Cleaning Up Before the Olympics
Chicago lost their Olympics bid, with Rio gaining the honor of hosting the games in 2010. So people started to celebrate.
All well and good, but Rio can be a really rough town, particularly if you don’t have any cash. The Vila Cruzeiro shantytown is just about as lawless a place as you will ever see. Ruled over by drug gangs who wage an endless battle over turf, even some of the cops who are tasked with imposing some sort of order in this urban jungle are savagely violent and hopelessly corrupt.
Efforts were stepped up to clean out the gangs in the months leading up to the Olympic pick, and don’t think the criminals haven’t noticed. A police helicopter was shot down last week by street level gunfire while it was keeping watch over a running battle between two rival drug gangs. Keep that in mind: the police are getting caught in the crossfire.
One thing that has struck me is the hodgepodge collection of arms that are being used in this conflict. Below is a picture of a home made .50 rifle that the police confiscated.
Unless I miss my guess, it looks to me like a machine gun barrel that has been attached to a home made stock by black electrical tape and a wood screw. Clever, those Brazilian drug gangs.
The picture below is from a police raid that was conducted back in 2005. Notice how the police are armed with a motley of weapons, from Kalashnikov derivatives to AR rifles and even a Ruger ranch rifle.
hat are those two handguns the crouching officer in the center of the picture is holding? Looks like a S&W clone in one hand, while a Beretta copy is in the other. I bet both came from Taurus, which has a reputation for making guns similar to those of their rivals.
Judging by the different uniforms, I think that the people pictured above all work for different government agencies. The really elite unit is the BOPE, sort of like a SWAT team for the whole country. Judging by the pictures I’ve been able to find on the Internet, they have a certain enthusiasm for FN-FAL’s.
Nothing wrong with the FN-FAL. Wish I owned one.
Interestingly enough, an old 19th Century machine gun design seems to still find a use in Rio. The Madsen machine gun was declared finally dead and gone last year, but I have found a few pictures that supposedly show them in action as of yesterday. Unfortunately, the pics are all on the AP server, and I don’t want to risk the ire of that particularly sue-happy organization. But can at least show you what a Madsen looks like so you can be on the lookout while browsing through the daily news photos.
The favorite way to deploy the weapon is with the shoulder stock removed. You might only be able to see the receiver.
October 24th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Oh they have a TON of cleaning up to do. I think the solution will be simpler than cleaning up the place. They will probably just wall off the nasty areas and make sure that the insanity doesn’t spill over into the Olympic village. The same thing they were going to do in Chicago.
October 24th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
I wonder if we’ll see armored bulldozers.
October 24th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
In the third picture down, the BOPE team member in the center is shooting a Cetme or one of it’s clones. If you look close you can see the case in the air.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Chris - odd he is holding that Cetme by the magazine - that can’t be the proper way to shoo that thing, is it?
October 24th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
shoot, sorry.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
It looks like that screw you mention may be helping pin the barrel into the receiver.
I guess the tape is to assure optimum bedding…
October 24th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
I have had this thing for 9 years and dindn’t know exacltly what to do with it. One of my friennds bought a PTR91 and said it was for long range shooting.
KK Mama wants attention. More to follow
October 26th, 2009 at 9:51 am
[...] here before about how the Madsen machine gun, a design which was first introduced in 1896, was supposedly retired last year. The last country to see the ancient design issued to regular troops and security forces was [...]