Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazryonh
Instead of disarming their agents, the FBI might want to give them something simpler to use. A pistol-caliber PDW might work well because it would have more points of contact and be easier to aim under stress than a handgun.
Speaking of FBI guns, I remember how in the first X-Files movie, Mulder goes to infiltrate a hostile facility while apparently being unarmed and ill-prepared. I thought that, since the TV series had been filmed in Vancouver for a long time, the production team might have just contacted the same film armourer as the Stargate TV series and given Mulder a touch more firepower for his mission. Something like a suppressed FN P90 (made famous in the Stargate TV series) might have worked well for someone in Mulder's situation. A P90 certainly would have been better than nothing while escaping from the rampaging Alien Colonists in the facility (and he didn't seem to have a backpack to get Scully the necessary clothing needed to survive in the hostile environment outside the facility either). |
A PDW isn't really any more convenient than an SMG or compact carbine, and for what a civilian agency like the FBI deals with PDW cartridges are a poor choice IMHO. The purpose of a PDW is to have something similar to or smaller than an SMG that still has good armour piercing properties. They tend to have pretty awful terminal ballistics because of this though so the only way that they are really effective is if you use them in full auto (which is actually viable due to their low recoil). The problem is though, do people want FBI agents spraying large numbers of armour piercing rounds in built up urban areas? And is this armour piercing capability really needed in most normal situations?
There is a case study in the idea of replacing a law enforcement body's sidearms with a PDW with the British MOD police. To reduce maintenance and training costs (so similar to this proposal) they decided that they would replace their Browning L9A1 pistols and L85A2 rifles with MP7s. However, the British government has never liked issuing full auto weapons to police so they are semi only. Having shot these semi only MP7s, I honestly feel that my Ruger 10/22 is a more capable man-stopper.
As a policy this has totally failed anyway, as they realised that they would still have to issue sidearms as personnel protection to anybody that was being deployed to a lot of foreign countries along with the fact that there are some roles where the MP7-SF is needlessly overt/militaristic. On the other end of the spectrum there are some situations where the MP7-SF is simply too underpowered and ranged so they have retained the L85A2. Along with this you have specialist units who decide they need to use other weapons. All told, rather than replacing the L9A1 and L85A2 with the MP7-SF, they have ended up also using SIG pistols, Glocks, the upgraded versions of the L85A2, MP5s and C8CQBs. It hasn't turned out to be quite the cost saving endeavour they were hoping for.