Why zombie ammo

Zombies rely on biting, scratching, and occasionally bludgeoning to inflict harm. Fortunately, our technology has moved on a bit from the days when teeth were considered cutting edge weaponry, and bite-proof armor is well within reach. Dog bite suits, while goofy looking, are verifiably bite-proof.

This removes one of the major dangers in any zombie apocalypse. You know the scenario: one member of a group is careless , gets bitten, and then stumbles back to infect the rest of the group. If all the soldiers are protected from head to toe, that risk is eliminated. Have you ever tried to bite or punch a tank? The destructive power of a tank almost goes without saying. Not only do they have those impressive cannons, most tanks also mount at least one machine gun. Even if the tank was completely out of fuel, the crew could have hidden inside for however long it took for another tank to show up and rescue them.

These points apply to any reasonably armored vehicles, not just tanks. The vehicle itself becomes a weapon. And you thought biting a tank was hard. Instead they zip around in the wild blue yonder, turning the undead into just regular dead. The destructive potential of modern airpower is hard to overestimate. A decently equipped air force can easily reduce a city to rubble , along with all the shamblers inside it.

That kind of damage is usually restrained in real life, because there needs to be something left to conquer, but all bets are off once the dead start to rise. Really, planes and helicopters are probably overkill against zombies. Predator drones can stay in the air for more than a day at a time, hunting down any undead that dare to show their rotting faces.

None of this is to suggest that a zombie outbreak would be pleasant. There would be deaths, especially in the first few hours as people figured out what the rules were, but it could never spread to world-ending proportions. Humans are just too good at killing things. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons.

Could you chip in? Mythcreants is an ad-free publication. If our work has helped you, please keep us going by chipping in. Your patronage keeps this site running. Become a patron. Also, body armour does not guarantee absolute protection.

Also, most machine guns rely on laying down a suppressing cone of fire, so hitting a zombie in the legs is difficult. This includes small-caliber ARs, most grenades, and sorry Oren land mines.

A faceplate and forearm defenses, plus beefed up glove facings, would just about do the trick. Try it! Put on some old clothes, take a Sharpie as a combat knife, have your roommate stick a Sharpie in his or her mouth for zombie teeth, and get to wrestling.

If you get sharpied on your neck, palm, armpit, inner elbow, crotch seam, or back of the knee before you can sharpie their head, they win.

Cool, here are two stereotypes about you that Max Brooks thinks are true. But present models will basically just blow your leg off. I also read WWZ when I was very young, so I probably have a little nostalgia filter on, hence why I forgot about the racism till now. A human can survive traumatic amputation, but the leglessness will pretty much take a soldier out of combat permanently; whereas on zombies such a mine will just reduce their threat notably, turning a shambler or even better, a runner into a much less dangerous crawler.

A living zombie, like the Rage Virus zombies from 28 Days Later, could die from blood loss, infection or other normal causes. Sure, they can pull themselves by their arms or hop if them still have one leg, but their mobility would be so low as to make them non-threatening. The problem is that zombies are relentless. They have no sense of time.

Sure, you can run away, but unlike a zombie, you have to sleep, you have to rest, you have to let down your guard sometime. You might get trapped somewhere and, unlike a zombie, you will find it hard to hack off a limb stuck somewhere.

And that is why you have to deal with legless zombies, too. Imagine a field full of zombies which have been mowed down by a machine gun attack. They feel no pain. They have one thought, one order, stuck in their head: find human, bite human.

So the next step after the machine gun attack should be something like fire bombs or napalm. You can kill a zombie with a bullet, but, honestly, burning is more efficent. There are humans who miss most of their legs or even all of them and are still pretty mobile. Then the zombies lie down without legs and become potential BOW landmine for healthy if They are not totally destroyed of cource.

Thus Traditional landmine begets Zombie landmine. Tanks require so much fuel and cannot cross most bridges or use many roads, they are just too heavy. As far as machine guns, only belt-fed, cooled guns would be effective.

The amount of ammo that soldiers would need to carry would be very heavy, and since anything but a headshot would be essentially wasted, it would not be terribly effective. As far as the body armor redesigns, it goes back to how fast the outbreak happens compared to the true threat recognition. Is there enough time to redesign, produce, and distribute before most bases or units are overrun?

That depends on whether it only spreads from one place or from several. And even if it spreads slow, if you have enough carries who might not be zombies, fighting it will be difficult. A plague evolves and that means it might spread a lot further and faster the longer it exists. Chris, blowing a leg off is a damn sight better than nothing, no doubt. So now you have this huge, huge HAZMAT problem: a thousand wounded zombies crawling across a partially-detonated minefield.

Not even if you give me a metal detector with a spike on the end. Why would they need to bury the mines? Just scatter them on the ground. Would we have to bury them, you think? Depending on the type of virus, it might be wise to burn them to eradicate everything. If you wear thick clothing a zombie could not break your skin with a bite just like a human being can not bite through thick clothing. Good point. One of the irritating stereotypes of military in movies and other media is that they are rigid and unable to adapt.

The general point that Max Brooks made in World War Z is that standard combat tactics, military or otherwise, would fare poorly against the typical movie-style zombie horde. Few people can agree just what the abilities and limitations of a zombie really are.

You may be right however, the reason it would be different for zombies is they would take no evasive maneuvers making them much easier to hit. I also liked how you left out tanks which I reckon could take out a majority of zombies in any city without ground troops, and then send troops in to sweep stragglers. And airforce miniguns can shoot anywhere from rounds a minute which I reckon would result in numerous zombie kills even without direct aim. When "Zombie Apocalypse" became a media obsession -- reanimated, in part by a spate of cannibalistic attacks -- the Hornady company snapped into action and came up with the perfect plan.

They rebranded one of their bullets, slapped a green tip on it, and fancied it up with creepy packaging. Voila: Z-Max bullets are designed to "make dead permanent," according to the Nebraska company's website. NOTE: This ammo isn't a toy kiddies, it's real. Be careful when using any live ammunition and use proper safety gear. Yeah, it's gimmicky, but it's not just catering to gun aficionados.

Max Ammo is a power-up in the Zombies game mode. No longer in production, this specialty ammo was basically a fun gimmick with surprisingly good performance. Ultra-flat trajectories send mangy menaces to the varmint graveyard. In military bullet color coding the color tells you what kind of bullet it is and the job it does.

Fun sells guns. Anyone that is really, and I mean seriously, worried about a zombie apocalypse should seek professional help. There are plenty of other real threats out there to fear. But the whole zombie thing, from shooting matches that feature zombie themes, to zombie ammo and accessories, to flashy zombie guns are all just plain fun.

So, what got me going on this today and not last month when MTM came out with the zombie box or a couple months before when Hornaday came out with zombie ammo or even a couple years ago with the zombie shoots up in St. Cloud, MN?

The rifle is topped with limited-edition bio-hazard engraved QDS sights. So yes, I like the zombie craze. Keep it going. Tell us here at Gun Digest what you like best of all the zombie stuff out there. Have some fun with it. Until the undead rise from their graves, your zombie guns are best put to use in competitions. The new Complete Guide to 3-Gun Competition is the place to start.