Armageddon???? (Part Fifty Up)

[Firethorn]

I have a .300 Weatherby, and Weatherby doesn't make anything BUT magnums.

I have a number of bolt actions, but the action on that one is so long that I always notice when I'm pulling the bolt back.

I hate to think how a .416 would hurt, even with a muzzle break and recoil pad.

My limit for the .300 is 4 rounds at the range.

[Gerald Tarrant]

Clearly, we're going to have to make gun ownership MANDATORY, like Switzerland, and teach people how to shoot.

I third that.

By the way, shouldn't there be a scene where a scientist methodically fires guns of various calibers into a Baldrick corpse and measures the radius and depth of the resulting hole to see how effective those guns are against the enemy?

And then broadcast those findings along with information from the autopsies (is that the word that's used for non-human disections?) about where you can cause the most damage. "Studies have shown that Baldricks maintain 78% of their fighting capacity after losing an arm, aim for the.." "Would you like to know more?"

[KlavoHunter]

Not quite, what's going on is much sneakier than that. Luga will do some explaining shortly.

Ah, very well!

[Firethorn]

Tough doesn't cover it.

6 rounds of .32, 9 rounds of .45, 8 30-06, and 3 .416 WBY, even if the last 2 were somewhat redundant.

Still, the .416 and 30-06 had far more effect per round than .223, of which 30 weren't doing it at times.

I'd rate 7.62x54 as 'marginal', anything below that as 'insufficient for duty use'. To include high velocity +P+ .45.

I'd expect to see 'Israeli carry' to become far more common(I'm referring here to the many pictures of hot ladies in civilian dress with M16/M4s on their backs). As for those unwilling to carry a full rifle, I'd see the .500 S&W Magnum becoming a common carry item. It's still only a handgun, but at short range it might work in sufficient number against a sole Baldrick.

[Xess]

Having listened to Johnny Cash's When The Man Comes Around I can't help but think a version of that song titled When Man Comes Around would be the perfect theme song for this story.

[JointStrikeFighter]

What about the Russian 9*39mm rounds? Would they be a suitable candidate for a short range round?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Tough doesn't cover it.

6 rounds of .32, 9 rounds of .45, 8 30-06, and 3 .416 WBY, even if the last 2 were somewhat redundant.

Still, the .416 and 30-06 had far more effect per round than .223, of which 30 weren't doing it at times.

I'd rate 7.62x54 as 'marginal', anything below that as 'insufficient for duty use'. To include high velocity +P+ .45.

I'd expect to see 'Israeli carry' to become far more common(I'm referring here to the many pictures of hot ladies in civilian dress with M16/M4s on their backs). As for those unwilling to carry a full rifle, I'd see the .500 S&W Magnum becoming a common carry item. It's still only a handgun, but at short range it might work in sufficient number against a sole Baldrick.

I suspect that any handgun below a .500 S&W Magnum would be inadequate against baldricks. Next would be sixgun rounds like the .500 Linebaugh, .475 Linebaugh, the .480 Ruger, the S&W .460XVR and .454 Casull. If one were attempting to compensate for quality with quantity, then .44 Magnum or .45 Colt in heavy Ruger sixguns, using heavyweight hard-cast bullets might do it. (Even the much-scorned Desert Eagle, but compared to a big sixgun, they're an ergonomic nightmare and are finicky enough that they're still best relegated to "Queen of the gun safe" status.) And even then . . . handguns are handguns and rifles are rifles. It'd probably be just enough to slow the baldrick down long enough to get to that shiny new African safari rifle, or that 12 gauge shotgun loaded with slugs.

Though given that the .30-06 at range does seem to get a baldrick's attention, and since the .308 Winchester will do most of what the .30-06 will do with 150-168 grain bullets, you'd probably see a big push (if not outright legislation) to get civilians to own AR-10s, Remington 750s, and other .308 chambered semi-autos, and .30-06 or 7mm Remington Magnum semi-autos. Not everyone can handle the sort of rifle that'd put a cape buffalo, or a baldrick on it's ass with one shot, after all.

Working down the power scale, massed fire (from many people, obviously) from fast-handling lever-action rifles, like the Marlin 1895 in .45-70 Government, or even lever-guns in .44 Magnum, .45 Colt, and other large revolver calibers would slow a baldrick down. And for those too recoil-sensitive for any of the above, there's always the Ruger Mini-14 or vast quantities of SKS rifles in 7.62x39, which will have at least enough momentum to make them better than .223 Remington.

