Comments by "" (@SusCalvin) on "America’s Thompson is Better Than You Think" video.

Giving the last-generation kit to security troops is tradition. There was home guard and government militia units and police troops in WW II armed with Great War weapons. Someone in a naval security role or watching a bridge as part of the home guard would probably not use their firearm but still needed to be armed with something. So they would get "castoffs" when frontline units were traded newly produced kit.
3
@andyfriederichsen One need they had in Europe was to arm a ton of home guard, militia and security troops. A lot of these people would be given old Great War surplus or get armed with the cheapest possible kit they could produce. If your job is to sit on a port and make sure commandos don't dynamite it, you probably don't need the best of the best. Same if your job is to be a partisan-chasing police unit somewhere, or rear line home guard for just in case an invasion comes. Or some lower-priority sector of the war, like garrison on Singapore.
2
I understand that quartermasters hate supplying everyone with their favourite caliber and parts. One method seems to be to keep a few floater loan pistols and rifles in the platoon or company, and just ditch them when they need weirdo foreign rounds or parts.
2
Local SWAT units are rare here. It's hard to understand how often smaller communities need a paramilitary unit. They fly in the national unit or the closest metro/regional unit here.
2
The Pacific is hard to understand from the euro-perspective. On paper it's very small operations with much less people than the huge fronts and urban sieges of Europe. But then you look at the map, and find that all these imperial japanese troops, US marines, locals and japanese worker auxilia are crammed onto a little rock two kilometers across. And they're fighting on battlefields as small as a couple football fields.
2
The army here used to stage an exercise to shoot off ammunition before it got old. Same with flares, shells and anything else.
2
@Gamerguy826 I thought the thompson wasn't a hit on the US home market for the same reason. It was legal to buy a thompson, but it cost a lot and why not just get a rifle instead. Agencies like the post office could afford them. The majority of firearms incidents were still cheap, concealable pistols or cheaper longarms, but someone using explosives or an automatic weapon pulled a lot of attention.
1
I thought the Thompson wasn't a hit on the civvie market either, because of the cost. Large agencies like the post office could afford them. They were legal, but a big investment. And people on the civvie market always compare with boring things like "can I buy a house?" "would I rather have a car?" Any time weapons like a Thompson, explosives and such was used it drew a lot of attention when people saw it as an escalation. Most firearms incidents were still concealable pistols and shortened shotguns or cheaper shotguns and rifles. And people using an automatic weapon or explosives is an escalation. Another alternative at the time was the BAR. I think that was only sold to the government. More with the manufacturer's choice than legality.
1
@larryspiller6633 They kept storing a lot of things through the entire Cold War, someone's job was to calculate how much baby formula and tea would be needed at depots. All these sundries including ammunition would age. I don't know exactly how old they wanted to keep it, just that they periodically renewed things up to the 90's. You could buy rations and weird army boxes at outlet stores. These things were sometimes not written down on paper. Every few decades they can still find some old explosives squirreled away in an army cache. During the Cold War they didn't want to be entirely dependent on central storages, people at platoon level in home guard might have military kit stored close by. If their job was to blow a bridge the moment the soviets were arriving, they had to be near the tools to do so.
1
To compare, they were arming government militia units and security troops in Europe with old Great War surplus. Partisan troops, police units, home guard units could all show up with wonky castoffs.
1
They start to use hand grenades or bombs a lot. The hand grenade existed but it was a specialist weapon. Now they started to use them in room-to-room fights inside forts or lob grenades from trench pit to trench pit. Sometimes it's ludicrous, like a section where two men carry nothing but a canvas sack of grenades or two and lob them ahead.
1