US gun ownership vs WW2 reality
- Thread starter nik2016
- Start date
Yeah, but (unfortunately IMO) those guns aren't exactly evenly distributed... many people in the US either have no guns, or, like me, have one gun, while there are nutbags who build up massive personal arsenals (and a few serious collectors who have no intention of participating in an armed rebellion...)
After the Franco-Prussian war, there was a similar fear among the Germans that there was a Franc-tireur behind every blade of grass and lurking behind every open attic dormer... in WWI didn't stop them from occupying nearly all of Belgium and a huge swath of France - but it did tend to make the reprisals that much worse...
It would be interesting to see numbers here.
I wish my grandfather had kept records on his Home Guard service - he was a farmer/reserved occupation in NZ during WW2 (well they both were) but he took the job of Armourer for the local forces and in 1940 at least, organised a collection of weapons in the county to arm the units. This was stored at our family farm house. Then a year or so later he gave them all back as the government was able to arm them properly.
I wish my grandfather had kept records on his Home Guard service - he was a farmer/reserved occupation in NZ during WW2 (well they both were) but he took the job of Armourer for the local forces and in 1940 at least, organised a collection of weapons in the county to arm the units. This was stored at our family farm house. Then a year or so later he gave them all back as the government was able to arm them properly.
More the New York Militia saying
'.Nope. this is really out of our jurisdiction. good luck,Federal Army, we won't be part of your invasion of Canada'
No. You're wrong. Watch it again. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?...180F78A34ED50C0B382A180&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
There may have been only 2 surviving members of the Wolverines, but they didn't lose. The last scene shows Old Glory freely flying over the
Wolverine Memorial/Partisan Rock that states " They fought here alone and gave up their lives so that this nation shall not perish from the earth."
The difference between this situation and Afghanistan is that the Taliban were a relatively small percentage of the overall population, and with only limited support from them, while here the insurgents would have the support of the majority of the population. It's going to be less Afghanistan, more Poland '39-'44.
I thought that posting an old story that has been bouncing around the interwebs since the time of dial-up modems would be appropriate for this discussion. The title was "What can one gun do against an army?"
A friend of mine recently forwarded me a question a friend of his had posed: "If/when our Federal Government comes to pilfer, pillage, plunder our property
and destroy our lives, what good can a handgun do against an army with advanced weaponry, tanks, missiles, planes, or whatever else they might have at their
disposal to achieve their nefarious goals? (I'm not being facetious: I accept the possibility that what happened in Germany, or similar, could happen here;
I'm just not sure that the potential good from an armed citizenry in such a situation outweighs the day-to-day problems caused by masses of idiots who own guns.)
" If I may, I'd like to try to answer that question. I certainly do not think the writer facetious for asking it. The subject is a serious one that I have given
much research and considerable thought to. I believe that upon the answer to this question depends the future of our Constitutional republic, our liberty and
perhaps our lives. My friend Aaron Zelman, one of the founders of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, once told me:
"If every Jewish and anti-nazi family in Germany had owned a Mauser rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition AND THE WILL TO USE IT (emphasis supplied, MV),
Adolf Hitler would be a little-known footnote to the history of the Weimar Republic."
Note well that phrase: "and the will to use it," for the simply-stated question, "What good can a handgun do against an army?", is in fact a complex one
and must be answered at length and carefully. It is a military question. It is also a political question. But above all it is a moral question which strikes
to the heart of what makes men free, and what makes them slaves. First, let's answer the military question. Most military questions have both a strategic and
a tactical component. Let's consider the tactical.
A friend of mine owns an instructive piece of history. It is a small, crude pistol, made out of sheet-metal stampings by the U.S. during World War II. While
it fits in the palm of your hand and is a slowly-operated, single-shot arm, it's powerful .45 caliber projectile will kill a man with brutal efficiency. With
a short, smooth-bore barrel it can reliably kill only at point blank ranges, so its use requires the will (brave or foolhardy) to get in close before firing.
It is less a soldier's weapon than an assassin's tool. The U.S. manufactured them by the million during the war, not for our own forces but rather to be
air-dropped behind German lines to resistance units in occupied Europe. Crude and slow (the fired case had to be knocked out of the breech by means of a
little wooden dowel, a fresh round procured from the storage area in the grip and then manually reloaded and cocked) and so wildly inaccurate it couldn't
hit the broad side of a French barn at 50 meters, to the Resistance man or woman who had no firearm it still looked pretty darn good. The theory and practice
of it was this: First, you approach a German sentry with your little pistol hidden in your coat pocket and, with Academy-award sincerity, ask him for a light
for your cigarette (or the time the train leaves for Paris, or if he wants to buy some non-army-issue food or a perhaps half-hour with your "sister"). When he
smiles and casts a nervous glance down the street to see where his Sergeant is at, you blow his brains out with your first and only shot, then take his rifle
and ammunition. Your next few minutes are occupied with "getting out of Dodge," for such critters generally go around in packs. After that (assuming you evade
your late benefactor's friends) you keep the rifle and hand your little pistol to a fellow Resistance fighter so they can go get their own rifle.
