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How many police departments have a .50 call machinegun, 20mm autocanon or even 60mm mortar in their armoury? How many survivalist groups would have gotten away with acquiring anything heavy, or if they did, sufficient ammunition to train with, let alone conduct any sort of operation?
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+1 on both points. My department has some select fire small arms in service with the SWAT team, but nothing heavier than 5.56mm, and caliber footprint maxes out at a .50 cal sniper rifle or two and some 37mm less lethal launchers (again, all belonging to SWAT -- patrol officers are authorized shotguns and semi-only AR-15s and similar). And while we do have a decent stockpile of ammunition, it's not adequate for any sort of sustained operations. I don't think any larger departments would be able to trot out much more military weaponry -- liability issues completely preclude anyone deploying a machine gun or mortar for law enforcement purposes.
Survivalists -- meh, though if the Cold War had kept going into the mid 90s and there was a tensing run up to world war when the Sino-Soviet war kicked off, I could see that school of thought having broader appeal and more adherents than it did in the real world (the New America storyline implies survivalism was a lot more popular in th the T2K US than in the real world). Heavy weapons for most of those people would be right out, though I did have an Ops NCO who swore that in the late 80s when his ODA was going some training in Idaho they were in ear shot of the sort of place usually referred to by the press as a "compound" and heard what was unmistakably someone putting rounds through an M60 machine gun.