Quote Originally Posted by Hsing-ee View Post
The Martini is a brilliant design for a military rifle for raw recruits. Single shot, so deliberate fire only, and so much safer than a semi-auto, a simple mechanism for jam-free firing, and takes about 5 minutes to train in its basic use. Strong and sturdy for use in hand-to-hand.

If there is an 'emergency' and the population must be quickly armed to drive off invading hordes this rifle would be the best thing, not a modern assault rifle, to issue to the local militias. I think it would be great in 7.62x39 for cheapness, knockdown power and the tapered case would make extraction certain. Grannies and schoolboys could wield it to great effect.
The experience of the Volkssturm suggests that untrained personnel with rubbish weapons are at most a minor irritant to a professional army. Their most effective weapon was not even a gun - the Panzerfaust.

If you need to arm folks quickly with a vaguely useful weapon, in the absence of an established mass-production arms industry, you want something like a Sten. Witness the various SMGs turned out during the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s.

AKs would be better.