On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, James Swayze wrote:
> Zero Powers wrote:
> > Right now only the military and the police are allowed to have special
> > weapons like fully automatic weapons. But if war were to break out between
> > the police/national guard against the millions of legally armed folks in the
> > US with their hunting rifles and pistols, my money would be on the poorly
> > armed masses.
> >
> Well normally I would too but in this case the poorly armed masses have no
> access to AWACS and it's brothers or the spy sat net or remote pilotless recon.
> There may be a few thousand night vision equipped survivalists but not
> your average Joe.
These things are more useless than you might imagine when you consider 1)
there is no easy way to discern friend from foe, since it is a domestic
operation and the "enemy" is not composed of obvious military columns, and
2) it would take a lot of resources to effectively monitor even a small
region of the land that makes up the U.S.; many U.S. states are the size
of European countries.
Also, if I had to guess a number based on various correlations and my own
experience, I would estimate that there are around 250,000 private citizens
in the U.S. whose equipment and training is as good or better than your
average U.S. Infantry soldier today. Realize also that most people in the
military are REMFs (i.e. administrative and support personnel) and have
very marginal combat capability.
Additionally, police units would get eaten alive in any real military
action and are really only useful for herding mostly-unarmed civilians.
Interestingly, there have been a couple cases in recent U.S. history where
civilian police units have engaged military units (too off-topic to go
into here) and were quickly decimated.
> Ammunition would be in short supply...surely to be targeted first by
> ugly big brother.
Ammunition would not run out unless there was a prolonged full-scale
shooting war, and even then it is unlikely to be an issue. Realize that
U.S. shooters purchase *billions* of rounds of ammunition every year. Not
only that, but most gun owners I know have hundreds or thousands of rounds
available at any given time.
If you take a lesson from the Warsaw ghetto uprising, it takes very few
bullets to "upgrade" your weapons to whatever your oppressor is using.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:05:55 MDT