Much easier to destroy everything in your house at the same time. I'll stick with my.45 for stopping power. My friend likes to say his Glock 9mm is superior to my.45 because his holds 18 rounds and mine only holds 8. I just tell him he will need all 18 of his and I only need one of mine.
Don't count on a one shot stop even with the.45. If someone is trying to kill you, shoot the son of a bitch until he hits the ground. The.45 rocks but it's still a pistol round. All pistol rounds are inherently underpowered. Some are just less underpowered than others.
Is that a 1911 you've got? I love them. I find it the easiest handgun to shoot accurately and I love the flat profile for concealed carry. I can conceal a government model 5" 1911 easier than I can a baby glock. Figure that one out....
Most ranges explicitly disallow holster draws or other quick-shoot scenarios
Where are you that "most" ranges disallow this? Most of the ranges around these parts sponsor IDPA and IPSC events. Holster draws and quick-shooting are the whole point of such competitions.
Chances are you'll encounter a thug or a psychopath who is a combat veteran of many firefights.
Huh? Got a citation for that or are you just making assumptions? Most criminals aren't "combat veterans". They rely on intimidation and fear to get what they want. When confronted with someone who has the means and will to fight back they will usually run away.
"Who wins" falls into another hollywood myth: that people fall down when you shoot them. They don't neccessairily. They may be shot several times and still returning fire.
People don't fall down when you shoot them unless you destroy the nervous system (headshot for you gamer types) or they fall down because of the shock of being hit.
Shock is a variable factor and can not be counted on to stop someone. Some people will fall down screaming after being shot in the arm. Others will absorb multiple shots that ultimately prove to be fatal, yet continue to fight until their blood pressure drops low enough that they pass out. The 1986 FBI shootout is a good example of this.
There are only two surefire ways for a bullet to stop someone. It can destroy/disable the nervous system or it can cause enough blood loss that they physically can't keep functioning. The former is problematic because it's exceedingly difficult to hit such a small target when the adrenaline is pumping and your life is on the line. The latter is problematic because even if you destroy the heart or sever a major blood vessel, they will still have at least 15 seconds of willful activity before they are stopped.
There's a reason why police officers are trained to shoot center of mass and to keep on shooting until the person goes down. Remember that the next time you see a headline like "Cops shoot man 12 times".
You are looking at the options available to Hitler from a retrospective post war view; i.e already assuming that WW2 would be a war of attrition
All wars are wars of attrition, unless your enemy decides to throw in the towel. It should have been obvious by 1941 that neither Stalin nor Churchill would be willing to do so, so it strikes me as kind of insane to not prepare for a war of attrition.
If that had happened, and Germany been free to direct its resources west/mediterranian again, there was nothing what so ever to fear from America.
I'm not sure I buy that she would have had "nothing whatsoever to fear from America". The United States still had a sizable edge over Germany in both GDP and population. Pacifying all that territory in the USSR would have been a huge drain on German manpower and material. The US will have the atomic bomb by 1945 regardless of what happens on the Eastern Front. The German program never got off the ground and it seems doubtful that they could catch up as fast as the Soviets (RDS-1 didn't happen till 1949), given that the Soviet program had the benefit of espionage networks that the Germans didn't have.
Declaring War on the US did not change his position in Europe much
You are looking at it in a vacuum and assuming that the only contribution made by the US was Patton's Army. What about lend-lease? For the most part the Red Army produced it's own weapons but not the logistical system to keep them supplied. Most of their trucks, locomotives and rolling stock came from lend-lease. Virtually all of their aviation fuel came from lend-lease, as did a sizable percentage of their aircraft. Foodstuffs, boots, and raw materials were also received from lend-lease. Where would the Soviet war effort be without this aid?
I don't think it would be "shrug it off" if we intercepted a North Korean warhead over the Pacific. But at least we could respond with conventional forces or nuclear weapons in the tactical role. We wouldn't have to reach into the playbook and start killing millions of civilians right off the bat.
The problem with your analogy is that was pre-bomb
I didn't make any analogies, all I did was point out the fact that nation-states don't always make rational decisions. I've not seen anything since Trinity that suggests this has changed.
and with ICBMs you can have their asses glowing in the dark in less than an hour.
That's small comfort. Part of the point of missile defense is to give the President another option besides "kill them all". If North Korea nukes an American city then our choice is to accept it (thus negating the concept of deterrence) or respond in kind and kill millions of people.
