How fast we are heading for a severe breakdown in civil order in this nation is debatable. The fact that we ARE headed in that direction is NOT debatable.
The Founders were smart enough to figure out that such a breakdown was possible, and they examined all the angles it might come from, and they created the Second Amendment as a civil right so that citizens of their new Nation might be better prepared to handle the troubles ahead.
The Founders looked at three threats. They were, in ascending order of importance, civil riot, Indian fighting (on the frontiers) and a Federal Government gone awry.
The Founders' solution to all three was Militia. The CURRENT solution to the two remaining threats (Indians fighting is a thing of the past, even if some like Russell Means want to keep it alive) is Militia.
Let's see how you might prepare yourself for Militia duty. I will probably write several posts on this subject, and they will be cross-linked. They will also be linked to posts which ran from July 7, 2005 to July 22, 2005 which I wrote in my dormant, but still available blog Paratus. To read them, go to the blog, drill down on the right side to "Archives", click on the word "Archives", and then highlight July 2005 and scroll through that month until you get to July 7, then scroll upwards to see the rest of the series.
Some of the following material is already covered over in those Paratus posts, but the only things which have changed in the last three years are ammo and gun prices (both have gone up, but ammo has almost doubled in that time).
I'm going to discuss weapons first, because they are the most likely thing to be embargoed by a government gone bad (there are constant attempts to do that, if you just landed from the off-Earth and have tapped into our rudimentary communications network, the Internet). Weapons are also the most expensive of the Militia equipment to acquire and train in the use of, and the most time-consuming. They are 80% of the total concept of citizen responsibility for preservation of the Nation and it's Constitution.
To look at weapons, we have to look at how they are used, so as to get an idea of what weapons a Militia needs.
Weapons are used according to their capabilities to effectively bridge the distance between the shooter and the target. Note the emphasis on the word "effectively". It's there for a reason, because firearms for individual use come in three effectiveness levels: handguns, carbines and battle rifles. Shotguns fits somewhere in between handguns and carbines, as to range.
Those three ranges are: handguns, 0-5 yards/meters; carbines, 0-100 yards/meters; battle rifles, 0-700 yards/meters. A militia fire team should have all three levels of firearms available, in military calibers, in some combination. A fire team of, say, five members might have 3 with handguns (most useful in house searches/clearings and roadblock work), 3 carbines or shotguns and 2 battle rifles. In the field, the militia member must carry one battle-day's supply of ammunition. for the pistol, that is assumed to be about 30 rounds, for the carbine, 100-120 and for the battle rifle, 100-120. Practically, more can be carried, but since the handguns is only going to be used as a desperation weapon in brief encounters at close range, 3 magazines full of ammo is all that's practical for one day. The carbine might be used for suppressive/harassing firing, so a minimum of 100 rounds is required, and ditto the battle rifle.
The shotgun has very heavy ammo, and 100 rounds is a heavy load, and it is used in desperation, close-quarter fighting, so that 50 rounds is probably OK.
The carbines and battle rifles may be semi-automatic or they may be manual loading. It doesn't matter, for when the leader calls for harassing fire, the objective is to get a lot of rounds on the target quickly. If a manual loading rifle is carried, the rifle operator must be able to load and fire quickly.
Pistol-caliber carbines. I have several combinations of pistols, and the same caliber of carbine. This allows the militia member to carry only one caliber of ammunition while being armed with weapons suitable for close-in work and for medium-distance work, and in a pinch, the member may arm an unarmed person who comes into the fight on the militia's side.
An excellent combination would be a .357 Magnum caliber revolver with a 4 or 6 inch barrel and a Marlin Model 1894 carbine of the same caliber. A bit beefier would be a .44 Magnum revolver and a Marlin carbine of the same caliber. This caliber in a carbine is lethal out to 500 yards/meters, but the bullet drop is such that nothing much past 300 yards/meters is effective. You might hit something holding over 5 feet (300 yard bullet drop), but your sights aren't made for holding over 18 feet (500 yard bullet drop).
There are semi-automatic pistols which have companion carbines also. You can pair Glock, Smith and Wesson, 1911A1 and some others with various carbines. The Kel-Tec Sub-Rifle 2000 is a carbine that takes the pistol's magazines. The most effective caliber is .40 S&W, but this carbine ranges only to 100 yards/meters, and anything over that will require excessive hold-over. The upside of these weapons is their weight, only 4#. That means you can carry much more ammo.
The battle-rifle is not meant to be light weight, most weighing 9# and up. They are generally some caliber of 7.62mm, such as 7.62 NATO (highly recommended, since it is the NATO heavy-rifle caliber), or 7.62X54 Russian (the WW2 Soviet blot-action rifles or the more modern RPK semi-auto), and the .303 British (the variants of the Enfield WW1 and WW2 rifles). The 8X57 is the old Nazi caliber, and there are plenty of those old Mausers around, and for the time being, plenty of the ammo, as the former East Bloc nations dump their supplies on the market (and while the Federal Government still allows imports of it).
The semi-auto battle rifles are the best. In 7.62 NATO, the CETME (Spanish) Model B (as imported and modified by Century Arms) is plentiful and reliable, and the H&K 91 and clones (PTR-91) are similar in function and better-built (but twice as expensive). The King of these pre-Stoner 7.62 autoloaders is the M14 and clones (Springfield M1A, Taiwan Type 57). There is an AR-type which shoots the 7.62 NATO, the AR-180, and it is a fine rifle, but well over $1,000. Finally, there is the FN-FAL, still in service in many armies. Having one of the above battle rifles means that you are the fire team's long-range member, and you need to be in shape to haul your 13-15# rifle (yes, it will weigh that much with bipod and scope), and 20-25# of ammo in 20-round magazines.
The militia member might show up for muster with a hunting rifle. Those who do will probably be relegated to duty not likely to involve volume-firing, because they probably won't have much ammo (most hunters don't have more than 40 to 60 rounds of ammo for their rifles), and by law, the weapons can't hold more than 5 rounds, and can't be loaded with stripper-clips, meaning reloading another 5 rounds takes a half-minute as opposed to 2-3 seconds for a magazine change. As a militia member, if you don't have a military weapon to muster with, bring a repeating shotgun, which will be more useful anyway than a scoped bolt-action rifle meant to kill elk at long range. If you are really proficient with such a hunting rifle, you might be pressed into sniper duty, but you'd better know military sniping doctrine, and most hunters don't. If you only have one long gun, bring it (except no .22 rimfire rifles).
In following posts, we will look at how the Militia will fight, what types of missions it will have, and what might become of it politically.
Stay tuned!