And there is, of course, the aforementioned 12 gauge shotgun.

[Shroom Man 777]

In the Philippines, most of our security guards are armed. Those guys guarding banks when the armored car rolls in with new cash, those guys pack M-4s. One of the guards I've seen has a USAS-12 (an auto-shotgun not much different from the AA-12).

Man, for supposedly gun-nut Amerikans, your rent-a-cops are...meh

[Zed Snardbody]

In the Philippines, most of our security guards are armed. Those guys guarding banks when the armored car rolls in with new cash, those guys pack M-4s. One of the guards I've seen has a USAS-12 (an auto-shotgun not much different from the AA-12).

Man, for supposedly gun-nut Amerikans, your rent-a-cops are...meh

Its a liability issue. Its one thing for a home owner to be armed and to take down a burglar, its another for a mall cop to put 3 into a shop lifter.

The dirty little secret about private security is that its there to be on display not stop all that much. You watch, notify and be a good witness while keeping your self safe. Even armed security, for the most part its the same thing, banks are insured its in no ones interest to have a gun fight in the loby, casinos its the same thing.

[Robo Jesus]

Ok, I've been giving some thought on the mechanics of the afterlife and other assorted random bits. Lots of conjecture here, but it makes sense on some levels.

Ok, we know that people when they die, they *usually (I'll explain the 'usually' in just a bit) end in either Heaven or Hell. Heaven has the habit of kicking a good portion of the souls who end up there out of heaven (usually those who won't mindlessly do what they're told). So, we know that there is some reason for where we end up. Now, if we are to go with the assumption that how you lead your life determines where you end up, then the actions/emotions/karma of our existence end up creating an imprint of some kind upon the soul which determines where it goes.

Now if this was the case of the soul having imprints, then it's very likely that people who have led passionate/emotional/action oriented lives are going to have a positive imprint upon their soul (positive does not always equate to "good" here people, just so you know). As Hell is said to be a realm of Chaos, Passion, and Wild Energies, then those with a positive charge are more likely to end up in Hell rather than Heaven. Now, you don't have to be evil to end up in hell, but 'evil' actions would in fact lead to a positive charge upon the soul more easily than 'good' actions. Therefore, Good and Evil do not play the defining role in where you end up in the afterlife, but they do play their role in things.

Now Heaven is thought to be a realm of inner peace, joy, serenity and all that rot. Now classically, these things have always been associated as being the opposite of the forces of action (essentially, the classical description would have been the word 'negative', but without the offensiveness or stigma that we currently associate with the word 'negative'). So, those who would live emotionally healthy lives, who would do 'good', or who had come to peace and/or serenity would likely have a negative charge, and end up in heaven. Whether they'd actually stay in heaven is a separate issue entirely though.

So, we know that at some point some higher dimensional being stepped through to Earth, and they did it without a beacon (Nephilim). A beacon of some kind to lock onto makes the trip much more easier to do. However, while the scientists could try to open a hole to heaven (by act of reversing the polarity!), without a beacon to lock onto, it would take a lot of trial and error as while they have the data for the hell portal, they don't know which part of the data is for opening the portal and which for is the beacon.


*Ok, to explain the usually. Humanity has been around for at least a hundred thousand years. It's an uncomfortable fact (as it implies that there is a HUGE amount of lost human history), but this is pretty much accepted by people who keep publishing genetics study reviews and the like. Now, in that one hundred thousand years, there have been at a minimum of one trillion souls of people who have been born and who have died. Heaven currently has somewhere between twenty billion to forty billion souls in it's possession (I couldn't find the post that said what the exact number was). Hell has somewhere around a hundred billion.

As there is one thousand billions in one trillion, there is a large number of missing souls here (about 850 billion to be more exact). Now, the story has implied that only very recently has heaven and hell come into contact with earth, and given that this sort of daemonic and angelic mythology is pretty recent (I think we can figure out when by looking at the numbers of souls Heaven and Hell currently possess with their domains and working out how long back it would take to get those numbers), this means that souls were ending up somewhere else before 'the stars were right' (Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn?) for the forces of Heaven and Hell to walk upon the earth.


