Re: gang has anti-tank rocket

[Guest guest]

I am sure there is plenty of that stuff floating around out there.

There have been very few actual uses of it so far though. Still, it is

disturbing.

It's funny that while people are trying to challenge the right for

people to own rifles and handguns, other people are arming themselves

with weapons like these.

Administrator

[Guest guest]

wrote: " Going by the picture, what they have is a PIAT

launcher. That was a British weapon from WWII that was really an

interim weapon and was widely hated by the troops. The PIAT really

isn't a rocket launcher so much as a spigot mortar. I works by

cocking a very powerful spring inside a pole of sorts and then

fitting the projectile onto the pole. When it is fired, there is a

powerful recoil to it from the spring, which is made worse when

the " rocket " actually fires. That is because the firing of the rocket

recocks the spring ... <snip> >.. "

That was interesting to learn. As always, you present the facts in

sch a way that the snapshot is clear.

" ... <snip> ... It ws not uncommon for the thing to break shoulders.

Maybe they should have let the gang keep it. First off, they aren't

going to find ammunition for it, and if they did, all they would have

to do is check the hospitals for broken shoulders to find who fired

it ... <snip> ... "

It wouldn't encourage the other gang members to give it a shot,

pardon the pun.

Raven

[Guest guest]

During World War II, those films were made that way for an additional

prupose: Many of the men that served were functionally illiterate. That

war was one where " Every able bodied man " was required to report to the

recruiting centers, and where just about everyone who was reasonably

fit, and who could follow simple directions was inducted. While many

older men were dismissed on account of age, they did let some folks in

who were still in their thirties and forties even.

Another reason was that many of the men from that era came from urban

and rural communities that were poor, and so had never seen a movie

before. Some rural communities did not have movie theaters. Thus by

making training entertaining, it had a " double Wow! " effect. Wow!

because it was a motion picture, and Wow! because it was an

entertaining cartoon to boot.

Vietnam saw a whole lot of troops cycled through the armed services,

and many of those troops were drafted. College kids could sometimes get

out of the war if they had connections, so there were many folks drawn,

once again, from communities where the education standards might not

have been so great. So the films were useful then too.

Finally, as said, the one thing the military doesn't want to do

is to make troops scared of their own weapons, nor does it want to make

troops scared of the enemy's weapons. It would be counterproductive to

show troops in training videos of people getting shot up in past wars.

Bullets and other projectiles, bayonets and bowie knives, grenades and

C4, poison gas and radiation can do all sorts of things to human bodies

that most people really cannot imagine. What the movies we see in the

theatres show doesn't even come close to what can happen on the

battlefield - the one possible exception being what we see in " Saving

Private . " All one needs to do to find out about the gore and grue

is read some autobiographical accounts of a war.

So the movies show what can happen to a person if something goes

wrong...but they don't get graphic enough to traumatize the viewers

either. The military wants to show enough to inform the trainees, but

not enough information to give them nightmares and make them afraid to

fight in battle.

Administrator

Disney and other animation houses made training films for the troops

during WWII. They weren't children, but the idea was that cartoons

would be more interesting and hold their attention better than some dry

film with real people. Not only that, but they could more graphically,

yet humorously, show what could happen itf you didn't follow

instructions when operating the weapon.

They did the same thing in Vietnam with the M-16 manual. It was a

little cartoon kind of book with a busty blonde showing them how to

care for the M-16. The army figured the troops would be more likely to

read that manual than the dry field manual and they were right. It also

would have helped if the M-16 wasn't junk and they didn't have to keep

it spotless for it to work.