"Gangsta" shooting style - the definitive guide...

[Hutch]

I saw the same show that RaggedClaw described. It's horrifying to see these guys literally dancing a jig as they fire from the hip, from over the head, etc. on full auto. Life is cheap there. They interviewed some of these < 15yo "fighters", and they were completely fatalistic. I don't think any of them expected to see 20. There was footage of some guy with a mortar tube between his splayed legs (kinda like our AA gunner), and he was firing it w/o the bipod, just held the tube with his hand. He was so whacked out, he bleedin' near shot himself with a morter round. He could not possibly have had a target in sight.

I'd love to listen to someone (maybe Number 6?) who could actually help me understand how things can become so unstable/anarchic there.

 

[The Viking]

An understatement, but yeah those soldiers could use some basic training in fundamentals.

It's no surprise that some countries over there have been taken down by small bands of hired mercenaries during the 60's and 70's.

Mercenaries? You could take over the whole country with a bunch of blind boy scouts.

 

[ocabj]

I found those pictures pure comedy.

For all those who posted that a couple of trained shooters could easily survive in that environment, I think you are forgetting about what happened in Somalia. Lots of trained Rangers and Delta operators, but suffering lots of casualties against poorly trained militia.

 

[outofbattery]

The long story short of the failure of African countries comes down to:European countries give colonies independance in the 1960's.Most end up with some form of dictatorship with backing from the West or Communist Bloc.Both sides pump much foreign aid to Africa to keep their proxies in power and to destabilize the others.At the end of the Cold War,the USSR couldn't afford to keep funding revolutions and the West no longer saw the need to keep tyrants like Mubuto in Zaire propped up and the rotten houses fell apart.What you're seeing is a failure to move very far foreward in any way in the past 40 years ( you can blame the colonizers or the kleptocrats who've run the places if you want):lack of basic needs and education being met means many not very bright people get angry and have access to lots of guns.

If you've seen Hotel Rwanda and want the actual story behind it,read Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands With the Devil.

 

[Buzztail]

And you guys are wondering where all of the 7.62x39 is going......

 

[VirgilCaine]

And you guys are wondering where all of the 7.62x39 is going......

LOL!

 

[Kurush]

And you guys are wondering where all of the 7.62x39 is going......

They call it "gravel".

 

[jsalcedo]

Doesn't brass sell to recylcers for $5 per pound?

These people are walking on a gold mine.

 

[Kharn]

Most 7.62x39 is steel cased.

Kharn

 

[RyanM]

Considering that copper sells currently for $2.10 per pound, and zinc is worth around $0.40 per pound, I really doubt that cartridge brass (68.5-71.5% Cu, <0.05% Fe, <0.07% Pb, 28.5-31.5% Zn, <0.15% other) is worth that much. Going by just the values of the metals, the most it could be is $1.55 per pound.

 

[scout26]

If you ever wonder where those old clothes you donated to Goodwill, Purple Heart Veterans, etc, ends up at....... well does anyone want to claim some of the clothes in those pictures as theirs from the 80's or 90's ???

 

[carebear]

As Number 6 says, most of Africa is not like this. In fact the parts of Africa I have seen, are very different from this.

Consider the crow eaten.

I should know better than to make broad generalizations.

I would question whether "most" of Africa, though not like this, is truly functional as far as infrastructure and political life go.

The scenes pictured are Mad Max writ large, but I hardly consider paved roads reverting to dirt tracks and water supplies becoming unpotable while life outside the cities reverts to subsistence living comparable to the last century to be doing much better. Harare may be a gem but I expect the smaller villages to be doing at least as well as those in the Alaskan Bush.

 

[Lucky]

The guy carrying a wounded buddy while keeping the muzzle pointed toward the enemy with only 1 hand, and his finger off the trigger, I kind of thought he had his stuff together.

My favorite is definately the cape though!

 

[Firethorn]

The guy carrying a wounded buddy while keeping the muzzle pointed toward the enemy with only 1 hand, and his finger off the trigger, I kind of thought he had his stuff together.

My favorite is definately the cape though!

