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Con't
To protect them against suburban sprawl many remaining open spaces have been made state or national parks but this often has the unintended consequence of closing these areas off to plinkers.
As areas one can legally plink become harder and harder to find, the cost of plinking increases due to travel time. Lack of suitable plinking venues in many parts of the United States has been a chief reason for the overwhelmingly rural character of plinkers in general.
Thus, the future of plinking is dependent upon a number of factors which are difficult to predict.
One possible outcome would be for plinking with firearms to largely disappear but for plinking with air rifles to make up for this, at least in rural areas. This would most likely occur if both the trend towards plinker habitat loss and the trend against more restrictive gun control laws were to continue.
Another scenario also assmumes that that plinker habitat reduction will not significantly abate but that public and private gun ranges will realize the large potential market in displaced plinkers. If this happens, one might seem some partial revival of plinking in a more rigid and structure context.
Adding a sound suppressor to a firearm greatly enhances its potential plinking use, especially when one is firing subsonic ammunition.
Examples of Plinking in the Media
R.Lee Ermey has popularized plinking on his History Channel television show "Mail Call" by using a variety of firearms and other weapons on his mortal "enemy" the watermelon. At times Ermey has used watermelon targets to gauge the relative stopping power of two different weapons. For instance, he compared the M-14 to the M-16. While some might not call such demonstrations, "plinking" Ermey does nothing to hide the pleasure he derives from such carnage and the use of reactive targets to display a weapon's power is certainly in the tradition of plinking.
Tank Plinking during the Gulf War
During the Gulf War, the destruction and high attrition rate of Iraq's armoured divisions, due to coalition air attack prior to the land campaign, gained the term tank plinking among coalition air forces. This was as a result of the abundance of armoured targets and the extremely effective use of strike aircraft, such as the F-15E Strike Eagle, F-16 and the A-10 Thunderbolt, via very high sortie rates and utilizing highly accurate precision-guided munitions such as the AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missile. Though the F-15, F-16, and F-14 all sortied in the Gulf War, the A-10 Thunderbolt II received the vast majority of tank kills, firing more than 90% of the Mavericks expended in the campaign, besides its very effective GAU-8/A Avenger.
During the latter parts of the campaign, aircrews learned to carry out missions early in the morning. With the sand still cool after night, the heat from a tank's engine made them stand out on the infra-red imaging in the cockpit. This allowed aircrew to identify targets easily, and precision munitions were afforded an even-easier kill.
The air campaign was so effective that at the height of the air assault, Iraq's armoured forces were being reduced by over 200 tanks and AFV's per day. Apart from the materiel destruction, it also destroyed the morale of Iraqi tank crews, and this was borne out during the first armoured encounters by coalition ground forces, where it was found that Iraqi tanks rarely got off the first shot. As it turned out, the crews were terrified of staying in their tanks, which had been transformed into death traps by the air assault, and as a result, the crews were camping some distance from their tanks.
As a ex-cop ---------I still plink
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