Machine Gun News: The Magazine for Full-Auto Enthusiasts; Volume 6, No. 12, May 1993

The format is approximately 8.25 inches by 11 inches. 60 pages, including covers. Illustrated covers. Illustrations. Tabular Data. Among the topics covered are: The Waco Standoff by Carlton Stowers; Development of the First Assault Rifle Sturmgewehr 44 by Al Paulson; In the Sights of a Weapon Genius by Richard Lewis; The C&S Metall-Werkes, MP5 72-Round Drum by Chris Choat; The AK 47 "Rate Reducer" by Ken Carter; The Second Annual Utah Subgun Shoot by Steve Parker; and The Care and Feeding of Suppressors by Mark White. The Waco standoff, also known as the Waco massacre, was the siege by federal government and state law enforcement officials of a compound belonging to the religious cult known as the Branch Davidians, between February 28 and April 19, 1993. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) obtained a search warrant for the compound and arrest warrants for Koresh and several of the group's members. Carlton Stowers was associated with Amarillo Daily News,1966-69, Lubbock Avalanche Journal, 1970-73; freelance writer, 1974-76; Dallas Morning News, sportswriter and columnist, 1976-81; writer and associate producer of, weekly series "Countdown to 84," USA Cable network, 1984; staff writer for Dallas Observer, 2000. AWARDS, HONORS: Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime Book, Mystery Writers of America, 1986, for Careless Whispers, and 1999, for To the Last Breath; Oppie Award for Reporting, Southwestern Booksellers, 1986, for Careless Whispers; Violent Crown Book Award, nonfiction category, and Writers' League of Texas, 2002. A machine gun (MG) is a fully automatic and rifled firearm designed for sustained direct fire. Automatic firearms of 0.79 inches caliber or more are classified as autocannons rather than machine guns. As a class of military kinetic projectile weapons, machine guns are designed to be mainly used as infantry support weapons and generally used when attached to a bipod or tripod, a fixed mount or a heavy weapons platform for stability against recoil. Many machine guns also use belt feeding and open bolt operation, features not normally found on other infantry firearms. Machine guns can be further categorized as light machine guns, medium machine guns, heavy machine guns, general-purpose machine guns, and squad automatic weapons. Unlike semi-automatic firearms, which require one trigger pull per round fired, a machine gun is designed to continue firing for as long as the trigger is held down. Nowadays, the term is restricted to relatively heavy crew-served weapons, able to provide continuous or frequent bursts of automatic fire for as long as ammunition feeding is replete. Machine guns are used against infantry, low-flying aircraft, small boats and lightly/unarmored land vehicles, and can provide suppressive fire (either directly or indirectly) or enforce area denial over a sector of land with grazing fire. They are commonly mounted on fast attack vehicles such as technicals to provide heavy mobile firepower, armored vehicles such as tanks for engaging targets too small to justify the use of the primary weaponry or too fast to effectively engage with it, and on aircraft as defensive armament or for strafing ground targets, though on fighter aircraft true machine guns have mostly been supplanted by large-caliber rotary guns. Some machine guns have in practice sustained fire almost continuously for hours; other automatic weapons overheat after less than a minute of use. Because they become very hot, the great majority of designs fire from an open bolt, to permit air cooling from the breech between bursts. They also usually have either a barrel cooling system, slow-heating heavyweight barrel, or removable barrels which allow a hot barrel to be replaced. Although subdivided into "light", "medium", "heavy" or "general-purpose", even the lightest machine guns tend to be substantially larger and heavier than standard infantry arms. Medium and heavy machine guns are either mounted on a tripod or on a vehi.…