Or maybe you then use your rifle to get a submachine gun from the Sergeant when he comes running. Perhaps you get very lucky and pickup a light machine gun,
two boxes of ammunition and a haversack of hand grenades. With two of the grenades and the expenditure of a half-a-box of ammunition at a hasty roadblock the
next night, you and your friends get a truck full of arms and ammunition. (Some of the cargo is sticky with "Boche" blood, but you don't mind terribly.)
Pretty soon you've got the best armed little maquis unit in your part of France, all from that cheap little pistol and the guts to use it. (One wonders if
the current political elite's opposition to so-called "Saturday Night Specials" doesn't come from some adopted racial memory of previous failed tyrants.
Even cheap little pistols are a threat to oppressive regimes.)
They called the pistol the "Liberator." Not a bad name, all in all. Now let's consider the strategic aspect of the question, "What good can a handgun do
against an army....?" We have seen that even a poor pistol can make a great deal of difference to the military career and postwar plans of one enemy soldier.
That's tactical. But consider what a million pistols, or a hundred million pistols (which may approach the actual number of handguns in the U.S. today), can
mean to the military planner who seeks to carry out operations against a populace so armed. Mention "Afghanistan" or "Chechnya" to a member of the current
Russian military hierarchy and watch them shudder at the bloody memories. Then you begin to get the idea that modern munitions, air superiority and
overwhelming, precision-guided violence still are not enough to make victory certain when the targets are not sitting Christmas-present fashion out in the
middle of the desert.
In the US, the Liberator pistol wouldn't be necessary. Millions of Glocks, Colts, S&Ws, and Rugers would be a much better starting point. And you already have a rifle that is almost on the same level as the sentry's. But his hand grenades would be useful. From there on the scenario would escalate accordingly, just the weaponry (RPG's, MANPADs, Claymores, etc) would change. So it's not just one gun, but it's the will to use whatever you have have to get something better to achieve your final objective.
A friend of mine recently forwarded me a question a friend of his had posed: "If/when our Federal Government comes to pilfer, pillage, plunder our property
and destroy our lives, what good can a handgun do against an army with advanced weaponry, tanks, missiles, planes, or whatever else they might have at their
disposal to achieve their nefarious goals? (I'm not being facetious: I accept the possibility that what happened in Germany, or similar, could happen here;
I'm just not sure that the potential good from an armed citizenry in such a situation outweighs the day-to-day problems caused by masses of idiots who own guns.)
" If I may, I'd like to try to answer that question. I certainly do not think the writer facetious for asking it. The subject is a serious one that I have given
much research and considerable thought to. I believe that upon the answer to this question depends the future of our Constitutional republic, our liberty and
perhaps our lives. My friend Aaron Zelman, one of the founders of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, once told me:
"If every Jewish and anti-nazi family in Germany had owned a Mauser rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition AND THE WILL TO USE IT (emphasis supplied, MV),
Adolf Hitler would be a little-known footnote to the history of the Weimar Republic."
Note well that phrase: "and the will to use it," for the simply-stated question, "What good can a handgun do against an army?", is in fact a complex one
and must be answered at length and carefully. It is a military question. It is also a political question. But above all it is a moral question which strikes
to the heart of what makes men free, and what makes them slaves. First, let's answer the military question. Most military questions have both a strategic and
a tactical component. Let's consider the tactical.
A friend of mine owns an instructive piece of history. It is a small, crude pistol, made out of sheet-metal stampings by the U.S. during World War II. While
it fits in the palm of your hand and is a slowly-operated, single-shot arm, it's powerful .45 caliber projectile will kill a man with brutal efficiency. With
a short, smooth-bore barrel it can reliably kill only at point blank ranges, so its use requires the will (brave or foolhardy) to get in close before firing.
It is less a soldier's weapon than an assassin's tool. The U.S. manufactured them by the million during the war, not for our own forces but rather to be
air-dropped behind German lines to resistance units in occupied Europe. Crude and slow (the fired case had to be knocked out of the breech by means of a
little wooden dowel, a fresh round procured from the storage area in the grip and then manually reloaded and cocked) and so wildly inaccurate it couldn't
hit the broad side of a French barn at 50 meters, to the Resistance man or woman who had no firearm it still looked pretty darn good. The theory and practice
of it was this: First, you approach a German sentry with your little pistol hidden in your coat pocket and, with Academy-award sincerity, ask him for a light
for your cigarette (or the time the train leaves for Paris, or if he wants to buy some non-army-issue food or a perhaps half-hour with your "sister"). When he
smiles and casts a nervous glance down the street to see where his Sergeant is at, you blow his brains out with your first and only shot, then take his rifle
and ammunition. Your next few minutes are occupied with "getting out of Dodge," for such critters generally go around in packs. After that (assuming you evade
your late benefactor's friends) you keep the rifle and hand your little pistol to a fellow Resistance fighter so they can go get their own rifle.
