Applying the "Small Girl, Big Gun" Principle

As some of you may be aware, I've been playing a character called Elisabetta in the Milan RPG. Elisabetta is an energetic, intelligent girl with a mischievious streak who looks about fourteen and deliberately cultivates a 'cutesy' image (which she also exploits).

Naturally, she seems to me like a perfect candidate to apply a big dose of the "small girl, big gun principle" too. The dichotomy is just awesome.

Problem is, Elisabetta's handler is a former Polizia di Stato officer who joined the SWA becuase of the death of her elder sister, an intelligence agent. As such, I don't think she's be keen on simply turning the streets of Rome and Milan into an all out warzone, especially if other handlers were equipping their charges with less powerful weapons.

So basically... can anyone here help me cook up excuses for why Elisabetta would pack really high powered automatic weapons, like say a Galil SAR carbine in 7.62mm NATO or a FN Minime with a 200 round belt box? About the best I can come up with on the SAR is the fact that it can cause serious damage to targets behind cover... which is kind of countered by the fact that it's ability to go through things can but bystanders at risk...

There's always the option of having Elisabetta herself fall in love with those guns at the range, and deliberately fudging her performance with any lesser caliber longarms (of course, what if she then discovers a .50Beo M4?)...
could take it a step further and have her settle for no less than a 10mm handgun, too

Nah, I'm not planning to apply the principle to her pistol, just her longarms. I'm taking the opposite approach with her pistol actually -she's getting a small, kind of cutesy looking pistol, a Walther P5C. Felisa (a first gen OC in another of my OC continuities) might get a compact 10mm Glock in the latest pistol shuffling though.

What I'd really like to equip Felisa with if I can justify it is a Galil SAR 7.62mm carbine, a FN Minime machine gun (basically a M249), and a Galil Galatz sniper rifle.

Just imagine how room clearing exercises would go with that Minime. Etta's P-90 has nothing on that monster.

So basically... can anyone here help me cook up excuses for why Elisabetta would pack really high powered automatic weapons, like say a Galil SAR carbine in 7.62mm NATO or a FN Minime with a 200 round belt box?

How about this: the Italian Navy intercepts a yacht smuggling advanced body armour from Libya. However, on interrogating the captured crew it's discovered that this operation has been going on for some time, and the authorities have only just caught up with it - several other shipments have already been delivered, and so the body armour can be expected to be fairly widely distributed amongst the Padanians. Thanks to the better protection that Padanian militants can now expect to have, bigger gauges with harder punch are needed to reliably put them down in combat - enter the Minime.

In the video game, the Padania you run up against, some will be wearing body amour as stated above. Solution to this- HEAD SHOTS!

Piero wrote:So basically... can anyone here help me cook up excuses for why Elisabetta would pack really high powered automatic weapons, like say a Galil SAR carbine in 7.62mm NATO or a FN Minime with a 200 round belt box?

Jean calls her handler a pansy because he only lets Elisabetta carry small weapons?

Kiskaloo wrote:

Piero wrote:So basically... can anyone here help me cook up excuses for why Elisabetta would pack really high powered automatic weapons, like say a Galil SAR carbine in 7.62mm NATO or a FN Minime with a 200 round belt box?

Jean calls her handler a pansy because he only lets Elisabetta carry small weapons?

I would recommend a big large silver hammer by the name of "Maxwell"....

With the Minime, it's not actually so much a matter of calibre (5.56mm NATO) as function... that thing is pure bullet hose. The Galil SAR in 7.62mm NATO is the one that has the calibre issue. I can think of an excuse to use 7.62mm NATO (namely, how effective it is against targets behind light cover) but that excuse seems more like something you'd hear from a veteran soldier, not a former police officer whose experience is mostly with 9mm pistols and SMGs and who is probably being advised by better trained colleagues to choose a 5.56mm over a 7.62mm rifle for closer range work.

There actually is some indication that some people in Italy view 7.62mm as a good CQB round, but I'd think that the former spec ops personnel this former police officer would be operating with would quickly put that notion to rest (as Italian CT type units don't seem to go by this 'wisdom' from what I've seen):

"However, at the beginning of the '90s, this weapon saw a widespread use in an Italian army operation: OPERATION VESPRI SICILIANI. It happened after summer of 1992, in Sicily, after the bomb-killing, by mafia, of two very important anti-mafia attorneys: GIOVANNI FALCONE and PAOLO BORSELLINO. Police personnel in Sicily was in too low number to ensure everyday Law Enforcement and fight mafia at the same time. So, the Army started Operazione Vespri Siciliani: a few thousand soldiers, armed with the BM59 rifles taken from the strategic reserve storage (this, due to the Military heads' belief that the 7'62-NATO cartridge should have been more effective in Urban Operations and C.Q.B.) SEIZED CONTROL of the Sicilian territory, ensuring normal Law Enforcement and allowing local police to concentrate all of its personnel on Mafia-related investigation."

The sniper version of the Galil is a bit less problematic calibre wise, since it's in a class of weapons where full power rifle ammunition is common.