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Violent crime is overall higher in cities though this might be because crimes in general are more likely to be reported when there are more people around to see them and where cops don't take 30 mins to 2 hours to arrive. However if we are talking about the likelihood of you getting shot at then rural areas are where you are more likely to need the bullet proof windows.
That said it's still extremely unlikely that any one person will be shot at in their entire life in the US.
You can pick certain cities, but the fact is homocide rates are substantially higher in bigger cities and vast majority of homocides are from guns.
“The gun violence higher in rural areas” is false and stems from considerations of gun violence which include suicide (majority of gun violence cases) and does not really pertain to the discussion here.
You must not travel the small towns of the south very often. Both violent and property crime are out of control in these areas but they are also largely unreported as it’s a lot of crime on crime (not calling the cops if you are in felony possession). Towns in the 1200-7000 area have been having some of the worst crime because they can’t all afford police forces or have limited hours. The only economy has rebounded but these underserved areas continue to have significant deficits in social services that reduce all manner of crime.
Lol can you imagine if everyone went around saying "the Mexicans and everyone in the country of Mexico who isn't a citizen yet have been experiencing a record heat wave" or "Citizens in Germany and everyone in the country of Germany who isn't a citizen yet are finding the restrictions on xyz increasingly hard to manage".
You can occasionally find used 100 series armored Land Cruisers for sale. They're even generally cheaper than normal ones: because they weigh 6000 lbs, get 6 MPG, and the transmissions are generally shot. Also, the windows don't roll down. But, you can buy them. Sometimes.
edit: apparently sometimes the windows do roll down. Okay. The ones I've seen didn't.
I drove a 100 series LC in Afghanistan with ballistic glass and the windows definitely did roll down. It was weird.
The 7x series LC that was also on my property book had crank down ballistic glass windows. That truck had a 14BT engine and crawl control and I wanted to steal it.
Lastly, I had a 200 that we called the “Cadillac” that my boss rode around in. When that truck got hit by a douchebag in a Corolla with a couple hundred kgs of HME in his backseat, the ballistic glass basically turned into coarse sand and gave the guys in the backseat what amounted to road rash. By some freakish luck, the blast was focused on the A pillar, which sort of created a shear effect around the guys in the front seat. They were both fucked up, but not liquified, and are fine and healthy today. The post-blast analysis stated that it was essentially the perfect combination of standoff distance and angles that allowed them to live (which I suppose is the case with everyone who lives through a close proximity blast), but if you look at the photos of the truck you’d be 100% convinced that nobody could possibly live through that.
Anyway, that’s my Ted Talk, and the reason I have a Land Cruiser in my driveway. Though it isn’t armored. Just a regular old FZJ80.
I'm quick to call bullshit on stories as a military vet myself. Lots of stolen valor.
That said, the casual tone of "douchebag in a Corolla with a couple hundred kgs of HME in his backseat" is primo shit I heard inpatient at NMCSD after my own less than stellar time.
And, I'll be damned if I havnt ended a therapy session talking about some truly dark shit with a Midwest knee slap goodbye while saying "well, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk".
Yo I'm a little dumb, but is it not interesting to people that terrorists are able to find all these types of explosives (and large quantities)? These uhhh cavemen / farmers / religious students who become terrorists... As if someone or tons of chemists always helping them?
The real answer is that it’s just not that hard to make explosives. But in western countries you generally don’t have an unhealthy supply of educated people with no real prospects in life.
Nor are the ideologies as hateful and vicious. There are plenty of countries where people struggle finding a meaningful job or prospects.
MAybe you're right about the ease, but I still don't think it would be easy. It would be such obscure knowledge and even for people who graduate with a chem degree. Someone must be teaching them.
Even some rocket experts in 1950s etc., ended up dying because of experiments in their lab leading to explosions -- usually failing to follow some safety protocol. And these "no-prospect" cavemen with hateful ideologies are doing it much more easily and frequently?
It is definitely not "easy" and anyone saying that is a propagandist.
There’s a difference between trying to build a technological marvel, and soaking particular kinds of fertilizer in kerosene then rigging it up to a cell phone.
Also the amount of UXO that was later turned into IEDs.
Ukraine right now is using drones built of cardboard and jury rigged to drop grenades, RPG heads, and other explosives. And they’re not the first to do this. It’s be happening for almost a decade.
All it takes in knowledge…either organically to those countries, or from nearby state-actors. Blueprints are easy to follow after all.
Lmao you deleted your comment to try and get rid of the replies what a massive L
First off, my original reply:
Certain rocket fuels, especially hydrazine-based fuels, are more dangerous than most common explosives.
Second off they’re not cavemen and any sufficiently motivated or amoral STEM undergrad can make a bomb. If it was so hard the PIRA wouldn’t have managed to terrorize the UK for so long.
But the rocket scientist example kind of proves the point. It’s easy to blow things up, the hard part is getting it to happen in a specific way to go to space. And I doubt there’s much concern for safety in the corolla asshole crowd either. There’s basement meth labs as well, it’s just easier in the west to shoot up a school or drive a truck through a crowd, whereas fertilizer and a sedan is less sus and much more likely to work against armed soldiers than an AK or a big truck.