That is a BIG difference between Japan, who if you read Yamamoto was not convinced they would actually win against the USA, but thought if they damaged the navy bad enough they could sue for peace, and Germany who thought the USSR would fall quickly thus giving them only one front.
As I said, I wasn't making an analogy. The point of bringing up Japan and Germany was simply to demonstrate that nation-states don't always make good decisions. Do you think it was rational for Japan to risk her future on the theory that the United States would come to the bargaining table rather than crush her with our industrial superiority? Was there a single event in American history that would suggest we'd come to the bargaining table while we retained the ability to defeat them? Do you think it was rational for Hitler to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbor when it was already evident that the USSR wouldn't be quickly conquered?
The bomb has changed all that.
No it hasn't. The fact that Israel has nuclear weapons has been a badly kept secret since the late 1960s and they were still attacked in 1973. Going back to the point that nation-states don't always make good decisions, do you think it was wise for King Hussein to throw his lot in with Egypt during the Six Day War after the Egyptian Air Force had been wiped out?
How many cargo ships do you suppose sail into the United States from North Korea or Iran? I know it's popular around here to hype this threat but the reality of the situation is that it wouldn't be nearly as easy to pull off this kind of attack as people think. Is it possible? Certainly. Should we worry about it? Probably. Does that mean we should ignore the missile threat? Not in my mind.
If the USSR couldn't deliver a nuke to US soil, then it is unlikely that the US could've done the reverse
Key difference: The US had forward operating bases. You can't reach the USSR from North America with 1940s/1950s bomber technology but you can reach it from Turkey, the UK, Japan, Italy, Iceland, Norway, etc, etc.
Third point (I guess I'm trying to set a record for most replies to a single post), but it's debatable that Germany would have won the war if she had prevailed in the East. For one thing, 'prevailing' on the Eastern Front isn't possible in the conventional sense, unless you can convince Stalin to throw in the towel or fight all the way to Vladivostok.
More to the point though, the Manhattan Project was never aimed at Japan. It was aimed at Germany. The German atomic weapons program was a joke -- they were no where near as far along as we were. Nor did they have the spy network that enabled Stalin to get the bomb years ahead of schedule. Do you think that Germany would have had the political will to continue the war when her cities started being destroyed? Do you think she could have beaten the Allies on the battlefield if they had started using a-bombs as tactical weapons?
Please don't say that German technology would have made the difference either. The British actually beat the Germans to having a workable jet engine. The Allies were ahead of them in terms of radar and electronics technology. We compromised their encryption systems and were decoding their traffic almost as fast as they were. They never came up with a workable proximity fuse for the anti-aircraft role. We had a commanding lead in naval technology. About the only area they had us bested in was rocketry -- but those were terror weapons that had no meaningful impact on the Allied war effort.
One other thing, sorry to reply twice, but wars are decided by Quartermasters. There's a saying in military circles, "Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." Having the best military technology and tactics in the world means absolutely nothing if you can't supply your troops with fuel, food and bullets.
Did I say it was a 'self evident thing'? All I said was that Germany was fighting twenty times her population and five times her GDP by the end of 1941.
Whatever else you might think of the German war plan, declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor was the height of insanity. It allowed FDR to get a free (in terms of political capital) pass to fully enter the European war and to implment the "Europe first" strategy that condemned the Third Reich to a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Had I been in Hitler's shoes I would have condemned the Pearl Harbor attack and done everything I could to muddle public opinion in the United States. Imagine FDR trying to explain why he was prosecuting an undeclared war in the Atlantic with resources that could have been used against the Japanese. Imagine trying to sell Congress on the notion of sending supplies to Stalin while the Philippines were being overrun and the West Coast was perceived to be in danger of coming under attack.
The other side of the coin is the Japanese stupidity in going to war with the United States. By most accounts we defeated them with just 15% of our war production, the rest went to Europe. That should give you an idea of just how great of a disparity there was between the Japanese and American economies in the 1940s.
You can say that they were banking on a quick victory and a negotiated peace, but it seems to me that you've already lost if you are relying on your enemy to throw in the towel when he has the resources to beat you. It also ignores history -- the United States had proven itself willing to fight a total war against it's own people during the American Civil War (see Sherman's march to the sea and Sherdian's valley campaign), why would the Japanese or Germans make the assumption that we wouldn't be willing to do the same against them?