Now, a while back there was talk of what happens to someone who dies in hell. As we know that the soul contains energy, and as energy cannot be destroyed, we know that death itself is kind of meaningless in the context it's being raised as. Now, energy can be redirected, siphoned, leeched, or allowed to atrophy, but energy cannot be destroyed. As there are about a hundred billion souls being tortured or whatnot in hell, we can reasonably say that the Baldricks get nothing from the deaths (I.E. destruction) of those souls, otherwise there would be about a hundred billion rotting faux corpses. So, we can assume one of a few things when a persons dies, or when the body of one of the dead is completely destroyed within hell. They either reappear somewhere else in hell, they end up taking in the energy of those being tortured alongside them and ascending to a level beyond that of Hell, or their souls can no longer hold onto that energy and they explode with the power of a nuclear bomb.

Actually, this raises another interesting question, what exactly is the soul? It's said within classical mythology that Demons and Angels do not have souls. Perhaps all the soul is is a way to tap into the energies of the universe. It would explain why the Angels and Demons would need the power provided by humanity, as they would be incapable of getting it on their own.

I digress though.

As for the issue of whether or not the damned can return to Earth, it would have some serious repercussions in terms of physics if the dead can infact 'step through'. The dead in the afterlife are essentially composed of Faux Matter, I.E. Energy turned into Matter. If they can step through those portals, then that means there is some way to turn energy into matter within the laws of physics (or maybe it's a loophole of some kind in quantum mechanics or the like) .

An issue which might arise from one of the dead stepping back to Earth would be whether or now their bodies would start to fall apart (that is something which could go either way depending on what the author decides, though let's assume it will so I can type out this scenario). If the Faux Matter can survive within say... three to six months let's say, then this would also mean that there is a chance the dead could infact breed with the living and produce viable offspring (though that depends entirely on whether or not that when the bodies of the dead are (re)formed that they also accurately reform the genetic codes of their sperm/ovum). If that is the case, then with the Faux Matter being able to last for a couple months, it would give the fetus a MAJOR chance for survival as most of the Faux Matter would have been replaced with an exceptional amount of regular matter (mainly though the nutrients and proteins provided by the umbilical cord).

Ok, I've rambled enough for now.

[Crayz9000]

I'm not particularly sure if you skipped physics, but one of the fundamental portions of Einstein's equations revolved around the relationship between matter and energy. It's fairly trivial to convert matter to energy, but it takes large amounts of energy to be able to do the opposite.

Fun fact: Energy is turned into matter pretty frequently inside of particle accelerators.

[Alan Bolte]

The idea that their skeletal structure is almost identical to ours, only "twisted," has a huge flaw. If they have wings, then regardless of whether the creature can fly or not, those wings need bones. This creature has six limbs, not four. It could still be the byproduct of genetic engineering or extreme long term selective breeding, but that talk of "If we go by bone count and position, this thing is human," has got to be modified.

Also, typo:

The railing, more decorative than ornamental, cracked free of the floor

[CaptainChewbacca]

Clearly, we're going to have to make gun ownership MANDATORY, like Switzerland, and teach people how to shoot.

I third that.

By the way, shouldn't there be a scene where a scientist methodically fires guns of various calibers into a Baldrick corpse and measures the radius and depth of the resulting hole to see how effective those guns are against the enemy?

And then broadcast those findings along with information from the autopsies (is that the word that's used for non-human disections?) about where you can cause the most damage. "Studies have shown that Baldricks maintain 78% of their fighting capacity after losing an arm, aim for the.." "Would you like to know more?"

It would have to be a live baldrick. As we've seen, baldricks decompose with such high speed that you couldn't do any reliable ballisticks test on them, unless it was killed in the dark, and then immediately frozen until testing could be performed.

Alan- The wings could be entirely muscle and ligament outgrowths of the shoulderblades.

[Robo Jesus]

I'm not particularly sure if you skipped physics, but one of the fundamental portions of Einstein's equations revolved around the relationship between matter and energy.

And where exactly in my post did I state that this wasn't the case?

It's fairly trivial to convert matter to energy, but it takes large amounts of energy to be able to do the opposite.

Fun fact: Energy is turned into matter pretty frequently inside of particle accelerators.

One of the things I was pointing out in that mini-side rant is that it is being done without any machinery (particle accelerators as an example ), and with an amount of energy that seems too low for the amount of matter coming out of the process if you look at what they've got. Essentially, the souls of the dead are willing matter into existance while not paying the needed energy costs that would be required for the amount of matter they are getting (based on what seems to be the core energies of the soul). So while your comment about basic physics is true, it's also very irrelevent to the point I was making.

