisis, and the other for back-woods hillbillies that can only turn left.
Maybe it’s because people think that if you own a $40,000 Desmosedici RR, the last thing you should be doing with the machine is making it something else. There’s no doubt that Desmo is the sort of thing little boys put posters of on their bedroom wall, so does tampering with Bologna’s GP opus change that childhood fantasy?We could delve into this topic further, but I doubt we’d get very far in the conversation. I will say this though, just like you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a bike by its build progress. That being said, this post is one of those articles that we see trouble brewing a mile away. A friendly reminder: the comments section is below, near the bottom of the page. Ducati Desmodoctor by Oberdan Bezzi We haven’t had a sketch by Oberdan Bezzi on the site in a while, but the Italian designer has inked this Ducati concept that we thought would help everyone get through the work week. Coining the name “Desmodoctor” it should be clear to whom Obiboi is paying homage to with this design, as Bezzi imagines what sort of “gift” the Bologna company would give Rossi to play around with when he’s not racing the Ducati Desmosedici GP11 or GP12.
Roland Sands Design Ducati Desmo Tracker Those boys in Southern California are at it again, as Roland Sands Design has taken on building a customer’s Ducati Desmosedici RR into a custom street tracker. According to RSD the lucky owner is Justyn Amstutz, and this zero miles Desmosedici RR is one of three in his stable. With 989cc 200+ hp V4 motor that revs to 16,000 rpm, RSD hopes to take Ducati’s beast of a street bike, and turn it into something that requires a steel boot to ride. The $40 Desmosedici UPDATE: All the tickets to the raffle are now sold out.Ducati’s Desmosedici RR is about as close to a MotoGP race bike as you can get on the street. But with a $72,500 price tag, the Desmo replica is a bit out of the price range for most mortals, so what if we told you could get one for $40? That’s what’s going on right now with the Los Feliz Charter School raffle, sponsored by ProItalia. There’s only a hundred or so of these $40 tickets left, so if you want a chance of snagging a Desmosedici on the cheap, you better act fast.