Machine guns and the zombie menace

Jonah has posted a series of zombie-related hits over at The Corner; here is the latest. As someone who both dreads the eventual zombipocalypse and has played around with automatic weapons a little bit, I’d like to take issue with one thing his reader says:

Furthermore, the assertion that fully automatic weapons, particularly machine guns, would be wasteful is also ludicrous.  When fighting masses of zombies, a single round would penetrate several of them, while the large wounds resulting would be almost guaranteed to cripple said zombies by breaking bones, severing nerves (why is the brain important if the nerves aren’t?), and tearing muscle.

Now, I guess it depends on which sort of zombies we’re talking about, but I hew to the theory that head shots are the only way to kill the suckers. This is the Romero-zombie: You have to score a head shot to render them dead. Taking out their limbs might slow them down, but it won’t stop them. And aiming an automatic weapon for multiple headshots in a row is no simple task. They kick around, pull up in the air, etc. The average person (i.e., not a SEAL) is better off with a scoped rifle and a medium caliber handgun.

Now, I suppose the Boyle-zombie (28 Days/Weeks Later) might be stopped by multiple rounds to the torso/limbs since they aren’t the undead, technically speaking, but even then I’m not sure: They seem to absorb a fair amount of damage and keep coming.

Anyway, in the case of the zombipocalypse, I think you only really have two options: Hole up in a shopping mall with a grocery store or stay a constant nomad, never allowing the zombies to catch up with you.