James Rogers wrote:
>
> 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.
And your average infantryman is not equipped with night vision
technology. These are reserved for special forces units, tanks,
choppers, and some limited regular forces that act in support of specwar
operations.
>
> 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.
And many gun owners are into reloading, and have extensive tools for
this 'hobby'.
it isn't difficult to set up a small gun powder plant, given emergency
conditions. Black powder is easy, and nitro-cellulose is not much
tougher to make. Making mercury fulminate is a bit tougher, and getting
the chemicals can be made difficult, but most of the difficulty is in
the risks of manufacture when you are inexperienced.
Getting used brass is easy. I know plenty of people who have bins of
hundreds of thousands of spent rounds. Casting bullets, lead ball or
copper jacketed, is also relatively easy (of course with toxic risks
that need to be planned for).
>
> 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.
Excellent point, and one that isn't recognised by those that disagree.
AFAIK, the ghetto uprising began with a small group, where one man
volunteered to get guns for others. He had been given a small revolver.
Most every other gun used in the uprising was captured from Nazi guards
that were caught unawares.
Mike Lorrey
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:05:55 MDT