The gudwife went to the movies with a pal tonite, leaving me to fire up my own dinner of leftovers, which I did. Since the operation of the nuke machine doesn't take much attention, I turned on the teevee and the History Channel.
There was a program on about guns and gangsters. It was pretty good, swerving only slightly left at the end. The program has one very vital point to make, so I'm going to retell the entire script, to make sure I make that point as well as the program's writers did.
The program started off with a discussion of pocket guns, pointing out that they were popular in the early part of the Twentieth Century with citizen and crook alike (there being few gun control laws then, any citizen could carry and most city-dwellers did, according to the program).
The operative concept was stealth. People wore baggy clothing then, so there was always a pocket to hide a pocket gun in. Colt made several pocket guns, mostly in .25ACP and .32ACP, single action automatics. These were cheap and reliable, if not overly powerful. They were meant to give the gunner a momentary advantage in the situation, nothing more, so a caliber that was good for flesh wounds only was considered adequate.
At the end of World War One, two significant, man-portable weapons were introduced: the BAR and the Thompson sub-machine gun. Citizens could own both, but they were expensive. Pistoleers of the age started on their never-ending crusade for more manly carry guns, finding the .45ACP and the .38 Super Auto to their liking in Colt's 1911 offering.
Prohibition came to America in the form of the 19th Amendment, the campaign for which was a textbook case in political salesmanship, but I digress.
Prohibition failed the day it started. While willing to embrace the concept (it was an actual Constitutional Amendment and 3/4 of the State Legislatures voted for it), Americans weren't willing to take the cure and quit drinking, and their appetites for a continuing supply of booze brought a windfall to the criminal underworld. Crime bosses who had never been big outside of their neighborhoods suddenly controlled territories of multiple cities and states. By control, I mean that they CONTROLLED. The huge cash profits bootleg booze brought in paid for mayors, judges, police chiefs and even State Legislatures. Bribery became the norm in local government.
The bootlegger gangs had few enemies from the law enforcement side, but they had plenty among themselves. Protection and safety became a concern, so the gangs armed themselves well, with all the latest hardware from Colt and Browning. Military machineguns became the norm, with the mentioned Tommy Gun and the BAR being the choices. The 1911 and nothing smaller than a .38 Special revolver became the handguns of choice.
The gangs fought each other viciously, but they only confronted the cops when the cops came after them. On those occasions, the cops were usually outgunned, most departments being armed with nothing more than revolvers and the occasional rifle, like as not a 30-30. Some had riot shotguns, but they were seldom deployed. The badge and the uniform were supposed to be the controls for cops, not their guns. Many police chiefs and police captains were on the gang payrolls, and so they usually left the gangs alone to distribute and sell their hootch.
The average gangster was a former WW1 soldier, and the Army taught ALL it's soldiers to shoot well in those days. Even cooks and bakers had to go to the rifle range and demonstrate that they could handle a rifle or machinegun. When these gangsters got into gunfights with each other and/or the police, THE RESULTS WERE USUALLY FATAL, AND IT WAS THE COPS WHO USUALLY DIED. THAT RESULT CAME FROM PURE MARKSMANSHIP AND GUN HANDLING, NOT FROM WHO WAS POLITICALLY CORRECT.
Let that soak in.
Now I'll repeat it.
In fights between cops and gangsters, the gangsters usually prevailed, because they stood and fought, took advantage of cover, used fire and move tactics, and THEY WERE BETTER SHOTS!
Cops were hampered by their weaponry, tactics and communications (that's about the entire gig, isn't it?). Their tactics told them to engage a superior force, and they did, and died for it. They engaged with revolver fire against gangsters armed with multiple full-auto weapons and died. While engaged, they had no method of communicating with their stations, as two-way radios weren't in popular use until the mid to late '30's.
The cops had a slow learning curve, but time was on their side.
In 1933, the Volstedt Act repealed Prohibition, and booze became legal by local option. The bootleggers were out of business with their most lucrative form of income, so they turned to other things: drugs, prostitution, vice and bank robbery.
Along with the repeal of Prohibition, the nation (and world) was in a deep economic depression. Post war boom had led to bust, and economies from global to personal retrenched. The Depression left only one winner, the banks. Banks had the money in a cash-poor society, so they were the kings now. People hated banks. Banks didn't care about their images, so all the wrong things said by all the wrong people stuck. Banks became so reviled that the average citizen cheered when they were robbed. Lacking the required moral regression to do robbery themselves, poor people all over the nation lived vicariously though accounts of daring robbers taking on the banks and living a life of guns, fast cars, fast women and easy money.
These robbers were mostly left-over bootleggers, but they brought their gun skills with them when they changed from bootlegging to bank robbery. In the heyday of the Midwestern bank robbery gangs like Bonnie & Clyde, Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly, the cops had no jurisdiction outside of their localities, and the FBI was just getting started, and bank robbery wasn't a federal crime anyway.
That all changed.
Desperate to stem the significant losses of both cash and life that the robberies caused, the banks used their influence to Federalize bank robbery. They had the FBI, then an investigative force only, armed and promoted to be the Nation's anti-crime strike force. The FBI countered law enforcement's lack of success against the gangs with fast cars (they actually had special "Interceptor" V-8 engines, unavailable to the masses, put into their Fords), heavy weaponry (they were armed with .45ACP Colts or .357 revolvers, and carried Tommy Guns and/or BARs), but above all, they could operate anywhere under Federal authority. They carried Federal warrants from "un-bribeable" Federal judges, and they set out to capture the gangs, one by one.
They only captured those who went quietly, however, and most didn't, so the public was treated to newspaper or newsreel views of bullet-ridden bodies of dead gangsters on a constant basis. When the FBI shot it out with a gang, the FBI won. They planned their shootouts, studied terrain and cover, and set ambushes. The ambushes were deadly. Their deadliness came from good information, information either willingly supplied (not always available) or bought outright (the FBI is known to this day for paying criminal informants lavishly). In any case, as a result of their information, they were almost always able to get the drop on the gangsters, and tactical surprise usually resulted in dead gangsters. Few gave up willingly. They died in their dozens, and in a span of three or four years, by the late '30's, most criminal gangs were either below the level of Federal interest, or they were dead.
What did we inherit from this era?
Several things.
First, we inherited a strong Federal police presence, and that strength has never waned.
Second, we inherited gun control. The National Firearms Act of 1934 outlawed most private possession of full-auto weapons, and that prohibition remains today. Gun control of other weapons has waxed and waned over the last 70 years, but the citizens generally back the idea that the deadliest military weapons should be kept only by the military (and police!).
Lastly, and most importantly, we inherited a lesson that is there for all of us to re-learn and believe:
In the only recent era where anyone could keep and bear any arms, there was inevitable armed conflict. In that era, those conflicts were ALWAYS won by the side with better weapons, better tactics and better communications. Not the side which was "right", the side which had the best field position, the best reinforcement AND the best gunnery.
It is ever thus.
Go to the range.