[Alan Bolte]

There's a living creature, present or prehistoric, of anywhere near that size with boneless wings? I admit I'm no biology nerd, but I'm unfamiliar with any such animal.

[DarthShady]

As there is one thousand billions in one trillion, there is a large number of missing souls here (about 850 billion to be more exact). Now, the story has implied that only very recently has heaven and hell come into contact with earth, and given that this sort of daemonic and angelic mythology is pretty recent (I think we can figure out when by looking at the numbers of souls Heaven and Hell currently possess with their domains and working out how long back it would take to get those numbers), this means that souls were ending up somewhere else before 'the stars were right' (Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn?) for the forces of Heaven and Hell to walk upon the earth.Razz

That is an interesting point.Where did those souls end up? Could it be that they went directly to the higher dimension that the demons and angels are trying to get to.And if so, how do the demons(angels) stop human souls from getting there now?

This story keeps getting more interesting with each chapter.

It would have to be a live baldrick. As we've seen, baldricks decompose with such high speed that you couldn't do any reliable ballisticks test on them, unless it was killed in the dark, and then immediately frozen until testing could be performed.

We have seen from the story that baldricks are sensitive to lasers, is it possible to use lasers as a weapon against them?

[[R_H]]

[
Goddamn, you're right! 'Gary's shoes for men' and everything. Great chapter, Stuart! It certainly has dire implications if a Baldrick can manifest at random and start ripping people apart. One is bad enough, but what if it had been 3 or 6? Clearly, we're going to have to make gun ownership MANDATORY, like Switzerland, and teach people how to shoot.

Gun ownership is not mandatory here. Firstly, only male citizens have to do national service (it's voluntary for women, for some reason), whether it's the military, civil service (working with the elderly etc.) or civil defence (disaster relief, air-raid shelter maintenance etc.), and by no means do all of them chose go into the military. It's possible to the military service all at once (Durchdiener, which runs for a year) and those that do so do not keep their weapons at their residences after having done the Durchdiener (as far as I know). As a result of a guy murdering a teenage girl with his service rifle a few hours after returning from his initial training, weapons can now be stored at arsenals (which are being reopened) if the militiamen do not want to keep their weapons at home. Firearm ownership, although very easy, is not mandatory here.

[kdahm(the same one)]

What part of "there already is a company which makes brand-new Garands in .458 Winchester Magnum" do you fail to comprehend, huh?

I took a look at their website. First, they take existing rifles and modify them. They do not make new rifles. Second, the modifications are so extensive that it is essentially not a M1, but simply uses the same reciever. The cost of the modifications is $2500.

I am not sure how well the rifle will work in mass issue, anyway. There are the so called "tanker" garands, which have been modified by shortening the op rod and using a shorter barrel. All of the ones I've seen have been finicky and prone to function problems. This is a similar mod to McCanns. Fine for a small number, hand made and custom fitted.

For mass manufacture, the M1a is a better choice to start in the M1 family because it already has most of the desired modifications the US Army wanted in the Garand. For a larger caliber, it would need reciever lengthening, but that could be done by digging up the older T44 blueprints.

Now I have to wonder if my Dad's Garand is de-militarized. I know he said it was surplussed, but I never really thought to ask. Part of me childishly thought he'd brought it back with him from the Marines after Korea.

There is no de-militarization, as meaning modified from the original to reduce capability and make 'safer' for civilian hands. All of mine have totally GI parts and could be placed in a WWII or Korean platoon rifle rack and not be noticed (except the one with a new stock). M1s in civilian hands were a. sent by the US as military aid overseas, then surplussed by that government and reimported. b. sold by the CMP to qualified civilians. c. "lost" by servicemen on their way home. or d. new manufacture of recievers in very small numbers, most of which used GI parts kits for everything but the reciever.

[Firethorn]

Its a liability issue. Its one thing for a home owner to be armed and to take down a burglar, its another for a mall cop to put 3 into a shop lifter.

It's not just a liability issue. It's also a cost issue. An unarmed guard security contract can cost as much as $5-15 less per hour.

By the same token, there is still enough call for armed security that most guards who can qualify to be armed will do so for the extra pay.

It hasn't been tested yet, but there are pushes from the gunny side to hold businesses that prohibit carry on their premises to a higher standard - IE you disallow me, a trained, investigated, and licensed CCW holder from carrying you're now at least partially responsible for my safety.

