Weapon of Choice

  

Fear is a sickness. It will crawl into the soul 
of anyone who engages it. 
It has tainted your peace already 
--Apocalypto (2006) 

Ray, has it ever occurred to you
 that maybe the reason we've been so busy lately 
is 'cause the dead HAVE been rising from the grave? 
--Ghostbusters (1984) 

You can go with this 
Or you can go with that  
--Weapon of Choice, Fatboy Slim 
_____________________   

So when the zombie Apocalypse goes down, what will be YOUR weapon of choice?  

Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald spoke with Ranger recently on the topic, and we thought you'd like to see on which side of the divide he comes down (Joe Biden vs. Lindsey Graham: Who knows more about post - apocalyptic survival?) 

From the article:

"Crazy as it may sound, one of the debates in the fight over gun control in Washington right now is whether you’d be better off using a shotgun or an assault rifle to defend yourself against marauding bandits in some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape.

"On one side, Vice President Joe Biden, who favors reinstating the ban on assault weapons, said last week in a Google hangout that after a big earthquake or natural disaster, you wouldn’t want an assault weapon anyway. “A shotgun will keep you a lot safer — a double-barreled shotgun — than the assault weapons in somebody’s hands that doesn’t know how to use it, even one that does know how to use it,” Biden replied.

"But this week, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who opposes reinstating the assault weapons ban, said Biden is wrong. Invoking the 1992 Los Angeles riots during a Senate hearing on gun legislation Wednesday, Graham said that while he respects Biden’s opinion, 'I think I would be better off protecting my business or my family if there was law and order breakdown in my community, people roaming around my neighborhood, to have the AR-15.'

"So who’s right? We put out a call to gun experts to find out. It may seem a little gauche to game out the hypotheticals of shooting bandits in a doomsday scenario, but this is something that concerns some in the gun-rights community and liberals need to be able to speak informatively about guns and their use.

"Jim Hruska, a former Army Ranger who commanded three marksmanship units and is now a firearms instructor in Florida, in addition to a gun collector and blogger, said he would take the shotgun almost any day. “For an assault rifle, you have to have some pretty extensive training to be proficient with it,” he said, noting that only perfectly aimed shots will work while the others will whizz by.

"Explaining that he keeps an Ithaca police shotgun 'no more than 3 feet from my bed,' Hruska said, 'One thing that I consistently tell people is that an assault rifle is only useful is if you’re fighting as a unit,' when team members use fire and movement tactics to overwhelm an enemy. 'That’s obviously not a home defense kind of thing.'"

.  .  .

“But the truth is, I would use whatever I could get my hands on,” Hruska said. Another thorny gun control debate that seems unresolvable.

Well, that's your Ranger, for whom the book "Small Arms of the World" is light bedtime reading.  But you already knew he wasn't (primarily) an assault rifle kind of guy.

[n.b.: Ranger only instructs Lisa in firearms usage today.]