I think the cost of rebuilding Honolulu or San Francisco from the ground up would exceed the cost of a missile defense system, but maybe that's just me.....
See my other reply for an answer. Nation-states do not always make rational decisions. It doesn't strike me as good policy to trust that our enemies will behave rationally when the consequence of being wrong is millions of dead Americans.
None of that, even if true (the Pearl Harbor bit is blatantly flase) has any bearing on my point that nation-states do not always make rational decisions.
Nice attempt at changing the topic though. I'll consider that your concession of the previous point.
Since no defensive system will be 100% perfect and there are other delivery systems (cruise missiles, aircraft) for nuclear weapons, I'd say that you don't have to worry about that.....
Honestly, do you really think that in a time of peace (and probably even at war) someone in charge of running a country would be foolish enough to authorize a nuclear missile strike against another sovereign country?
Yes, I do. Is there some rule that says nation-states always make rational decisions? History suggests that they don't. Japan went to war with a nation that had twice her population and almost six times her GDP. Germany went to war with virtually the entire world -- she was fighting twenty times her population and nearly five times her GDP by the end of 1941.
Any logical observer could have predicted the outcome of those choices. Indeed, many people in the defense establishments of both countries warned what the result would be -- but the leadership pressed ahead anyway. Millions of people on both sides died as a result. The only difference between then and now is that it would take a lot less time to run up the body count with modern technology.
It doesn't strike me as wise foreign policy to trust that our enemies will make a rational decision. Not when millions of people will die if they don't. Having a missile defense gives the President a second option. What would you rather see, the geopolitical fall out from a warhead that was shot down over the Pacific or the geopolitical fall out from the warhead that wiped out Honolulu or San Francisco?
Reagan is dead, his "Starwars" waste of money should join him. We could easily have free medical care for everyone if we cut the defense department to a reasonable size.
I hate to break it to you but nothing is "free"......
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Much easier to destroy everything in your house at the same time. I'll stick with my .45 for stopping power. My friend likes to say his Glock 9mm is superior to my .45 because his holds 18 rounds and mine only holds 8. I just tell him he will need all 18 of his and I only need one of mine.
Don't count on a one shot stop even with the .45. If someone is trying to kill you, shoot the son of a bitch until he hits the ground. The .45 rocks but it's still a pistol round. All pistol rounds are inherently underpowered. Some are just less underpowered than others.
Is that a 1911 you've got? I love them. I find it the easiest handgun to shoot accurately and I love the flat profile for concealed carry. I can conceal a government model 5" 1911 easier than I can a baby glock. Figure that one out....
Much better to have a longgun (e.g. shotgun) to ensure the job gets done.
Everything is a trade off. To be sure, the shotgun gives you more stopping power. But the handgun has a few selling points:
Most ranges explicitly disallow holster draws or other quick-shoot scenarios
Where are you that "most" ranges disallow this? Most of the ranges around these parts sponsor IDPA and IPSC events. Holster draws and quick-shooting are the whole point of such competitions.
Chances are you'll encounter a thug or a psychopath who is a combat veteran of many firefights.
Huh? Got a citation for that or are you just making assumptions? Most criminals aren't "combat veterans". They rely on intimidation and fear to get what they want. When confronted with someone who has the means and will to fight back they will usually run away.
"Who wins" falls into another hollywood myth: that people fall down when you shoot them. They don't neccessairily. They may be shot several times and still returning fire.
People don't fall down when you shoot them unless you destroy the nervous system (headshot for you gamer types) or they fall down because of the shock of being hit.
Shock is a variable factor and can not be counted on to stop someone. Some people will fall down screaming after being shot in the arm. Others will absorb multiple shots that ultimately prove to be fatal, yet continue to fight until their blood pressure drops low enough that they pass out. The 1986 FBI shootout is a good example of this.
There are only two surefire ways for a bullet to stop someone. It can destroy/disable the nervous system or it can cause enough blood loss that they physically can't keep functioning. The former is problematic because it's exceedingly difficult to hit such a small target when the adrenaline is pumping and your life is on the line. The latter is problematic because even if you destroy the heart or sever a major blood vessel, they will still have at least 15 seconds of willful activity before they are stopped.
There's a reason why police officers are trained to shoot center of mass and to keep on shooting until the person goes down. Remember that the next time you see a headline like "Cops shoot man 12 times".
