I won't argue with anybody's constitutional right to bear arms but I'm still quite confused why anybody would need to own a military style gun? Beyond the obvious reasons of for killing human beings.
Just because the basic right is there should this mean any gun deemed a "gun" can be owned by an American citizen? In fact, the Constitution says "arms." Does this mean our forefathers thought we should be able to bear any weapon arms manufacturers can develop? I'm sure they had no concept of just how good our weaponry could get.
And if we're going to own guns like this, because all American citizens are such responsible gun owners, why shouldn't they be tracked with ballistic fingerprinting? I wonder if such a program was in place during the sniper investigation if the suspects would have been traced quicker. The sniper's gun was illegally owned but had been initially legitimately sold to a distributer.....somewhere along the way it was insecure enough to be stolen or it was passed on illegally. If there were ballistics fingerprinting wouldn't even a stolen gun be traced quicker?
Why do gun proponents think there should be no limitations, no registration and no tracking if they have every intention of being responsible gun owners?
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/25/n...00&en=03042a63fef8433b&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
Officials Say Records Show Gun Was Illegally Owned
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
Federal authorities said last night that a gun seized from two suspects had been officially linked to the shootings in the Washington area and that one of the suspects, John Allen Muhammad, should have been legally disqualified from buying or possessing it.
The gun is a Bushmaster XM15 A3 M4, a civilian version of the standard American military rifle, the M-16, made with a removable handle on top so that a scope can be easily mounted on it, say officials of its maker, Bushmaster Firearms.
Bushmaster Firearms is a small privately owned company in Windham, Me., that specializes in making copies of the M-16. Last year it made 50,000 rifles, said the company's vice president, Allen Faraday, with the XM15 selling for about $800. On its Web site, Bushmaster advertises its rifles as "the best, by a long shot."
Michael Bouchard, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said at a news conference that tests had linked the seized gun to the East Coast killings.
Mr. Faraday said the gun was first sold to a distributor in Washington State last June. He declined to identify the wholesaler and said he did not know how or where Mr. Muhammad acquired the rifle.
The sniper's choice of the XM15 was a little unusual, Mr. Faraday said, because it has a 16-inch barrel and is therefore less accurate than the conventional M-16, which has a 20-inch barrel, or many sniper rifles that have 26-inch barrels. The shorter barrel, however, does make the XM15 easier to conceal.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Faraday said today, "Naturally we feel terrible and horrified" by the sniper killings in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. "We are very sad this deranged and crazy man picked up one of our guns."
Bushmaster first learned the identity of the gun seized in Mr. Muhammad's car when A.T.F. agents called the company a few hours later with the weapon's serial number, Mr. Faraday said.
Legally, Mr. Muhammad apparently should not have been able to buy a gun because he was under a domestic protective order taken out in March 2000 by Mildred Denice Muhammad, then his wife, in State Superior Court in Tacoma, Wash., court records show. The couple, who lived in Tacoma, were divorced in October 2000, and the restraining order was made permanent, the court documents also show.
The 1994 Crime Control Act made it illegal for a person under a restraining order to buy or possess a gun, and a mandatory background check should have revealed Mr. Muhammad's disqualification. It was Mr. Muhammad's possession of the gun, despite his disqualification, that led the authorities to charge him Wednesday night with a firearms violation, an official of the firearms bureau said.
Figures compiled by the bureau show that Bushmaster was a tiny company until the Clinton administration persuaded Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons in 1994. From 1988 to 1992, Bushmaster manufactured an average of only 1,500 rifles a year, and made none in 1993, the year before the ban. But in 1994 its production jumped to 24,868 rifles.
Mr. Faraday was careful to say its copies of the M-16 were not assault weapons, since they do not have collapsible stocks, flash suppressers or a mounting to install a bayonet, some features that were ruled out by the 1994 ban. The magazine of the XM15 also holds only 10 rounds, the permissible limit set by the 1994 ban.
In addition, the rifle is only a semiautomatic, requiring a trigger pull for each shot, not fully automatic as a military rifle, which allows multiple rounds to be fired with a single pull of the trigger.
But Kristen Rand, the legislative director for the Violence Policy Center in Washington, a gun control group, said that the XM15 seized in Mr. Muhammad's car still had features that mimic an assault weapon.
"It complies with the letter of the law, but it is still an assault rifle," Ms. Rand said.
The ban on assault weapons expires in 2004 and is considered likely to be the subject of a major fight in Congress. The National Rifle Association strongly opposed the ban and has made not renewing it a priority. The association has also opposed the prohibition on people under a restraining order from buying a gun.
A spokesman for the association, Andrew Arulanandam, did not return telephone calls today seeking comment.
