America Is Well Equipped To Deal With The Slow Zombie Menace

27 Oct, 2009 by John Hawkins

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Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly given the nerdiness of the average political wonk, there has been a significant amount of discussion about zombies on political blogs.

There have even been mathematical studies designed to figure out how we’d fare in a slow zombie uprising (Link courtesy of Daniel Drezner, who has his own long spiel on zombies):

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.

They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures.

As a horror film fan, this just seems very unlikely to me. Why?

1) Zombies are very slow.
2) Zombies don’t even seem to have animal level intelligence.

The slow part, everyone notices. But, have you ever noticed how dumb zombies are? They see a nice, tasty living person with a head full of brains and they slowly shuffle over there and eat him. You know what animal that reminds me of? A cow. But, cows eat grass — it can’t run away. Grass also can’t fire bullet after bullet at your head while you’re walking over to eat it.

And let’s face it: unless the numbers were absolutely overwhelming, one person with a gun and ammo would be a match for a large number of zombies. Combine that with the fact that here in the United States, estimates vary on how many guns there actually are in private hands, but it’s definitely north of 200 million — and we’re not even talking about the police, FBI, national guard, and military. So, once people figured out what was happening, it would seem to me that the game would be up pretty quickly for the zombies.

Am I making a mistake here? If so, tell me where I am going wrong.

PS #1: I do realize that many non-American populations don’t have guns. All I can say to them is enjoy your brains while you still have them, suckers!

PS #2: Of course, fast zombies would be a whole different ball game. While they wouldn’t be a match for a prepared, organized, well armed society, they could do much, much, more damage before they were put down.

PS #3: Know what could really potentially spread like wildfire? Vampires. The only real check on them would probably be their desire not to increase to such an extent that they lose their food supply.