6th of September, 2000
We burgled our landlady's late husband's tool shed last night. The guy worked as a miner, mechanic, and electrician for most of his life and seems to have been quite the tinkerer. Shame he ain't still with us.
It was a little harder than we thought it would be, but our M1 Carbine is now an M2. The bullets are somewhat underpowered by rifle standards but in my opinion the firepower and the sturdy nature of the gun make up for it.
[Caleb: liberate our minds, by any means necessary!]
[Kate: preach it, brother!]
Remember those arguments they used to have before the gun bans, with the rhetorical questions of why anyone would need an assault rifle? "Respectable" conservatives would always respond half-heartedly, often with appeals to that long-dead document, the Constitution (Laid in State since 1861, at least) but it was obviously a question they could never really answer because, well, they never would have need for military-pattern weapons of any kind. Where are all the respectable conservatives now? Most likely, the ones that ain't working for the occupation forces have all died of radon poisoning from hiding in their basements when the shooting started.
Let's, for a moment, set aside the question of what is and is not an assault rifle, even though the Branch Davidians got themselves and and their children massacred for doing just that, and consider that there is in fact a very good reason why someone might want to own one: they're quite useful for seizing a defended enemy position or for preventing one's own position from being seized.
Beyond that? Guerrillas generally don't hold territory and seldom try to seize it. If all you're doing is the small-scale ambushes that tends to define guerrilla warfare, then an assault rifle might not be the best weapon for you. If, on the other hand, you want to rob a train—which will require you to seize control of at least one bunker, the section of rail that it overlooks and the train itself—then an individual rifle capable of automatic fire would be just what you want and you would be rather displeased to only have two of them.
A decent shotgun is an acceptable substitute. Range is even poorer than a carbine (though similar to a submachine gun), and they also tend to come short in capacity and rate of fire, but their killing power is unparallelled at close range and their simplicity of use lend them well to work in close quarters.
Grenades are also quite handy when it comes to defortifying one's enemy, and unlike assault rifles, I could quite easily produce a few with, as an old friend used to say, a few household chemicals in the proper proportions.
We're going to be working on that instead of silencers at the moment; as our operation will call for firepower over subtlety. We made off with a large can of calcium carbide last night (useful for explosives or chemical weapons), as well as about a thousand match heads and some Grant's Tree Stump Remover (potassium nitrate) and sugar. We'll see what we can do with it.
Steve and Maria saddled up and went to see if they could get in touch with Doug Henderson's people out in Pincherville. Kate's out hunting, and Caleb's going to join her when he's done helping me.
No comments:
Post a Comment