A similar thing did happen in UK, actually, and before this whole 3D gun printing craze at that. There was a guy, you see, who figured out that you can actually make a reasonably efficient firearm (a smoothbore submachinegun chambered in 9x19mm - good enough for distances up to 50m or so) out of shelf components - steel tubes and such - if you just pick the ones with the right diameter. So he set on a quest to do just that, wrote a book detailing how to build one, and published it in 1998.

This being UK, after he published it, they charged him with construction of an illegal firearm. He's still in prison. The book is still on Amazon.

It's because they don't need it. In a disarmed society, you don't need to have a gun to extort money by force.

It's an incorrect statement. The correct one is "legal gun owners are statistically the least likely demographic to commit crimes". That's because, by definition, a legal gun owner is the one who was never convicted of a felony, and the majority of criminals (esp. when it comes to violent crime) have past criminal records.

Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't. The nice thing about having a shotgun is that if he wouldn't, OP could still defend himself.

Out of a carbine, it would actually be a fair bit more powerful than 7.62x39 at the muzzle, at least for hot loads - you can get .44 Magnum to push a 240gr bullet at ~1900 fps or so, giving 1900 ft lbs of energy - compared to ~1500 for 7.62x39 out of AK. But given that it's a fat non-spitzer bullet, it would slow down much faster, as well.

It'll take a fair bit to heat up the barrel to the point where it'd be a concern, though. I have personally dumped 6 30-round magazines - 180 rounds - down the line one after another from an AR, and it basically heated up the handguards to the point where they were uncomfortable to hold with bare hands (but not melting). Now, keeping in mind that 6 magazines is actually the standard loadout of a US army soldier, I don't think that this is a concern.

Shooting a polar bear with buckshot, sure. Shooting it with a slug would be as efficient as shooting it with .303, if not more so.

Their primary purpose would be to alert the properly outfitted army units of enemy movements in those remote areas.

So they're basically an early alert / light scout force, not line infantry.

If you already have tons of .303 in stock, why bother?

If they want cheap, they should just buy Mosins by the crate. They can likely stock up on a dozen rifles for every ranger they have, and use them for spare parts as needed for several more decades to come.

Given the sheer amount of Lee-Enfields in circulation, it would probably be cheapest for them to just buy new rifles.

Just to give an example, here is what is available on a typical day on GunBroker. How many Canadian rangers are there, again?

If that is the case, then why Russian military has switched to polymer stocks on AKs over 30 years ago, and not looked back? If you look at the rest of Russian equipment, it is very much designed to be gracefully handling extremely cold weather, for obvious reasons.

Just FYI, even a single round fired causes permanent hearing damage, which is why wearing hearing protection is required on pretty much any firing range regardless of how many people are there. The damage is very small, but it accumulates over time.

For this reason, silencers are actually used widely in many European countries for routine activities involving firearms even by civilians, e.g. while hunting. Many of those countries don't regulate them at all, despite heavy regulation of firearms themselves.

It would certainly be a very good thing for police to have and use silencers consistently, in light of the fact that they do occasionally use their firearms in public, and this negatively affects the health of every single person on the scene.

This is also a myth, invented in retrospect to explain the poor performance.

The original 5.56mm was actually very much a killer round. To remind, it was 55 grain back then, and it was fired out of a barrel with 1:14 twist in Stoner's prototype. This made it understabilized, which would cause it to yaw and fragment very consistently in tissue, causing extreme permanent cavity sizes, and fist-sized exit wounds on human targets. In combination with burst fire (and to remind, the entire 5.56 thing was a sidetrack of Project SALVO, which was all about making a weapon that could fire controllable, accurate bursts.

But understabilization negatively impacts accuracy, and US army brass still clung to their notion of accurate rifle from the trenches, so they asked the twist to be increased to 1:12. This still worked reasonably well with a 55gr round out of a 20" barrel, though less so than the original. Then, finally, some idiot decided that a rifle round should reliably penetrate the standard-issue helmet at range, and so the steel-cored SS109/M855 with its 1:7 twist was adopted as a standard round - and while it does indeed penetrate really nicely, it doesn't tumble nor fragment reliably at any range. Then USMC fucked it up even further by coming up with M16A2 which replaced full auto by the useless three-round burst, and generally shying away from the concept of automatic fire by riflemen and pushing their "one shot, one kill" thing; Army actually objected to many of the changes, but they were forced to adopt M16A2 as well due to budgeting reasons.

In truth, everything that you've just told applies to pretty much any military bolt action rifle of WW2. There are plenty of Mosins around that have been similarly abused but also work. I have one with a receiver stamped 1917, and a matching barrel, and it works great even after almost 100 years of use by who knows how many owners. Ditto Mausers.

Most bolt action rifles would actually work just as well, and often better, especially if they are stainless (Lee-Enfield is not), which would make a big difference in a canoe or a kayak, or covered in salt spray. Quite a few semi auto rifles would also do all of this, good examples being SKS and various AK variants, though it's not clear why these guys would need a semi-auto at all.

The main argument for Enfield is not that it's somehow superior to all the other options. It's simply that they're already there, and I would assume there's more in the stockpiles from WW2 days. So why not just use them?