Thought's on France's LE guns after Paris attacks w/pics

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"Hiding behind a street corner one of them gave him a shot in the knee from like 25yrds away"
That's real great and all that the (for all anyone apparently knew) imminent lethal threat to all around was not dealt with swiftly, but 'shoot to wound' is more of a happy accident than something to strive for in practice. Gun was real enough for the guy to get shot at & be crippled or bleed out, but I suppose he still didn't seem like an immediate enough threat for intentionally lethal force to the responders at the time :confused:

FWIW, not all US cops are with the LAPD/NYPD. We had that one officer, in a show of baddassery fit to be rendered by Frank Frazetta, take out a suicidal lunatic firing an AK wildly into the Austin, PD headquarters here in Texas, while holding the reigns of two adjacent horses in one hand at a distance of 100yds away, with a single shot. Not that that is at all common, either :p

TCB
 
In the mid 80's my US Coast Guard LE Training Team and I worked with a French Navy team. The boarding officers had Ruger 9mm revolvers,Beretta 9mm subguns and 12ga pumps. They had a high level of firearms training much higher than Dutch and British sailors. They were professional and I enjoyed working with them.
 
Pretty sure they chose their version of the mini-14 specifically because it doesn't look as "military."
 
@barnbwt

Obviously he didnt seem like an threat that had to be killed.
The passersby had cleared the street. It would have been suicide by police.

11 out of 10 US Cops would have granted him the wish.

(Sidenote: the chance of guns not being real is much higher here. Plus the requirements for people to become LEO ist higher. Way higher.)
 
I have no doubts of the effectiveness of the Mini 14 as a fighting weapon.
I well remember an incident that took place in April of 1986 where effective use of a Mini 14 rifle ended the lives of two FBI agents and wounded five others before the whole debacle ended.

Another incident of effective use of a Mini 14 in Norway I'm not going to get into because it ended up being one of the worst mass murder shootings in recent history.

I owned a Mini 14 in the late 70s as did many others because they could be bought for $200 and magazines to 20 round capacity were common and inexpensive.
It wasn't a match accurate rifle but served well for shooting coyote in Illinois and later, when I returned from the Army, the gun did well on Texas varmints and whitetail deer.
Colt AR15 rifles were going for $450 retail at the time and it wasn't uncommon to see them priced even higher than suggested retail. If you wanted to play with those you had to pay and my income wasn't in league with the tariff.

I saw an article that commented on the fact many of the current French Officers using those Mini's are younger than the guns they are fielding.
A testiment to the guns durability under normal use.
 
am I the only one thinking the mini 14 has a striking resemblance to the m1 carbine wich served as a police and military rifle for many many years?
what's not to like?
 
My Mini-14 has never missed a beat in the 45 years I have owned it.
Target rifle accuracy is not necessary for a cop in the streets.
100% reliability is.
Click to expand...
There are a lot of yotes that can't attest to the inaccuracy of my Mini 14, a fair number that I've contacted at well over 200yds.
In the cold, my Mini 14 keeps running when a some ARs need to go warm up in the truck. :rolleyes:
 
re Open bolt SMGs

SOme open bolt guns do have safety systems that allow the gun to be carried and ready. The Uzi has a grip safety. The Danish M49 series has a grip safety on the magazine well so both hands have to be on the gun to fire......which is why you sometimes see photos of the guns with tape wrapped around the magazine well to hold the safety down to allow one hand operation. Even the French MAT49 had a grip safety.

Many of the older guns had a safety that locked the bolt back that consisted of having the cocking slot be J shaped one cocked the gun then raised the handle into the curved bit and let it go a little forward. It was not a whole lot easier to get it off safe than to cock from a bolt forward position, but it provided some assurance that dropping the gun would not result in firing either from letting the bolt go forward or from bolt bounce from an uncocked gun.

Some SMGs had actual safeties such as the Thompson and the Sterling Patchett not a lot different than those on rifles.

In my experience open bolt guns get the short sift with regards to accuracy. I found guns like the MP40, STEN, Patchett, and S&W M76 to all be capable of delivering single shots (MP40 required a bit of skill at trigger manipulation) into minute of Soda Can at 25 meters. One of the things I loved about the Thompson was that the weight of the bolts of the 1921 and 1928 were so light in comparison to the rest of the gun that single shots were quite accurate, I did not love the thought of lugging one for days on end however. Even the clunky M3A1 grease gun with its huge heavy bolt could deliver single shots to the head at 25 meters, better than most folks can do with a handgun.

Now shot dispersion does rear its ugly head if one DOES go full auto. For the most part SMG gunners are taught to fire very short bursts of two to four rounds and again I have never had difficulty holding those two to four on the torso of a 25 yard target.

Yes I have seen untrained people fire six to ten round burst that ended with the SMG doing duty as an anti aircraft gun.....that is a training (or lack there of) issue.

That said one German Special Police group I trained with fired burst of up to 15 rounds from MP5 varients at across the room distances......AT SUSPECTED TARGETS! Yep their entry teams would pepper closed doors and furniture. I have to admit that being handed an MP5k with shoulder harness all adjusted for one and being told to dump the short 15 round concealable mag into a closed closet door trying for a figure eight was a hoot. I can not imagine a US police department SWAT or whatever doing this sort of thing though.

edit: Looked it up M12 has a grip safety and a push button safety and push button selector.


