I have shot an AR15. At a gun range. I have never owned one, however.
So you have never owned any of these guns; you have never carried any of these guns as part of your job duties; you have never been trained to use these guns in any kind of formal or informal setting; you have never used these guns for hunting or recreation, other than shooting an AR15 at a range one time; you have never practiced any kind of tactical drills using these guns; an up until recently you were apparently not aware of the differences between a nineteenth century .22 caliber cartridge like the 22 Short, 22 Long, 22 Long Rifle, and a more modern .223 Remington cartridge. Yes, I followed up on Elixir's comment and reviewed your posting history on the subject. Forgive me for being so blunt, but you know nothing about these guns, or firearms in general. I don't know where you are getting your information, perhaps playing Call of Duty or similar games in mommy's basement, and casually dropping terms like "bump stock" and and "Glock switch" to appear to speak with authority on the subject, authority you do not possess. You appear to believe that your experience playing Call of Duty supersedes the opinions of a person who has extensive experience hunting with, and later training with, carrying and fighting with these military rifles. Your assertion that the deletion of a full-auto sear from civilian AR15 style rifles makes it a completely different weapon is ridiculous. It is difficult to control the M16 in full-auto, you run out of ammo very quickly when using the gun this way, you might only be carrying 3 or 4 extra magazines, and you don't have the luxury of reloading the magazines while engaged in combat. For full auto we carried M60 machine guns, with everyone carrying extra belts to feed the beasts. And lots of grenades, which were far more effective at taking out fortified enemy positions and stopping assaults than our rifles.
The M16A1 is a deadly weapon, just as the modern derivations of the AR15 platform based on the M14 and M16 platforms are. The M16 can do enormous damage to soft human bodies and can penetrate body armor and even light skinned APC armor using the steel tip/core bullets we used. Much more so than the 45 auto cartridges in our 1911A sidearm. The modern Ar15 platform rifles and carbines available to the general public are just as devastatingly lethal, and better designed to the task of killing humans than the rifles we carried (our M16A1 rifles were prone to misfeeds caused by a poorly designed extractor).
I checked out my daughter's Mini 14 over the weekend. Its a nice gun, and feels like a scaled down M1 or M14 in my hands (I qualified with the M14 at Parris Island in 1967 and was issued my first M16 about a year later in Okinawa). The Ruger can be just as devastating in the hands of a professional operator, but it is no AR15. Which is why you don't see law enforcement carrying Mini 14s or bolt action rifles designed for hunting, they carry AR15s. According to my daughter who shoots AR15 rifles in competition - "you buy a Mini 14 to go plinking two or three times a year, you buy an AR15 if you are a professional operator and carry it every day". My daughter is a better shooter than the NCOs who trained us at the rifle range in the Corps, and her opinion carries a lot of weight with me. The Mini 14 is a very different gun from the M16/AR15 and is designed for a completely different purpose.
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