Bushmaster's principal owner and chairman, Richard Dyke, was the finance chairman of George W. Bush's campaign for the presidency in Maine in 1999. Mr. Dyke resigned as Mr. Bush's chief fund-raiser in Maine in July 1999 after a Los Angeles police officer sued Bushmaster as the maker of a gun that wounded him in a shootout with bank robbers.
The D.C. Sniper and the Gun Issue: What Are the Implications?
10/22/2002
News Analysis
by Dick Dahl
Gun control had almost vanished as an issue in the 2002 election campaign season until early October, when a sniper started shooting people in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. The National Rifle Association was basking in the knowledge that all but a few Democrats had turned their backs on the issue and that Congress was set to move on an NRA-backed bill to provide the gun industry special immunity from lawsuits.
But since the sniper's deadly work has caught the nation's attention, the NRA's firm control of the gun issue has slipped.
First, the author of the immunity bill, Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., announced that Republican leaders had decided to "postpone" action on the bill because the timing was inappropriate. And now that many lawmakers are returning to their home districts for the final weeks of the campaign, the issue is dead for this session.
Second, the NRA now finds itself in a defensive posture for blocking ballistics "fingerprinting" technology that could help investigators locate the shooter if it were widely available. On Oct. 17, the NRA's executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre and executive director Chris Cox issued a statement pointing out the shortcomings, as they see it, of the technology and claiming that it "infringes on the rights of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans" because "this scheme is national gun registration."
While the statement acknowledged "our collective horror" over an "inexplicable tragedy," the terseness of its central hands-off message is unlikely to win the NRA many hearts. Indeed, the organization has been widely vilified for its intransigence and insensitivity. On Oct. 18, for instance, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson attacked the NRA and the lawmakers who follow its bidding, saying, "This is a nation where every car is registered, where every credit card transaction goes into a database, and where every Internet transaction seems to result in a marketer knowing your business. Yet (the federal government) still does not have the courage to force people to register lethal weapons. All because of the NRA and our fear of it."
Third, the White House reaction to the sniper holds potentially serious political implications. First, the White House stated its preference for the NRA position on ballistics fingerprinting over that of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Then, receiving a flurry of criticism, it backed down the next day. As Joe Sudbay, policy director for the Violence Policy Center, told Join Together Online, Bush has "his own set of problems with the NRA." That is, while the NRA strongly supports Bush, and while Bush's position on ballistics fingerprinting and other gun issues shows that he will follow the NRA line, how far can he follow them without suffering politically? "Bush is not going to sacrifice the suburbs completely to the NRA," Sudbay said.
Fourth, the potential exists for political backlash against some of the NRA-backed--and overwhelmingly Republican--candidates in this year's elections. Already, the political implications of the sniper shootings have become a large part of the Maryland gubernatorial race between Democratic Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Republican Congressman Robert Ehrlich. Polls showed that Ehrlich had already committed an apparent gaffe in late September when he suggested that some of the state's tough gun laws should be reconsidered. The emergence of the sniper made Ehrlich's statement look like an even greater political miscalculation and could cost him the election.
Elsewhere, New Jersey Democratic ex-senator Frank Lautenberg (Robert Torricelli's replacement) has begun using the gun issue to characterize his Republican opponent, Doug Forrester, as an NRA follower. And as the New York Post's Deborah Orin reported on Oct. 17, the political implications of the sniper shootings have "even popped up in gun-loving South Carolina," where Democratic Senate candidate Alex Sanders has yanked an ad in which his champion skeet-shooting wife Zoe is firing a gun as he pledges to "take aim" at Washington. Now, Orin reports, Sanders is calling for ballistic fingerprinting; his opponent Lindsay Graham, takes the standard NRA position that ballistics fingerprinting is not foolproof. In other races, Orin says, "the question is whether this new layer of anxiety will alter how voters make their picks."
The reality, however, is that nobody really knows. One of the problems for the Democrats who have run away from gun control this election season is that a sudden embrace of the issue now looks like political exploitation. Even in the Maryland gubernatorial race, a decision by Townsend last week to run a TV ad in which she attacked Ehrlich on the gun issue may have backfired somewhat for that reason, based on a poll which indicated voter disapproval.
As Election Day nears, the political implications of an elusive sniper in the region surrounding the nation's capital are still unclear. Much depends, of course, on what kind of person is actually doing the shooting. Still, whether the shooter is the product of right-wing sniper subculture or an international terrorist, the NRA and its supporters will have something to answer for -- because in either case, the NRA's role as intransigent opponent of laws and technologies that might better track down either category of killer is well-known.