I see this theory taking a huge jump. As well as security guards being issued rifles, not handguns.

HEHEHEHEHE...

If any of you are familiar with the 'mall ninja' concept, I just had the picture of a electric golf cart with a 50 mounted on it....

[Stuart]

Ok, we know that people when they die, they *usually (I'll explain the 'usually' in just a bit) end in either Heaven or Hell. Heaven has the habit of kicking a good portion of the souls who end up there out of heaven (usually those who won't mindlessly do what they're told). So, we know that there is some reason for where we end up. Now, if we are to go with the assumption that how you lead your life determines where you end up, then the actions/emotions/karma of our existence end up creating an imprint of some kind upon the soul which determines where it goes.

Not really, the working presumption is that heaven took the people it needed and closed the gates a long time ago. I refer you to the original SLAM thread on this. Everbody goes to hell regardless of their conduct here on earth. Even when heaven's gates were open, the people who went there were the "faithful" ie the blindly obedient. That doesn't need any real mystery to determine.

Now if this was the case of the soul having imprints, then it's very likely that people who have led passionate/emotional/action oriented lives are going to have a positive imprint upon their soul (positive does not always equate to "good" here people, just so you know). As Hell is said to be a realm of Chaos, Passion, and Wild Energies, then those with a positive charge are more likely to end up in Hell rather than Heaven. Now, you don't have to be evil to end up in hell, but 'evil' actions would in fact lead to a positive charge upon the soul more easily than 'good' actions. Therefore, Good and Evil do not play the defining role in where you end up in the afterlife, but they do play their role in things.

The above being the case, this speculation is deprived of its basis.

Ok, to explain the usually. Humanity has been around for at least a hundred thousand years. It's an uncomfortable fact (as it implies that there is a HUGE amount of lost human history), but this is pretty much accepted by people who keep publishing genetics study reviews and the like. Now, in that one hundred thousand years, there have been at a minimum of one trillion souls of people who have been born and who have died. Heaven currently has somewhere between twenty billion to forty billion souls in it's possession (I couldn't find the post that said what the exact number was). Hell has somewhere around a hundred billion.

Your numbers are an order of magnitude out here. The highest estimates of total human population top out at around 125 billion. Many of the more robust estimates fall into the range of 90 to 110 billion humans. I've gone with the top end of that range, of whom 100 billion are in hell, 10 billion in heaven.

As there is one thousand billions in one trillion, there is a large number of missing souls here (about 850 billion to be more exact). Now, the story has implied that only very recently has heaven and hell come into contact with earth, and given that this sort of daemonic and angelic mythology is pretty recent (I think we can figure out when by looking at the numbers of souls Heaven and Hell currently possess with their domains and working out how long back it would take to get those numbers), this means that souls were ending up somewhere else before 'the stars were right'

Once again, with the basic error in the data corrected, there are no missing souls to account for. 10 billion in heaven, 100 billion in hell is it

Now, a while back there was talk of what happens to someone who dies in hell. As we know that the soul contains energy, and as energy cannot be destroyed, we know that death itself is kind of meaningless in the context it's being raised as. Now, energy can be redirected, siphoned, leeched, or allowed to atrophy, but energy cannot be destroyed. As there are about a hundred billion souls being tortured or whatnot in hell, we can reasonably say that the Baldricks get nothing from the deaths (I.E. destruction) of those souls, otherwise there would be about a hundred billion rotting faux corpses. So, we can assume one of a few things when a persons dies, or when the body of one of the dead is completely destroyed within hell. They either reappear somewhere else in hell, they end up taking in the energy of those being tortured alongside them and ascending to a level beyond that of Hell, or their souls can no longer hold onto that energy and they explode with the power of a nuclear bomb.

The basic hypothesis is that there's a kind of life energy that humans build up during their lives that gets released when they die. That life energy boosts them through the barrier that separates levels and is expended in so doing. Once in the next level up, they start to accumulate life energy again. Only, the demons in hell and the angels in heaven tap that energy for their own purposes, to boost them up to the next level of existance. Hell does this by almosty infinitely proloning the deaths of the souls in the hell so they leach out the life energy as it accumulates, heaven by ritual chanting and submission etc that achieves the same end.

