Several terrorists, from the perpetrator of the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas to those involved in other horrors in Texas and Florida, have chosen an AR-15 or similar rifle as their primary weapon of destruction. According to tactical experts in law enforcement and the military (Sharps, 2024), the terrorist use of these types of weapons, essentially civilian semiautomatic versions of the M-16, has frequently made little sense; the relatively small calibers, ballistic characteristics, and even the length of this type of weapon have been inappropriate to several terrorist situations. For many purposes, many other weapons would have been more appropriate for the homicidal purposes of the given terrorists.
Why is this frequently less-than-optimal weapon, similar at least in appearance to the fully automatic military M-16, such a favorite?
The answer may be entirely psychological.
Albert Bandura (1977), in his studies of social learning theory, famously demonstrated that human beings tend to imitate and that we especially imitate those who are perceived as powerful and rewarded for their actions; and for our purposes here, nobody was more powerful than Clint Eastwood in his role in the well-known, if somewhat superannuated, Dirty Harry movies.
As those movies were produced, an interesting phenomenon occurred in the United States. At the beginning of that........