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Veering Sharply from RedHot

Armed with Batons and WWI Rifles?

By: kowalski (Diary)  |  December 1st, 2008 at 12:45 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Skanderbeg and I have been having a brief discussion in RedHot and because the question he asked was so interesting, I thought I’d make it into a diary for further commentary.

Here are the links:

“Veering Sharply”
“Re: Veering Sharply”
“Re: Re: Veering”

Some additional information has come in. Over the past few days there have been conflicting reports about the police presence at Victoria Terminus. The Beeb reported on Thursday that it took about half an hour for the police to arrive (??), which later accounts refute — including the one from the now-famous photographer D’Souza who snapped the picture of one gunman in the station, now the sole survivor of his cadre. It has been reported that he survived by pretending he was dead until it was noticed in the ambulance that he was still breathing.

Nevertheless, Pappu Mishra’s words were telling, even last Thursday:

The police arrived half an hour after it was all over and the men had vanished into a balmy Mumbai evening.

“The system is loose, the security is hollow. They killed as they wished, and there were no policemen around,” Mr Mishra says.

This directly contradicts D’Souza as well as the latest available from the AP, which states:

In the first wave of the attacks, two young gunmen armed with assault rifles blithely ignored more than 60 police officers patrolling the city’s main train station and sprayed bullets into the crowd.

Bapu Thombre, assistant commissioner with the Mumbai railway police, said the police were armed mainly with batons or World War I-era rifles and spread out across the station.

Initially the Beeb had it that the police simply weren’t there until after all the killing had been done. Now the Assistant Commissioner with the Mumbai railway police says that 60-odd police officers were there all along, but they were unprepared and outgunned, even though they supposedly had rifles. D’Souza says they just ran and hid, despite vastly outnumbering the gunmen and being….”armed”….and even though people begged them to use their weapons.

It now looks like they did that because they were armed with sticks and rifles like the one your grandpa has laying around upstairs in the attic; rifles that haven’t been fired in almost 100 years, and never will be again. Nobody has definitively answered the question of whether any of the station police even had bullets for those antiquated museum pieces, or knew how to fire them if they had to.

I think Mr. Mishra is probably the most reliable source on this story, but I think he’s holding back and not telling people just how pathetic the real security situation was at Victoria Terminus. Evidently the terrorists knew just how pathetic it was, though.

More to come as this develops. But it’s looking more and more like the Mumbai police, numbering as many as 60 in the station, simply cowered in the face of two armed gunmen because they were essentially unarmed. I’m beginning to get the sense that the security in Mumbai resembles a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, with token “police” sauntering around in a gritty train station armed with antiques dating back to the Opium Wars…

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  • civil_truth

    Reading the above exchanges, three possible reasons come to mind as to why the police forces may not have been properly armed:

    1) In light of India’s history as a British colony, the Mumbai police may be following the British bobby model of patrolling essentially unarmed.

    2) The Mumbai government may not have be willing to arm and properly train their police in the use of said weapons (or may have corruptly spent the funds elsewhere).

    3) The Mumbai government may have been afraid to properly arm their police for fear that the police would use their weapons against the citizens they are charged to protect. Or perhaps that these police weapons would end up on the black market and/or in the hands of insurrectionists.

    Just some first thoughts.

  • Achance

    and more powerful than most modern “assault” weapons. If the story is true, the WWI rifle is probably some “colonial” Enfield and they’re good 30 caliber weapons. The only advantage the modern weapon has is in rate of fire and sixty cops with magazine fed bolt actions can put up a whole lot of fire.

    I know if I had cover, distance, and wasn’t being directly assaulted by superior numbers, I’d take my Ruger M77 30.06, basically a WWI weapon, over, say, an AK, AR or M4, M16 type weapon. I’d just sit back with cover out of your effective range and blow large holes in things. Now, if you came at me banging away with the auto, the only thing I could do would be either get a good shot and kill you or run like Hell.

    Trouble is, people can write almost anything about this stuff because so few people in America have ever had any sort of weapon in their hands. I suspect the issue here was more the gunners than the guns.

    Even American cops other than specially trained elite units don’t do real well in these situations. There was a shooting incident one road over from my house a few years back; felony hot pursuit and the guy shot at the officers. Two officers emptied their Glocks in his general direction while chasing him on foot through the neighborhood. Lots of bullet holes in trees and such and some impressive gouges in the pavement, but not a scratch on the perp. They caught him later sound asleep in his bed.

  • kowalski

    Sure, a WWI-era rifle can still be a very formidable and accurate weapon if it has been cared for. The looming question for me is whether the ones the Victoria Terminus police had were even functional, whether they had been issued ammunition and had ever been trained to use them. If they were just carrying them around as show pieces a-la Skanderbeg’s Cairo experience, they wouldn’t have been very useful.

    That might explain why 2 men in a train station were able to accomplish so much mayhem despite being vastly outnumbered, and why none of the police attempted to stop them.

    Your point about never having held or fired a weapon as an officer or a civilian is right on, though. That’s why I always recommend that people take the necessary steps to become licensed or permitted in their state and take a course, preferably more than one — even if they don’t intend to own a firearm.

    FrontSight can help with that.

    And ditto, I’d take a good, solid and functional .30-06 or M1 with a couple of magazines over an AK, etc., for defensive purposes, particularly at ranges greater than 50 yards with a little cover. Drop back 200 feet, find some cover, and pick ‘em off.

  • PhxG

    nt

  • Lammo

    just make sure if you get one that it has been retrofitted or was not under the following recall:

    http://www.ruger-firearms.com/LCPRecall/index.html

    Safety is rule #1!

    PS – - great post – reminds me of a photo from shortly after 9/11 showing CANG members patrolling an airport in Southern CA (Orange County I think) with clearly unloaded M-16s – no magazine in the rifle!

  • Doc_Holliday

    around every fifth round actually hits the bad guy. Their is something about having your life in danger that makes it hard to shoot. I am not trying to be funny, just stating the facts. Also, some cops are “gun guys” who train a lot, and many others only fire a couple times a year when they need to qualify.

    Also, I agree people totally discount the danger/potential of a bolt action rifle, but that is not much of a defense weapon unless you are already in the field and expecting trouble.

  • Achance

    P1853 Enfield rifled musket, .58 caliber. It’s deadly accurate out to 200 yards and blows a very big hole in whatever you hit. ‘Course, it’s a little hard to load by modern standards.

    Actually, the P1853 is an epochal weapon. It represents the first major transfer of technology from the New World to the Old. The Royal Armory managed to attract some Americans who’d worked for the Springfield Armory and who understood the standardization methods the Americans used. The P1853 wasn’t as interchangeable as a P1861 Springfield, but it wasn’t the handmade product that the British had used previously.