Lawless

Ive walked with plenty of ammo in my day in different terrain. Ammo carrying was always an issue. When you thought you had enough you were always calling for more and when you didnt get contact it was easy to think it was too much. The heavier weapons were not always carried either. A SAW is in the same caliber as our rifles and it takes just as many rounds to kill someone. Like I said earlier I love the M16 and its variants. Just that the caliber seems more like a compromise when applied to later barrel design. Im merely trying to pick the collective mind of people I know of whoms opinion I can respect. I can think of a few situations where it would have really eased my mind to see the bad guy dead on the ground and not stumbling around a corner.

EDIT Almost forgot to mention the 74. The 5.45 is a deadly round. The Afgans refer to it as the poison bullet if I remember correctly. It is designed to and does exactly what the M16 did with the slower twist rate. It accomplishes this by having a long light round with weight mainly in the back of the bullet. In testing it has been shown to start to tumble within 1.5 inches after impact. This creates a massive wound channel that causes serious CNS damage. That said the M16 now relies on fragmentation of the round rather than tumbling which relies on velocity which relies on barrel length and the list goes on. For comparison a krink in 5.45 is just as deadly at 100 meters and in as its full size parents. If you had an M16 with a barrel length of 8.5 inches you would be lucky to get fragmentation across a big room. That seriously hurts the lethality of the round. Im not trying to be arguementative, just stating fact. Its apples and oranges with the two rounds because of the way it accomplishes its job is totally different than our M16.