The NRA has been quick to criticize its opponents for playing politics with the sniper shootings, a reaction which strikes Sudbay as both ironic and hypocritical. "With every other consumer group, when there are deaths or injuries or something horrific happening, the first thing they say is, 'How do we prevent this from happening again?' But when we do it in gun control, we're accused of playing politics."
The NRA might see it as playing politics, but to gun-violence-prevention groups who are pointing out shortcomings that could be improved to reduce the danger of future sniper killings, it's more a case of common sense. It's also a case of available alternatives. The problem with guns is that, unlike almost all other consumer products, they were exempted from regulation when the Consumer Product Safety Act was passed in 1976.
Of course, one might question why the NRA, the most powerful gun organization in the land, doesn't take some sort of lead in the effort to reduce the likelihood of future sniper killings. But the NRA's role is protecting gun owners and the gun industry--not saving lives.
The D.C. Sniper and the Gun Issue: What Are the Implications? Feature article, Join Together Online (www.jointogether.org), October 22, 2002.
Just because the basic right is there should this mean any gun deemed a "gun" can be owned by an American citizen? In fact, the Constitution says "arms." Does this mean our forefathers thought we should be able to bear any weapon arms manufacturers can develop? I'm sure they had no concept of just how good our weaponry could get.
And if we're going to own guns like this, because all American citizens are such responsible gun owners, why shouldn't they be tracked with ballistic fingerprinting? I wonder if such a program was in place during the sniper investigation if the suspects would have been traced quicker. The sniper's gun was illegally owned but had been initially legitimately sold to a distributer.....somewhere along the way it was insecure enough to be stolen or it was passed on illegally. If there were ballistics fingerprinting wouldn't even a stolen gun be traced quicker?
Why do gun proponents think there should be no limitations, no registration and no tracking if they have every intention of being responsible gun owners?
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/25/n...00&en=03042a63fef8433b&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
Officials Say Records Show Gun Was Illegally Owned
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
Federal authorities said last night that a gun seized from two suspects had been officially linked to the shootings in the Washington area and that one of the suspects, John Allen Muhammad, should have been legally disqualified from buying or possessing it.
The gun is a Bushmaster XM15 A3 M4, a civilian version of the standard American military rifle, the M-16, made with a removable handle on top so that a scope can be easily mounted on it, say officials of its maker, Bushmaster Firearms.
Bushmaster Firearms is a small privately owned company in Windham, Me., that specializes in making copies of the M-16. Last year it made 50,000 rifles, said the company's vice president, Allen Faraday, with the XM15 selling for about $800. On its Web site, Bushmaster advertises its rifles as "the best, by a long shot."
Michael Bouchard, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said at a news conference that tests had linked the seized gun to the East Coast killings.
Mr. Faraday said the gun was first sold to a distributor in Washington State last June. He declined to identify the wholesaler and said he did not know how or where Mr. Muhammad acquired the rifle.
The sniper's choice of the XM15 was a little unusual, Mr. Faraday said, because it has a 16-inch barrel and is therefore less accurate than the conventional M-16, which has a 20-inch barrel, or many sniper rifles that have 26-inch barrels. The shorter barrel, however, does make the XM15 easier to conceal.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Faraday said today, "Naturally we feel terrible and horrified" by the sniper killings in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. "We are very sad this deranged and crazy man picked up one of our guns."
Bushmaster first learned the identity of the gun seized in Mr. Muhammad's car when A.T.F. agents called the company a few hours later with the weapon's serial number, Mr. Faraday said.
Legally, Mr. Muhammad apparently should not have been able to buy a gun because he was under a domestic protective order taken out in March 2000 by Mildred Denice Muhammad, then his wife, in State Superior Court in Tacoma, Wash., court records show. The couple, who lived in Tacoma, were divorced in October 2000, and the restraining order was made permanent, the court documents also show.
The 1994 Crime Control Act made it illegal for a person under a restraining order to buy or possess a gun, and a mandatory background check should have revealed Mr. Muhammad's disqualification. It was Mr. Muhammad's possession of the gun, despite his disqualification, that led the authorities to charge him Wednesday night with a firearms violation, an official of the firearms bureau said.
Figures compiled by the bureau show that Bushmaster was a tiny company until the Clinton administration persuaded Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons in 1994. From 1988 to 1992, Bushmaster manufactured an average of only 1,500 rifles a year, and made none in 1993, the year before the ban. But in 1994 its production jumped to 24,868 rifles.
Mr. Faraday was careful to say its copies of the M-16 were not assault weapons, since they do not have collapsible stocks, flash suppressers or a mounting to install a bayonet, some features that were ruled out by the 1994 ban. The magazine of the XM15 also holds only 10 rounds, the permissible limit set by the 1994 ban.