Agreed. From the way the guy was hanging off from him, it looks like he's injured in some way.

I felt that the pictures of the weapon handling was funny, the results(though rare) of fire, however inaccurate on average, not funny.

It calls into question the philosophy of 'an armed society is a polite society', but I guess the second part of having a peacefull society is having hope. If you have no hope, if you have no strong desire for self preservation leading from that hope, you have reason to be polite, to encourage peace, to only take up your arms to defend yourself, your family, your society, your country.

It also makes me think that it's a wonder that the USA is as peacefull as it is. It seems that as you increase ethnic diversity, violence increases. The USA is so diverse it's almost like it came through the other side back into non-violence. Where do you see the most violence? Where different races, cultures, have ghettoized themselves, where they've lost hope, etc.

 

[Creeping Incrementalism]

Couple more from the arfcom thread.

Poor FAL

Has anybody figured out what is with that scope yet?

 

[Crosshair]

ocabj

For all those who posted that a couple of trained shooters could easily survive in that environment, I think you are forgetting about what happened in Somalia. Lots of trained Rangers and Delta operators, but suffering lots of casualties against poorly trained militia.

IIRC didn't we have like a 300 to 1 kill ratio on them? And that was when we where running trying to get the heck out of town once SHTF. You get a .308 with a supressor on a tall building and they would never find you.

 

[max popenker]

Has anybody figured out what is with that scope yet?

I believe this is an early version of Armson OEG - a red-dot type sight made in South Africa. Rifle is most probably the S-African R1.
Modern OEG sights look like that

 

[GoBrush]

Woke up, could not sleep, to damn early to laugh that much, now I am really awake, thanks preacher man now I'll never get back to bed!

 

[Silent-Snail]

I laughed, I cried, now my head hurts so I'm off to L&P.

Edit: I also read the whole 18 page shebang.

 

[Sportcat]

"I'm the only one qualified to shoot this rusty AK with a life vest..."

 

[Omni04]

man i posted a link to the ar-15 post on another forum i frequent and i am getting flamed like crazy. Hahaha, goes to show you that some people will do anything to pick an e fight

 

[RyanM]

It also makes me think that it's a wonder that the USA is as peacefull as it is. It seems that as you increase ethnic diversity, violence increases. The USA is so diverse it's almost like it came through the other side back into non-violence. Where do you see the most violence? Where different races, cultures, have ghettoized themselves, where they've lost hope, etc.

The fact is, the US as a whole actually is pretty peaceful. I really do not buy the whole "racial violence" thing. The UK is pretty darn racially homogenous, and yet they have roughly 5 times as much reported violent crime per population. Since the UK's definition of something-or-other wounding is much narrower than aggravated assault in the USA (lesser forms of wounding aren't violent crimes, much like simple assault in the US), and the UK figures are based on convictions rather than the actual number of crimes reported, it's pretty safe to say that the UK has at least 10 times as much violent crime per population. I wouldn't be surprised if it's more like 40 or 50 times as much.

The fact is, most violent criminals in this country are extremely impoverished, have nothing to live for, and have no hope, just like these guys in Africa. The fact that they're mostly Black is due to socioeconomic reasons, which are incredibly obvious if you know anything about the history of this country. Being property for 2 centuries, then being treated like second-class citizens for a century more, is a hard blow to recover from. It's not as easy as saying "okay, you're free and you're our equals, now get a job."

If anything, "ghetto-izing" is just more proof that segregation and separation don't work, even if it's done willingly. Ghettos aren't places where "ethnic diversity has increased," they're the exact opposite.

 

[Number 6]

It also makes me think that it's a wonder that the USA is as peacefull as it is. It seems that as you increase ethnic diversity, violence increases. The USA is so diverse it's almost like it came through the other side back into non-violence. Where do you see the most violence? Where different races, cultures, have ghettoized themselves, where they've lost hope, etc.