Actually, this raises another interesting question, what exactly is the soul? It's said within classical mythology that Demons and Angels do not have souls. Perhaps all the soul is is a way to tap into the energies of the universe. It would explain why the Angels and Demons would need the power provided by humanity, as they would be incapable of getting it on their own.

The soul is the projection of us into the next dimension or level of existance upwards. Assuming there is a downwards, the bodies etc we inhabit now are the "soul" of creatures on the next level of existance downwards. Angels and demons do have souls, they are just the projection of their bodies upwards into teh level of existance beyond theirs

As for the issue of whether or not the damned can return to Earth, it would have some serious repercussions in terms of physics if the dead can infact 'step through'. The dead in the afterlife are essentially composed of Faux Matter, I.E. Energy turned into Matter. If they can step through those portals, then that means there is some way to turn energy into matter within the laws of physics (or maybe it's a loophole of some kind in quantum mechanics or the like)

The whole situation has some serious repercussions for classical physics.

An issue which might arise from one of the dead stepping back to Earth would be whether or now their bodies would start to fall apart (that is something which could go either way depending on what the author decides, though let's assume it will so I can type out this scenario). If the Faux Matter can survive within say... three to six months let's say, then this would also mean that there is a chance the dead could infact breed with the living and produce viable offspring (though that depends entirely on whether or not that when the bodies of the dead are (re)formed that they also accurately reform the genetic codes of their sperm/ovum). If that is the case, then with the Faux Matter being able to last for a couple months, it would give the fetus a MAJOR chance for survival as most of the Faux Matter would have been replaced with an exceptional amount of regular matter (mainly though the nutrients and proteins provided by the umbilical cord).

Wait and see.

[Stuart]

The idea that their skeletal structure is almost identical to ours, only "twisted," has a huge flaw. If they have wings, then regardless of whether the creature can fly or not, those wings need bones. This creature has six limbs, not four. It could still be the byproduct of genetic engineering or extreme long term selective breeding, but that talk of "If we go by bone count and position, this thing is human," has got to be modified.

Not really, for example the main bone of the wing could be a wildly distorted scapula. We've established that the wings provide propulsion and steering not lift so that would fit quite nicely.

[Stuart]

For mass manufacture, the M1a is a better choice to start in the M1 family because it already has most of the desired modifications the US Army wanted in the Garand. For a larger caliber, it would need reciever lengthening, but that could be done by digging up the older T44 blueprints.

The simple solution to the M1 vs M1A argument is to say both. They're similar enough so that both can be put into service and producing both can use all the tooling that's available. Neither impact seriously on the resources needed for M16 production (they use wooden furniture for example and their components can be built using small machine shops.

We can refer to the revised M1A as the M114 and the revised M1 as the M115.

[Murazor]

The story is still good, but I've a couple of nitpicks to drop about the use of Spanish.

"una ropas de prostituta" sounds very, very odd. I'm not 100% positive about the Latin-American usage, but in Spain we would say something like "ropa de puton". Puton being a colloquial, somewhat less offensive form of puta and prostituta.


"Él era el hombre más valiente que he visto siempre.” Translates like "He was the bravest man I've always seen". Instead of siempre, it should be "nunca" and the phrase could be "Era el hombre mas valiente que nunca haya visto."

[Brovane]

Personally for myself if you didn't want to carry a full size rifle or shotgun I would think a high capacity double column .45 ACP handgun would be best. Load it with something like a +P+ 180grain Corbon rounds, basically supersonic .45 ACP. Having a Para-Ordnance our a Glock loaded with these rounds so you have between 13-14 rounds. Hell with a Para Ordnance P-14 with a +2 magazine you could have 16 rounds of .45 ACP plus one in the pipe ready to go. At least that should slow down a demon long enough for heavier fire power to go. The problem with a .500 S&W is it is a hell of a kick and in a revolver you only have 6 rounds. With a high capacity .45 you can squeeze out a lot of rounds fairly quickly and then you pop in a fresh magazine and you are ready to go again.

Of course I would imagine that several states will find the the Federal government invalidating there restrictive gun control laws unless they act quickly to do it themselves. I would also imagine that there will be some type of national carry law that will allow someone to basically bring a firearm any place they choose.

[CaptainChewbacca]

An acquaintance on another board has been reading this fic avidly, and though he can't register here asked me to post this:

Exotic Ammunition and Vampires. Explosives, exotic materials, and other interesting goodies. He thought it might be useful to the discussion here.