Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, writes:

When the people of a nation have been disarmed and oppressed, it is fanciful to expect them to rise up against the well-armed government which is oppressing them.  The Founding Fathers knew that and thus enshrined in the Constitution the right to keep and bear arms, not solely for defense against robbers or home invaders but also against a tyrannical government.

In World War 2, the United States air-dropped Liberator pistols to enable disarmed people in The French Resistance to kill Nazis. That wasn’t enough to win the war – troops in the air, on the seas and on the ground were still needed – but it was a gesture of faith in ordinary people’s ability to seize control of their own future.

I think we should do it again, in Cuba and Iran, with leaflets saying. “It’s your country. Take it back.”

What can it hurt?

Joe Doakes

 

The Liberator was a single-shot .45 pistol with a rate of fire of about one round a minute; it had a plug bolt, and no extractor – the user would run a stick down the bore to extract the case after firing. It was literally useful for nothing but knifepoint range assassinations. It came with, essentially, a Bazooka Joe comic (kids, ask your parents) showing illiterate tribesmen how to use it.

Records of its use are sketchy, but doesn’t love the concept?

I’m going to advocate for a revival of the “Sten” gun – a submachine gun designed and built in record time in the UK right after Dunkirk, when speed and simplicity were king;  made out of stampings so crude the Soviets looked and said “uh, that’s some crude stampings, there) with only the bolt and barrel being machined, and using the trove of 9mm ammunition captured in North Africa until domestic manufacturing started, It equipped most of the Commonwealth armies (at least among troops that didn’t rate a Thompson) and was airdropped into occupied Europe in prodigious numbers.  Iy was also so simple that plans airdropped into Poland, France, Norway and Yugoslavia allowed them to be manufactured in quantity in occupied Europe.   

Crude?  Absolutely.  Some Brits claimed theirs jammed every time they were fired.  The one I shot had the back receiver cap fall off with the last round I fired. 

But it cost $15 in 1944 dollars to build, with maybe five man-hours of time, including machining.   

Apropos not much.  Honest.  

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, March 16th, 2026 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Geekery, Victim Disarmament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.