You are looking at the options available to Hitler from a retrospective post war view; i.e already assuming that WW2 would be a war of attrition
All wars are wars of attrition, unless your enemy decides to throw in the towel. It should have been obvious by 1941 that neither Stalin nor Churchill would be willing to do so, so it strikes me as kind of insane to not prepare for a war of attrition.
If that had happened, and Germany been free to direct its resources west/mediterranian again, there was nothing what so ever to fear from America.
I'm not sure I buy that she would have had "nothing whatsoever to fear from America". The United States still had a sizable edge over Germany in both GDP and population. Pacifying all that territory in the USSR would have been a huge drain on German manpower and material. The US will have the atomic bomb by 1945 regardless of what happens on the Eastern Front. The German program never got off the ground and it seems doubtful that they could catch up as fast as the Soviets (RDS-1 didn't happen till 1949), given that the Soviet program had the benefit of espionage networks that the Germans didn't have.
Declaring War on the US did not change his position in Europe much
You are looking at it in a vacuum and assuming that the only contribution made by the US was Patton's Army. What about lend-lease? For the most part the Red Army produced it's own weapons but not the logistical system to keep them supplied. Most of their trucks, locomotives and rolling stock came from lend-lease. Virtually all of their aviation fuel came from lend-lease, as did a sizable percentage of their aircraft. Foodstuffs, boots, and raw materials were also received from lend-lease. Where would the Soviet war effort be without this aid?
It's not like playing Civ2. You can't rush build it after you realize you need it.
Get some realism before you enter the real world, kid.
I don't think it would be "shrug it off" if we intercepted a North Korean warhead over the Pacific. But at least we could respond with conventional forces or nuclear weapons in the tactical role. We wouldn't have to reach into the playbook and start killing millions of civilians right off the bat.
The problem with your analogy is that was pre-bomb
I didn't make any analogies, all I did was point out the fact that nation-states don't always make rational decisions. I've not seen anything since Trinity that suggests this has changed.
and with ICBMs you can have their asses glowing in the dark in less than an hour.
That's small comfort. Part of the point of missile defense is to give the President another option besides "kill them all". If North Korea nukes an American city then our choice is to accept it (thus negating the concept of deterrence) or respond in kind and kill millions of people.
That is a BIG difference between Japan, who if you read Yamamoto was not convinced they would actually win against the USA, but thought if they damaged the navy bad enough they could sue for peace, and Germany who thought the USSR would fall quickly thus giving them only one front.
As I said, I wasn't making an analogy. The point of bringing up Japan and Germany was simply to demonstrate that nation-states don't always make good decisions. Do you think it was rational for Japan to risk her future on the theory that the United States would come to the bargaining table rather than crush her with our industrial superiority? Was there a single event in American history that would suggest we'd come to the bargaining table while we retained the ability to defeat them? Do you think it was rational for Hitler to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbor when it was already evident that the USSR wouldn't be quickly conquered?
The bomb has changed all that.
No it hasn't. The fact that Israel has nuclear weapons has been a badly kept secret since the late 1960s and they were still attacked in 1973. Going back to the point that nation-states don't always make good decisions, do you think it was wise for King Hussein to throw his lot in with Egypt during the Six Day War after the Egyptian Air Force had been wiped out?
Neither are places below sea level on river deltas that are sinking into the Gulf of Mexico but we are rebuilding that one.......
How many cargo ships do you suppose sail into the United States from North Korea or Iran? I know it's popular around here to hype this threat but the reality of the situation is that it wouldn't be nearly as easy to pull off this kind of attack as people think. Is it possible? Certainly. Should we worry about it? Probably. Does that mean we should ignore the missile threat? Not in my mind.
If the USSR couldn't deliver a nuke to US soil, then it is unlikely that the US could've done the reverse
Key difference: The US had forward operating bases. You can't reach the USSR from North America with 1940s/1950s bomber technology but you can reach it from Turkey, the UK, Japan, Italy, Iceland, Norway, etc, etc.
Third point (I guess I'm trying to set a record for most replies to a single post), but it's debatable that Germany would have won the war if she had prevailed in the East. For one thing, 'prevailing' on the Eastern Front isn't possible in the conventional sense, unless you can convince Stalin to throw in the towel or fight all the way to Vladivostok.
More to the point though, the Manhattan Project was never aimed at Japan. It was aimed at Germany. The German atomic weapons program was a joke -- they were no where near as far along as we were. Nor did they have the spy network that enabled Stalin to get the bomb years ahead of schedule. Do you think that Germany would have had the political will to continue the war when her cities started being destroyed? Do you think she could have beaten the Allies on the battlefield if they had started using a-bombs as tactical weapons?
