Tag Archives: mexico vigilante

Is that a Reising, or are you just happy to see me?

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Saw this in a news image from down in Old Mexico.

Captioned as "Masked and armed men guard a roadblock near the town of Ayutla, Mexico, on Jan. 18. Hundreds of men in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero have taken up arms to defend their villages against drug gangs." With no attribution

Captioned as “Masked and armed men guard a roadblock near the town of Ayutla, Mexico, on Jan. 18. Hundreds of men in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero have taken up arms to defend their villages against drug gangs.” With no attribution

The gun, for those of you who are hardware savvy, appears to me to be a M50 Reising submachine gun.

I did a piece on these little forgotten WWII gems for Guns.com last year that will give you more information but bottom line is H&R (yes, the shotgun fellas from Massachusetts) made about 123,500 of these .45ACP subguns to the design of one Eugene G. Reising from 1940-46 in several variants. The USMC used them in Guadalcanal before replacing them with more reliable gear, with the balance being issued stateside to state guards and the USCG for beach patrol (see below).

coast guard beach patrol w riesing

After the war many were handed out by the Office of Civil Defense (now FEMA) to police agencies for use if WWIII ever cracked open. This had led to a bunch of small departments still having these old guns around.

How this one showed up in Mexico is anyone’s guess. The forward grip and shortened/repaired stock is a nice, locally added touch.

If a gun could talk…

Mexican Government Adopts the Vigilantes, says they loved them all along

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vigilantes

vigilantes_group_march.jpg.size.xxlarge.letterbox

mexico-vigilantes

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico essentially legalized the country’s growing “self-defense” groups Monday, while also announcing that security forces had captured one of the four top leaders of the Knights Templar drug cartel, which the vigilante groups have been fighting for the last year.

The government said it had reached an agreement with vigilante leaders to incorporate the armed civilian groups into old and largely forgotten quasi-military units called the Rural Defense Corps. Vigilante groups estimate their numbers at 20,000 men
under arms.

The twin announcements may help the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto find a way out of an embarrassing situation in the western state of Michoacan, where vigilantes began rising up last February against the Knights Templar reign of terror and extortion after police and troops failed to stop the abuses.

“The self-defense forces will become institutionalized, when they are integrated into the Rural Defense Corps,” the Interior Department said in a statement. Police and soldiers already largely tolerate, and in some cases even work with, the vigilantes, many of whom are armed with assault rifles that civilians are not allowed to carry… (More in the AP story here)