Or maybe you then use your rifle to get a submachine gun from the Sergeant when he comes running. Perhaps you get very lucky and pickup a light machine gun,
two boxes of ammunition and a haversack of hand grenades. With two of the grenades and the expenditure of a half-a-box of ammunition at a hasty roadblock the
next night, you and your friends get a truck full of arms and ammunition. (Some of the cargo is sticky with "Boche" blood, but you don't mind terribly.)
Pretty soon you've got the best armed little maquis unit in your part of France, all from that cheap little pistol and the guts to use it. (One wonders if
the current political elite's opposition to so-called "Saturday Night Specials" doesn't come from some adopted racial memory of previous failed tyrants.
Even cheap little pistols are a threat to oppressive regimes.)
They called the pistol the "Liberator." Not a bad name, all in all. Now let's consider the strategic aspect of the question, "What good can a handgun do
against an army....?" We have seen that even a poor pistol can make a great deal of difference to the military career and postwar plans of one enemy soldier.
That's tactical. But consider what a million pistols, or a hundred million pistols (which may approach the actual number of handguns in the U.S. today), can
mean to the military planner who seeks to carry out operations against a populace so armed. Mention "Afghanistan" or "Chechnya" to a member of the current
Russian military hierarchy and watch them shudder at the bloody memories. Then you begin to get the idea that modern munitions, air superiority and
overwhelming, precision-guided violence still are not enough to make victory certain when the targets are not sitting Christmas-present fashion out in the
middle of the desert.
In the US, the Liberator pistol wouldn't be necessary. Millions of Glocks, Colts, S&Ws, and Rugers would be a much better starting point. And you already have a rifle that is almost on the same level as the sentry's. But his hand grenades would be useful. From there on the scenario would escalate accordingly, just the weaponry (RPG's, MANPADs, Claymores, etc) would change. So it's not just one gun, but it's the will to use whatever you have have to get something better to achieve your final objective.
no, but (despite the memes) neither did farmer Nguyen's SKS.
Main battle tanks, surface to air missiles, and fighter jets won.
edit: nvm, saw B-52s and my mind jumped to Vietnam, oops
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I would like to see a sequel to red dawn , in which they go behind the scenes as to how did the soviets managed to pull of this "mother of all sea lions" operation ? And how many Careers ended in Pentagon due to the failure to stop them.
I mean geez even if we had f102s in 1980s they surely would be able to shoot down the lumbering soviet cargo planes
I mean geez even if we had f102s in 1980s they surely would be able to shoot down the lumbering soviet cargo planes
Yeah, I reckon it would end up being akin to the Soviet and Yugoslav partisans and the cold war era Operation Gladio. You'd have people operating behind enemy lines hitting supply chains and what have you, and being a mix of civilian ad hoc guerillas operating independently using "off the shelf" arms and those supplied and directed by the U.S. government. Of course, all of this would be happening while the U.S. military is fighting the invaders on the frontlines.
Cryhavoc101
Donor
To be fair nothing has solved Afghanistan in hundreds of years
On the other hand airpower and superior military power has routinely resolved conflicts elsewhere across the world
I would add to the above: insurgent campaigns of the modern era have primarily had external support for the insurgents. In the Vietnam War, the insurgency in South Vietnam was supplied by North Vietnam who in turn received aid from both the USSR and China. And in Iraq, Iran supplied at least some of the insurgent groups. Because...fact is, an insurgency that lacks external support will be ground down via attrition, not just of manpower but also loss of weapons and munitions (as one example, the IRA were effectively running on fumes towards the end of the War of Independence, and Collins accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty because he knew operations couldn't be sustained).
Compare the success of the Vietnam War, where the insurgents had a friendly power right on the border who could run guns to them, with Commonwealth victory in the Malayan Emergency, where the Communist guerrillas were far more isolated in terms of resupply.
Supplying insurgents in the US would be a much harder ask. You could potentially do it via Canada or Mexico, but you'd still need to ship stuff to them, and shipping weapons across one or the other large oceans would be a lot harder than simply smuggling them across a land border...
You're forgetting that a lot of weapons will be coming from the still-free parts of the USA. The Contiguous United States has a greater land area than all of non-Russian Europe, so it's going to take something like the combined armies of a continent just to have a chance of making it, assuming they could even get there.
It's not just guns the occupiers have to worry about either, there's also bombs to consider. There's plenty of bridges in the US that could be taken out of commission by a car-bomb, which would seriously screw with the logistic in an area.
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