Please don't say that German technology would have made the difference either. The British actually beat the Germans to having a workable jet engine. The Allies were ahead of them in terms of radar and electronics technology. We compromised their encryption systems and were decoding their traffic almost as fast as they were. They never came up with a workable proximity fuse for the anti-aircraft role. We had a commanding lead in naval technology. About the only area they had us bested in was rocketry -- but those were terror weapons that had no meaningful impact on the Allied war effort.
One other thing, sorry to reply twice, but wars are decided by Quartermasters. There's a saying in military circles, "Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." Having the best military technology and tactics in the world means absolutely nothing if you can't supply your troops with fuel, food and bullets.
Did I say it was a 'self evident thing'? All I said was that Germany was fighting twenty times her population and five times her GDP by the end of 1941.
Whatever else you might think of the German war plan, declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor was the height of insanity. It allowed FDR to get a free (in terms of political capital) pass to fully enter the European war and to implment the "Europe first" strategy that condemned the Third Reich to a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Had I been in Hitler's shoes I would have condemned the Pearl Harbor attack and done everything I could to muddle public opinion in the United States. Imagine FDR trying to explain why he was prosecuting an undeclared war in the Atlantic with resources that could have been used against the Japanese. Imagine trying to sell Congress on the notion of sending supplies to Stalin while the Philippines were being overrun and the West Coast was perceived to be in danger of coming under attack.
The other side of the coin is the Japanese stupidity in going to war with the United States. By most accounts we defeated them with just 15% of our war production, the rest went to Europe. That should give you an idea of just how great of a disparity there was between the Japanese and American economies in the 1940s.
You can say that they were banking on a quick victory and a negotiated peace, but it seems to me that you've already lost if you are relying on your enemy to throw in the towel when he has the resources to beat you. It also ignores history -- the United States had proven itself willing to fight a total war against it's own people during the American Civil War (see Sherman's march to the sea and Sherdian's valley campaign), why would the Japanese or Germans make the assumption that we wouldn't be willing to do the same against them?
I think the cost of rebuilding Honolulu or San Francisco from the ground up would exceed the cost of a missile defense system, but maybe that's just me.....
See my other reply for an answer. Nation-states do not always make rational decisions. It doesn't strike me as good policy to trust that our enemies will behave rationally when the consequence of being wrong is millions of dead Americans.
Yeah, you guys are so compassionate, ONLY killing 240,000 innocent people.
There are no innocent people in a total war.
None of that, even if true (the Pearl Harbor bit is blatantly flase) has any bearing on my point that nation-states do not always make rational decisions.
Nice attempt at changing the topic though. I'll consider that your concession of the previous point.
Since no defensive system will be 100% perfect and there are other delivery systems (cruise missiles, aircraft) for nuclear weapons, I'd say that you don't have to worry about that.....
Honestly, do you really think that in a time of peace (and probably even at war) someone in charge of running a country would be foolish enough to authorize a nuclear missile strike against another sovereign country?
Yes, I do. Is there some rule that says nation-states always make rational decisions? History suggests that they don't. Japan went to war with a nation that had twice her population and almost six times her GDP. Germany went to war with virtually the entire world -- she was fighting twenty times her population and nearly five times her GDP by the end of 1941.
Any logical observer could have predicted the outcome of those choices. Indeed, many people in the defense establishments of both countries warned what the result would be -- but the leadership pressed ahead anyway. Millions of people on both sides died as a result. The only difference between then and now is that it would take a lot less time to run up the body count with modern technology.
It doesn't strike me as wise foreign policy to trust that our enemies will make a rational decision. Not when millions of people will die if they don't. Having a missile defense gives the President a second option. What would you rather see, the geopolitical fall out from a warhead that was shot down over the Pacific or the geopolitical fall out from the warhead that wiped out Honolulu or San Francisco?
No critisism. Less freedom than the "suggestion box" at my office. Lame.
Nicely done! Wish I had some mod points to throw at you :)
A link for the newbies who don't get the reference.
Reagan is dead, his "Starwars" waste of money should join him. We could easily have free medical care for everyone if we cut the defense department to a reasonable size.
I hate to break it to you but nothing is "free"......
That must explain why Iran and North Korea are so busy working on cargo ships and airplanes as delivery systems......