re: #257 Romantic Heretic

In a sort of speculative history I’m working on…

Modern American weapons are made all over the place so Canadians and Mexicans would by parts cheap from the First States and sell them expensively to the True States and vice versa.

Who’s making the ammunition in this story? That takes raw materials and lots of them and complex chemical processing with high quality-assurance levels at all points in the manufacturing chain. Making reliable centre-fire primers in bulk is not something that can be achieved by a backyard gunsmith. Nitropropellant chemistry is tricky and a modern self-loading firearm like an AR-15 won’t perform very well if fed with home-made black powder cartridges. Making jacketed bullets isn’t a backyard endeavour either and feeding unjacketed lead through an AR-15 or equivalent is a recipe for stoppages and fouling.