Hollow-point? I'd be interested in a cite there--an AR15 has enough power to take unarmored humans, and 5.56mm is more/less equivalent to .223cal, a fairly typical USian hunting-rifle cartridge last time I checked.
I'm not saying .223 isn't appropriate for hunting. There is a wide range of game that can be taken with a wide array of suitable cartridges. Militaries are more concerned with incapacitating a target, humanely or inhumanely.
A hunter is concerned with minimizing pain to his prey, thus needs more energetic and deforming cartridges to ensure that a less than perfect shot is still significantly wounding.
A soldier just needs his target to go down.
Here are some articles on the subject:
http://www.chuckhawks.com/bad_deer_cartridges.htmhttp://www.nrahuntersrights.org/Article.aspx?id=6148http://www.americanhunter.org/blogs/223-for-deer-hunting/The first article claims that .223 is a poor deer cartridge.
The second that it is acceptable as one.
The third is very supportive.
It's a game of margins, as the first article says. Sure, you can take a deer with anything, but what would you call an acceptable margin of error for an acceptable level of precision in shot placement? A wounded deer is the hunter's responsibility.
And you're right, hollowpoints, particularly deeply penetrating ones that expand plenty, give the hunter a huge edge over the soldier.
Chiefly because you'll go to the pawnshop anyway to sell stuff, buy ammo/spraypaint/guitars, etc. As the thread-title may indicate, I was hoping to make the Department Store someplace the LCS would actually visit, and thought that putting the M249 in the same place one might buy large consumer goods such as, say, a washing machine or riding mower helped demonstrate the practical non-sense of C+ Gun Control.
In the 70's, department stores would carry offbranded versions of popular firearms very cheaply. Not the ultratactical stuff, but the tamer things.
In my game, I have modded it such that arms dealers carry pretty much everything at a blanket 1.5x price hike, the pawn shop sells every gun in the game, and the Department store carries the guns for discount prices.