PL>I wonder why people enjoy deriding the M3 and the M76.  They were good
  >designs, ugly yesm but they work as intended.  Now the MP5 seems to
  >dominate but I am not sure why we need roller delay action and
  >complicated designs.
        About the only thing wrong with the M76 was the chamber, which
ended up being reworked. It had a bad problem with jams and case
separations on a hot gun until that was done. Once that got taken care
of, it wasn't bad at all. It was originally intended as a sort of
domestic equivalent of the Swedish K. Locally, the Washoe County
Sheriffs Office carried them for awhile for SWAT ops.
        In the case of the MP5, the big thing with this gun, aside from
the fact that the Brits and the Germans carry it, (the other guy's
weapons are always better regardless of the actual merits) is that it
fires from a closed bolt which is a bit more accurate for guys who don't
get much chance to practice, (And you do have to practice with SMGs
firing from an open bolt or you don't hit anything with them) and some
bureaucrats like the idea of being able to swap trigger packs so that
they can make sure that nobody fires rock & roll without a bureaucratic
decision.
        For my money, there was a gun that would have been a lot better
had anyone actually produced it. Back in the early 70's when I was in
highschool, there was this police weapon called the Fox Carbine, which
was a .45 patrol rifle/SMG. It had swappable trigger packs, a three
number combination lock that I could live without, but modern
bureaucrats would love it, and it could take a cattle prod on a bayonet
lug as an auxillary weapon for riots. (Well, it was the 70's,  and riots were on everybodies mind it seems.) You could do
everything with the Fox carbine that you can do with the MP-5, and you'd
have the added stopping power of the .45ACP cartridge, which would seem
to be a better bet for an entry gun because of the excessive penetration
problems that you can have with a 9mm. Best of all, it used M3 magazines
of which there was an endless supply back then, which lowered costs
considerably. In all, a very good police design that was well adapted to
what cops currently do with their Heckler & Koch imports and not nearly
as expensive.
        They never made many of these and if you see one, it's a
collectors item, and an expensive one at that. Given current
restrictions, you don't see prototypes of weapons like that anymore as
private ventures, which is a shame. Personally, I think that we're
losing our competency at weapons design as a result, and that tendency
to buy whatever European special ops outfits are using, aggravates that
condition.
        In the end, we're not serving our own best interests by
slavishly imitating what we see in Europe. It doesn't matter if it's
Charlie Beckwith trying to clone the SAS here, (which is what he tried
to do with Delta) or our tendency to grab whatever the Europeans are
using whether than encouraging innovation here, in the end I don't think
that we're going to be well served. American problems would be better
handled by our engaging some brain cells and producing American
solutions.
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 X SLMR 2.1a X Nevada, a place where dynamite is a household appliance.
--- Maximus 3.01
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