-kBob
 
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Mp7, So you think the officer meant to shoot the guy in the knee??? Depending on the social environment, I might have claimed I intended to do that after the fact. But the reality would be somewhat different. True, in the US we are trained to shoot COM. A situation happened here locally in which an officer with a small department shot and critically wounded a suspect. A letter to the editor demeaned the officers involved and their department in that they had not been trained to shoot to wound like officers in the largest department in the state. Coincidentally, I spent over 20 years with that largest department and was a firearms instructor. We never taught to shoot to would like in the old cowboy movies. Sure liked the trick shooting in those old cowboy movies though;-)
 
I've deleted several post that were wandering pretty far from the OP..."France's LE guns"

If yours was one that was deleted, don't repost it. If you feel the need to respond to a deleted post...reconsider
 
French police/security Interior Ministry adopted the Ruger AC556 in the 1970s. Apparently the individual weapons are well-vetted and well-maintained and they have seen no reason to abandon the decades of armourer and operator training. Units using the Rugers include:
o Border Police - Police Aux Frontieres (PAF)
o Riot Control Brigade - Police Nationale Compagnies Republicaines de Securite (CRS)
o Army Special Operations Unit - Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN)

And to echo what others have said, that French issue Ruger stock is handsome, and would probably sell here, especially to those who find the regular carbine style stock too short.
 
barnbwt said:
"Hiding behind a street corner one of them gave him a shot in the knee from like 25yrds away"
That's real great and all that the (for all anyone apparently knew) imminent lethal threat to all around was not dealt with swiftly, but 'shoot to wound' is more of a happy accident than something to strive for in practice. Gun was real enough for the guy to get shot at & be crippled or bleed out, but I suppose he still didn't seem like an immediate enough threat for intentionally lethal force to the responders at the time :confused:

FWIW, not all US cops are with the LAPD/NYPD. We had that one officer, in a show of baddassery fit to be rendered by Frank Frazetta, take out a suicidal lunatic firing an AK wildly into the Austin, PD headquarters here in Texas, while holding the reigns of two adjacent horses in one hand at a distance of 100yds away, with a single shot. Not that that is at all common, either :p

TCB
Click to expand...
I just googled the Austin story, amazing. The officer himself credited Divine intervention. :)
 
The 9mm sub gun is great for returning fire quickly and Two or 3 mags should work until reinforcements get there. I saw a lot of 12 gauge shotguns also, they must carry according to the area they are in, or what their tasked with.
I would like to see more AR's in SBR config with suppressors on them, Just for the extra penetration and power. But the 9mm always worked well in the sub-gun role.
 
French civilian Rugers are demilitarized versions of the rifle only; they do not fire and are intended to be used for collecting purposes!
Click to expand...
I believe French citizens who jump through the right hoops can own AR-15's, so I'm sure there are civilian mini-14's (not AC556's) in private hands there. I'm not sure what the rules are regarding caliber, but Ruger certainly made the Mini-14 in .222 Remington as well as .223 Remington.
 
"I just googled the Austin story, amazing. The officer himself credited Divine intervention"
The shot took place at midnight, also :D
 
I saw a Mini-14 Ranch Rifle this afternoon at Wally World with the same stock as in the #5 post, minus the inletting a'la .30 Cal Carbine. Price was good, too!:)
 
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Those Beretta SMG's were issued to uniformed in Paris when I was there in '99. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

The cop I saw standing guard at a police station was a woman. The magazine was in the weapon.

The airport security was an unarmed gendarme (an older guy in a blue cop like uniform) and two young soldiers in fatigues carrying FAMAS rifles with the magazines out.

The cop who game me a quick tap on the shoulder at a Metro station had a pistol (MAB?) in a holster with a coiled wire lanyard. (I entered the metro with a lit cigarette.. that was a no-no.) His partner had one of those Beretta SMGs.

You couldn't find a public trash can at that time because Paris had a round of terror bombings. Every business put out the trash just a few moments before the garbage truck arrived. Every public wastebasket was welded shut or removed.

The cops I saw (except the gendarme) were all armed with a pistol and were in no short supply.
 
I'm just back from Paris. Fewer LE on the streets than one would expect. Some troops, whether Army itself or reserves, I couldn't say, but they were armed with the pretty distinctive FAMAS rifle. Among the gendarmerie, I saw what I believe to have been H&K G36Es but I can't swear to it. And a group in St Denis, the morning after the raids last Tuesday night that appear to have been some sort of rapid response unit were armed with MP 5s. I saw none of the Ruger rifles on this visit but have seen them in the past and I believe this is a second tier reserves firearm but don't know enough about how the gendarmes are organized to be sure.
 
Give the French their due with the Manurhin MR73, one of the finest revolvers ever made.
 
Which handguns do either French police or armed forces normally carry?
There doesn't seem to be a clear list posted anywhere (on this topic).

Because we are seeing Brussels on the new almost as often, what handguns/rifles do armed Belgian officers carry?

olafhardtB: In case any readers were not aware, French soldiers deployed into n.w Africa within the last few months either to fight a branch of Al Qaida, or defend an area from them.
This was probably in one of their former colonies.
 
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