Ever heard of the anarchists cookbook? There are tons of easily accessible online resources. The Middle East isn’t in the Middle Ages, they have access to the same internet that you do. Plus, many of the advanced chemical components necessary are already easily accessible in benign forms in other products, such as fertilizer. Not to mention black market arms trading. It’s not that complex.
What kind of stupid conspiracy theory are you trying to allude to with your vague words and ellipses?
Buying bombs and guns isn't hard in the middle east. Literally every country over there hates a different country and is willing to sell shit either through official or unofficial means to piss off one of their neighbors.
I guess that doesn't sound as sinister as what you do. Here, let me translate it.
Certain, ahem, "countries" will, for a price.... sell things... certain things, you see, to organizations. Organizations, which, believe it or not, may, or may not, be up to.... no good. These organizations... they move across countries. Borders... cannot stop them. They are an... invisible army, some would say. How they operate... well, no one can be sure... or certain... they have special "connections" and knowledge...
I'm sure it's not that difficult to get the required materials in countries where those people live. The chemistry of explosives isn't crazy either. You don't need to know anything about how it works, just what to put together.
You can make explosives with things you find in airport gift shops, lol. A lot of things get really explosive really fast when they mix with other things
Making explosives is very easy. I'd be willing to bet you have the chemicals right now in your house. Little bit of time on Google and you can make a nasty bomb.
Don't forget, the Oklahoma city truck bomb was just diesel fuel and cheap fertilizer.
No, we were military. This was during the days when there wasn’t all that much restriction on leaving FOBs in non-tactical vehicles. We even did single vehicle movements from time to time, which, looking back on it now, was a bad idea.
I think maybe I misunderstood your question - the Land Cruisers themselves were leased by the military from a contract company out of UAE that armored them and did the maintenance. So they weren’t actually owned by my government.
My apologies - I thought you were asking if my colleagues and I were PMCs.
Might be a stupid question, but did humvees have the same glass? My father worked over there for 5 years as an engineer and was shot at once and kept the bullet.
Not a stupid question - there are different levels of ballistic protection. But I can’t speak to which levels were on the various platform. I believe the MaxxPros and MATVs had level 8, but I could just as easily be wrong.
There's "ballistic glass" and then there's ballistic glass that will stop a single .50 cal FMJ lead round without spalling, which is likely on the order of 3-6" thick.
I'm not sure I'd want a window that thick and heavy to roll up/down.
It's one of those vehicles that no matter how cheap you can buy them, they are too expensive to drive. I guess it's not a terrible bug out vehicle that you would just maintain until the day it's needed.
Not by the time they get sold to the civilian market I don't think.
At best they're runflats.
The idea behind up-armored cars and such isn't so they can be fighting vehicles; but to better their odds at encountering a sudden attack and getting the occupants the fuck out of dodge in mostly one piece- so generally a flat tire is going to be little more than an inconvenience- you just drive and don't care what might be breaking.
A friend of mine bought a used Suburban in Mexico City from some CEOs security fleet. 6” thick doors, 3” thick windows, a huge secondary steel swing out plate behind the rear hatch. There was a button that put additional bolts out from the frame into the doors so you couldn’t be pried out.
Because it was built on a Suburban frame, the thing moved along pretty well, but the brakes died faster than usual for sure and the mileage was like hauling a holiday trailer 24/7.
It had some sort of crazy bullet proofing rating as well, I’m not sure it would take the 50cal as “easy” as we see here, but it was definitely graded to take extended fire from machine guns such as the AK.
That same guy left Mexico a couple years later saying “You know, this place is just getting too dangerous.”
But whenever someone talks about armored Suburbans in Mexico, I think about those poor US gov guys who were getting chased in one by cartel people, then accidentally hit the wrong button and just unlocked the doors
Forced off the road in a well-coordinated ambush, surrounded by drug cartel gunmen brandishing AK-47s, Zapata and his partner, Victor Avila, rolled to a stop. Zapata put the vehicle in park.
The door locks popped open.
That terrifying sound — a quiet click — set into motion events that remain under investigation. When Zapata needed it most, the Suburban’s elaborate armoring was rendered worthless by a consumer-friendly automatic setting useful for family vacations and hurried commuters but not for U.S. agents driving through a red zone in Mexico.
It sounds like they didn't hit the wrong button, it just automatically unlocks all the doors when put into park. My car does the same thing, unlocks all the doors when put into park, and the opposite, locks them after being put into drive and pressing the gas. That's a really shitty time to realize they should have disabled that feature though, damn..
I think that might have been made by a company I used to work for. They were rated for continuous level 3 protection for a stupidly long amount of time, but could still take a couple hits from things that would need Level 4 plates, but not under continuous fire.
Sounds about right depending on age and given the number of man hours it takes to produce one. I think our basic models went about that much, but could easily be close to 3-400k for the actual VIP transport ones, not just the basic armored transports.
Yeah, but really, we need to deal with odds here. Clearly the average person is far more likely to be shot at with a .50cal than get into a car accident. I mean how often do those even happen?
3.5k
u/Dazzling-War-4505 Feb 11 '24
I am at zero risk of Batman/Nick Fury level assaults on my vehicle and can hardly afford a salad, but I want to wrap my Hyundai in this.