Moral Wars

Gun barrels do get hot when you fire them repeatedly. It can affect your accuracy so, when sighting in your gun, it's a good idea to wait a few minutes between shots. Hunting shots are almost always taken with a cold barrel, so you want your zero to be as close as possible to that. Most modern military rifles and machine guns have a heat guard over the barrel. That's the part that is full of holes like Swiss cheese. It's supposed to help disperse the heat, and also to protect you from burning your hand if you accidently touch the barrel when it's hot. I suppose it would be possible to damage the gun by firing it too fast for too long a time, but I've not heard of that commonly happening. Machine gunners are trained to fire three to five round bursts because that's the rate at which a reasonable amount of accuracy can be maintained. Every round you fire makes the muzzle jump a bit and, if you just held the trigger back, the gun would soon be pointing straight up into the air.

In a manner of speaking, all wars are moral wars. Each side believes that they are morally superior to the other side, and that it's their mission to teach them a lesson for their own good. Of course wars are also fought for economic reasons, but there is almost always a moral or ideological spin that is put on them. Even in ancient times, the first thing the winners did, right after the looting and pillaging, was topple the losers' gods off their pedestals and install their own gods in their places. There are a few exceptions that come to mind. Cyrus the Great of Persia was notoriously tolerant of the religions and cultures of the people he conquered, even to the point of encouraging and subsidizing the rebuilding of Israel's temple after the war. Ancient India was over run a number of times, but they always managed somehow to assimilate the conquerors' religions into their own. The Roman's were pretty reasonable about things like that until they adopted Christianity but, after Rome went down, it was back to business as usual.

The rehabilitation of Japan and Germany after World war II was a great success story, which makes we wonder why our guys haven't done anything like that since. Of course, first you have to win the war before you can impose your culture on your former enemies. We did win in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a largely ineffective effort was made to teach them about democracy. We couldn't rightly overthrow their religion, but we could have insisted that they put freedom of religion and women's rights in their constitutions, which would have at least started them on the path to becoming like us when they grew up. MacArthur did something like that in Japan. It was a hard sell at first, but eventually the Japanese came around because they knew it was the only way they were going to get our occupation forces out of their country. Maybe, for this to work, you first have to drop a couple of atomic bombs on them, just to get their attention.