Having a bunch of ethnicities does not cause conflict by itself. What most of the research has found is that where a region is ethnically diverse and there is another exacerbating factor like economic or political marginalization, then there is an increased likelihood of conflict. People like Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Benjamin Barber have propagated the myth that ethnicities are naturally conflictual, and that much of the world is returning to a state of tribal warfare. The problem is that they do not have the empirical evidence to back it up. What you see are some very extreme cases of ethnic conflict like in Palestine, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Burundi, and so on, but that does not count all of the other regions that have diverse ethnic groups and have relative peace. The work of Fox, Inglehart and Norris, and Sadowski have all provided evidence that directly contradicts the claims of Huntington and the like.

There is also the problem of how the news media and the West perceive of conflicts in Africa and in other parts of the world. It is easy to explain the concept very simply as just ethnic rivalry, but that does not take into account the history of the region or the complex political and economic situations. One of the best anecdotes to this comes from the Bosnian war where a lady pointed out that she did not realize that she was Muslim until CNN told her she was.

I would question whether "most" of Africa, though not like this, is truly functional as far as infrastructure and political life go.

The scenes pictured are Mad Max writ large, but I hardly consider paved roads reverting to dirt tracks and water supplies becoming unpotable while life outside the cities reverts to subsistence living comparable to the last century to be doing much better. Harare may be a gem but I expect the smaller villages to be doing at least as well as those in the Alaskan Bush.

No one is going to argue that Africa as a whole is developed in the same way that the United States is developed, but economic development is very different than political development. Democracy, civil society, and rule of law are in place in many African states. Some countries in Africa have localized problems as well. Uganda is a relatively stable country, but has an active and violent insurgency in the north, but Spain also has the Basques to deal. Some have high crime rates such as South Africa, but has a very active democracy. Africa is very diverse and making broad claims about the continent politically is difficult.

In terms of economic development, outside of the major cities you definitely see a more rural form of living, and a lot of subsistence farming. This is not like Mad Max however. Education in many countries is provided and development is happening in some countries, albeit slowly. What you see in the media is not reminiscent of what you see when you are actually there.

 

[losangeles]

What you see in the media is not reminiscent of what you see when you are actually there.

Number 6, you seem so pro-African, and that's cool with me! Someone needs to take the cause.

I've been to Africa many, many times, for many years. Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria, to name a few -- and I don't share your optimism of the conditions there vis-a-vis the rest of the world. I've (tried to) run businesses there and still have plenty of ties there; I vacation there, I talk on the cell with folks there still. I hope one day to be successful there. Mauritius and Seychelles in the Indian Ocean felt pretty stable. Egypt and Libya felt different, in a very hectic sort of way, but there was no instability.

But man, I've seen a lot of things beyond the negativism of the media -- stuff people will not believe! The tribalism -- and the violence engendered by it -- is no joke! You can point your finger at the Basque in Spain and all the other trouble spots in the world, but African problems are definitely there and definitely unique.

I was not there but I have personally talked with people who were in the midst of 3/4 million people killed (by mostly machete and blunt weapons) in 4 months time in Rwanda. I know people who grew up during that time and still talk to them, about how as kids they were playing with bones -- there were fields of bones! -- not knowing any better.

There's some backward stuff people wouldn't believe. I have been amongst tribesmen who were stark naked, walking around like it's normal, and taking a crap by bending over, and resuming their walk like it's nothing. And if you want to talk to them about philosophy or advantages of diversification, you might as well forget it. And this was not in only one country (a backwater part of Ethiopia, and again in Tanzania). Some peeps are living like their ancestors were 2,000 years ago still.

I know many Africans here in the States who will corroborate what I say. From different countries. Somalia included. We know about that one. Some of the sh*t they had to go through ain't no joke.

I won't get into my career, but trust me, I've been there and have seen some awful sh*t. I want it to change. I want something positive to come about. But believe me, there's a long, long way to go -- face the facts: the deplorable conditions are the worst in the world --- and peeps got to recognize this before hoping to make fixes. I don't know the solution, but the solution is not from denying the level of difficulty and sugarcoating the progress.

 

[dasmi]

I have been amongst tribesmen who were stark naked, walking around like it's normal, and taking a crap by bending over, and resuming their walk like it's nothing.

I would imagine it is normal, in that culture.