Get Off My Lawn: Great WWII Guns for Home Defense

[Elderberry]

Shooting Illustrated  by Rick Hacker - Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Despite all the atrocities of the Second World War, this global conflict gave our country’s fighting men and women some of the greatest individual battlefield weapons of the 20th century. While most of them have been retired from government duty by more advanced designs, these veteran World War II arms, like our Armed Forces veterans themselves, have attained a certain immortality, not only as symbols of America’s ongoing fight for freedom, but also as weapons still prized for their reliability and effectiveness.

Indeed, just as they have proven themselves on the battlefield, today these wood-and-steel World War II veterans—collectability aside—can serve in an even more personal mission of protecting our homes and families. To validate this concept, I enlisted the opinions of some of the most skilled and experienced firearms and self-defense experts I know: the instructors of Gunsite Academy.

Gunsite’s Ken Campbell, who spent more than 35 years with the Boone County Sheriff’s Office in Indiana before he retired and relocated to Arizona, has a sizable collection of World War II firearms, including the favorite World War II vet for home defense among Gunsite instructors—the M1911 pistol, a gun with a well-deserved reputation.

“I was a young and wet-behind-the-ears USAF Airman on my first deployment to Central America, assigned to the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne,” says Gunsite instructor Daniel J. Bilodeau, who was deployed to Joint Task Force Bravo in 1986, after which he began a 30-year career as a Federal Agent with the U.S. Department of Energy. “My first meeting with my platoon sergeant,” he recalls, “I showed up in my issued gear and he took notice of my USAF-issued Smith & Wesson Model 15 .38-caliber revolver. His comments still ring in my ears with a tone of dissent: ‘You need to take your ass to the armory right now and tell them I said to give you a 1911. We tried that .38 crap before and it didn’t work out too good back then, and I don’t see how it would be any different now. I’ve seen that .45 work and have no doubt it will still work now.’”

More: https://www.shootingillustrated.com/articles/2020/10/6/get-off-my-lawn-great-wwii-guns-for-home-defense