[Lonesome in Massachussets]

You may be right, but an automatic weapon can stampede a crowd. If faced with a hostile crowd, I'd prefer an automatic. My grandfather's grandfather was a police captain in NYC during the 1863 draft riots. Blacks, police and "the gentry" were the targets.

The police were heavily out manned and did not have superior firepower. They were hard pressed to prevent as many lynchings as they could. In fact they were hard pressed to prevent police stations from being overrun. Fear of firearms kept the rioters out of many middle class homes. People did not band together for self-defense and many homes were looted and burned.

The riots only ceased when Union troops fresh from Gettysburg arrived to quell them. (It was the causality lists from Gettysburg, published in the newspapers, that sparked the riots.)

When the U.S. Forces seized Saddam Hussein Airport, the Iraqis apparently intended to assemble a mob of about 5,000 unarmed people and march en masse on the airport, defying the U.S. forces to gun them down in front of an international TV audience. Seems the U.S. got word of this tactic and dropped a 500 pound bomb on the assembly point just as the crowd was gathering. Caused just enough carnage to deter the others.

[JoeGar]

Fear of firearms kept the rioters out of many middle class homes.

In the late 1970s, I was visiting a friend in North Arlington, New Jersey. While discussing the Newark race riots, he showed me a street and said, "The riots stopped on that side of the street. That's Newark. This side of the street is North Arlington. We all had rifles on this side."