This post assumes a actual civil war has started, law and order has broken down and you and your community need to take extreme measures to keep living. This is not to suggest you do any of this because people are looting stores in your downtown but for when mobs are going house to house for rape and murder. Which I believe will happen. Soon.
Israel is often attacked by mobs of people. They found that since Wahhabism and other (but not all) schools of Islamic jurisprudence suggest to adherents that dying in combat ensures you get to heaven they found it was difficult to manage what are essentially human wave tactics where people are OK with taking fatal wounds.
The solution they employed was one of the best examples of out side the box thinking I’ve ever seen. They armed individual soldiers with Ruger 10/22 rifles and had them wound instigators in the crowd. I’d heard they tend to aim for the legs.
The dynamics of mobs, especially when they’re politically motivated, is that they are either organized ahead of time and thus have some sort of command and control element or if they’re organically formed they are dependent ques from the most aggressive and excited members of the crowd. In either case there are “nodes of attention” for lack of a better term that hold the system that is the mob together. If those nodes are injured it can take the wind out of the crowds sails but there’s also the possibility that if the injury is fatal the crowd will just frenzy. If instead these nodes – the de facto leaders of the mob – need medical attention the crowd will begin to see other nodes change their focus to helping their comrades and many will follow.
If the person I also bleeding and screaming, there will be people who will throw up their hands and leave for less bloody pastures. Where death may not be feared pain can still inflict terror.
In a similar vein old timers in America may have heard of a riot control technique called “skip shooting” with buckshot which is a brutal but effective tactic to control mobs with a shotgun in federal prison. The Internet fails to mention this was originally developed for civilian mobs using birdshot which would kill less people.
To skip shoot (which takes a lot of practice) you basically shoot about a foot in front of the crowd. Unlike Hollywood’s magical bullets in the real world bullets ricochet by sort of skittering down the surface of what they hit. So picture skipping a stone on a pond – this is kinds what happens when you shoot the asphalt in front of a crowd. The rounds will also loss a lot of their kinetic energy meaning that like the Israeli .22 you’ll see more wounds and less one shot kills.
Both will be valuable techniques for communities to use in a complete collapse scenario where rioting and mob violence is occurring. I would say they would work well together for neighborhoods besieged by riots. These are “less lethal” but not “non lethal” though. .22 LR out of a rifle kill lots of folks:
The IDF will not disclose under what circumstances they will use the “Ruger” (as they refer to the weapon) saying that it is classified. We know it was originally used as a less-lethal weapon. Israeli press have quoted military staff saying it is “nonlethal”, but in my opinion the Israeli journalists are either mis-translating into English or are unaware of the distinction between “less-lethal” and “non-lethal”.
For a number of years after 2001, possibly more than five years, the IDF stopped using the Ruger 10/22 after a number of protesters were killed with the rifle. In an 18 month period between mid-2008 and the end of 2009, after its reintroduction, one Israeli newspaper reported that the IDF had expended about $300,000 USD worth of .22 LR ammunition, which at 2015 consumer pricing would work out to be over 1.5 million rounds of ammunition, or 20,000 per week!
That article was from 2015 and while we don’t know the exact number deaths vs people shot what we can see is that if you shoot enough people with a .22 rifle someone’s going to die.
OK, So what do you need to apply this knowledge?
A .22 caliber rifle – any sort as long as it’s reliable. A scope of some sort is a must because you want to shoot from a distance and you’ll be looking for identifiers we’ll get into later. If you can get a suppressor great. If not don’t sweat it. If it’s semi-auto skip the AR variants and go for the Ruger. They are the most reliable.
A shotgun – any reliable gun of any caliber where you can find birdshot and buckshot.
The ammo – CCI is my go to brand for .22 but Winchester is good. It doesn’t need to be fancy of have hollow points or anything. Any round will work for this strategy. If you’re using semi-auto get as many extra mags as you can afford. If you’re in a restricted state or just have some other kind of rifle ensure you have a way to keep ammo ready to reload. Heritage Manufacturing makes good quality leather belts and ammo pouches that hold .22. For about $30 you can get “slides” that hold ammo that fit on your belt. Finding good shotgun round carriers isn’t easy but Midway USA will have something.
For shotguns you want #5-#2 shot low brass. Buckshot is for when you have to really kill a guy. If you’re skip shooting people you’re trying to not go lethal but you want it to hurt. But with the shotgun you’re going to be with people hopefully one with a .22 rifle. I’ll get into that later.
Lights – Weapon lights are a great idea but at night you lighting up your rifle takes some of the benefits out of this strategy. One of the points of the .22 rifle strategy is that the crowd is confused and doesn’t know what to do. You don’t want to take the chance that someone in the crowd figures out they can just rush the flashlight. For the shotgun this is the opposite. The shotgun light is to show them you’re running a shotgun and you mean business.
Now how do you use it. OK picture the riot. If there is a organizing element, which for many riots there is, they will need ways to identify themselves to each other and assistants who are relaying orders to the crowd. An easy way to know if there is an organizing element is if you begin seeing pallets of bricks delivered to your cities.
In the Kenosha riots there were Antifa with ear pieces and radios, and you’ll often see them either wearing orange or neon reflective gear. Those are your targets. Look for people who seem to be agitating the crowd then watch who they’re talking with etc. These organized sieges last days, weeks and sometimes months and I expect will be almost permanent in some areas soon. So hopefully you and your neighbors are cooperating for the area defense. That said there is never a time for you to stop gathering intel. Even during a riot have non-combatants in your area taking notes if they can using binoculars or Ring doorbells. have them collect info on if they see any uniformity of the rioters, who’s doing what things like that.
If the mob is organic and not controlled you want to target the people who are the loudest or if you can seem to have the most friends. The natural leaders will stand out and must be taken out.
So, you have an idea of who’s directing traffic that night (or day) and are ready to act. You set up well away from the crowd out of easy reach. If you live in apartments on the top of a building where access is either cut off or ideally you have people working with you stopping people from entering. Or behind cover in your subdivision. As long as you can see what’s going on.
Then simply shoot the most active people you see giving orders. The legs are a good spot because it won’t stop the person from screaming. Then move on to the next person who is trying to get the crowd to regroup. Rinse and repeat.
If the crowd is still surging then it’s time for the shotgunner to skip a shot or two. If the crowd is truly dangerous use buckshot. Skip shooting is best used by people with a group who are able to mount a defense. If it’s just you, a shotgun and a crowd it’s slugs for everyone as Dave Chapelle says. The shotgun as a backup team member for you .22 rifleman is really where the skip shooting will shine by backing off any brave members who want to test their luck.
This is all a psychological game – the more wounded who need medical attention and are verbal about it the better. Every wounded mob member immediately takes at least one or two of their friends out of the fight. A dead mob member might only take one out.
Some questions that you might have:
Could you do this with .22 pistols? In theory yes, in practice you want to be much further way from the crowd. .22 pistols are for wood loafing, plinking, trapping and shooting skinny goblins that break into homes. But you have to use what you got.
Could you replace the .22 with a air rifle? In some areas people don’t have access to guns but air rifles that are pretty hard hitting. The problem is areas that restrict .22 LR also restrict .22 air rifles. But again use what you got but I think you’d need to employ even powerful air rifles in mass volley fire from fortified positions to stop a mob.
Why don’t I just shoot them with my AR/AK? I don’t know ask the Israelis. They deal with mobs more than me and use the technique, you do you. However if you can disperse a mob with $3 of .22 ammunition rather than loose 100 rounds of .223 then have to figure out a place to put those bodies wouldn’t you prefer that?
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Author Rob Taylor