In addition, the rifle is only a semiautomatic, requiring a trigger pull for each shot, not fully automatic as a military rifle, which allows multiple rounds to be fired with a single pull of the trigger.
But Kristen Rand, the legislative director for the Violence Policy Center in Washington, a gun control group, said that the XM15 seized in Mr. Muhammad's car still had features that mimic an assault weapon.
"It complies with the letter of the law, but it is still an assault rifle," Ms. Rand said.
The ban on assault weapons expires in 2004 and is considered likely to be the subject of a major fight in Congress. The National Rifle Association strongly opposed the ban and has made not renewing it a priority. The association has also opposed the prohibition on people under a restraining order from buying a gun.
A spokesman for the association, Andrew Arulanandam, did not return telephone calls today seeking comment.
Bushmaster's principal owner and chairman, Richard Dyke, was the finance chairman of George W. Bush's campaign for the presidency in Maine in 1999. Mr. Dyke resigned as Mr. Bush's chief fund-raiser in Maine in July 1999 after a Los Angeles police officer sued Bushmaster as the maker of a gun that wounded him in a shootout with bank robbers.
The D.C. Sniper and the Gun Issue: What Are the Implications?
10/22/2002
News Analysis
by Dick Dahl
Gun control had almost vanished as an issue in the 2002 election campaign season until early October, when a sniper started shooting people in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. The National Rifle Association was basking in the knowledge that all but a few Democrats had turned their backs on the issue and that Congress was set to move on an NRA-backed bill to provide the gun industry special immunity from lawsuits.
But since the sniper's deadly work has caught the nation's attention, the NRA's firm control of the gun issue has slipped.
First, the author of the immunity bill, Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., announced that Republican leaders had decided to "postpone" action on the bill because the timing was inappropriate. And now that many lawmakers are returning to their home districts for the final weeks of the campaign, the issue is dead for this session.
Second, the NRA now finds itself in a defensive posture for blocking ballistics "fingerprinting" technology that could help investigators locate the shooter if it were widely available. On Oct. 17, the NRA's executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre and executive director Chris Cox issued a statement pointing out the shortcomings, as they see it, of the technology and claiming that it "infringes on the rights of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans" because "this scheme is national gun registration."
While the statement acknowledged "our collective horror" over an "inexplicable tragedy," the terseness of its central hands-off message is unlikely to win the NRA many hearts. Indeed, the organization has been widely vilified for its intransigence and insensitivity. On Oct. 18, for instance, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson attacked the NRA and the lawmakers who follow its bidding, saying, "This is a nation where every car is registered, where every credit card transaction goes into a database, and where every Internet transaction seems to result in a marketer knowing your business. Yet (the federal government) still does not have the courage to force people to register lethal weapons. All because of the NRA and our fear of it."
Third, the White House reaction to the sniper holds potentially serious political implications. First, the White House stated its preference for the NRA position on ballistics fingerprinting over that of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Then, receiving a flurry of criticism, it backed down the next day. As Joe Sudbay, policy director for the Violence Policy Center, told Join Together Online, Bush has "his own set of problems with the NRA." That is, while the NRA strongly supports Bush, and while Bush's position on ballistics fingerprinting and other gun issues shows that he will follow the NRA line, how far can he follow them without suffering politically? "Bush is not going to sacrifice the suburbs completely to the NRA," Sudbay said.
Fourth, the potential exists for political backlash against some of the NRA-backed--and overwhelmingly Republican--candidates in this year's elections. Already, the political implications of the sniper shootings have become a large part of the Maryland gubernatorial race between Democratic Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Republican Congressman Robert Ehrlich. Polls showed that Ehrlich had already committed an apparent gaffe in late September when he suggested that some of the state's tough gun laws should be reconsidered. The emergence of the sniper made Ehrlich's statement look like an even greater political miscalculation and could cost him the election.
Elsewhere, New Jersey Democratic ex-senator Frank Lautenberg (Robert Torricelli's replacement) has begun using the gun issue to characterize his Republican opponent, Doug Forrester, as an NRA follower. And as the New York Post's Deborah Orin reported on Oct. 17, the political implications of the sniper shootings have "even popped up in gun-loving South Carolina," where Democratic Senate candidate Alex Sanders has yanked an ad in which his champion skeet-shooting wife Zoe is firing a gun as he pledges to "take aim" at Washington. Now, Orin reports, Sanders is calling for ballistic fingerprinting; his opponent Lindsay Graham, takes the standard NRA position that ballistics fingerprinting is not foolproof. In other races, Orin says, "the question is whether this new layer of anxiety will alter how voters make their picks."
The reality, however, is that nobody really knows. One of the problems for the Democrats who have run away from gun control this election season is that a sudden embrace of the issue now looks like political exploitation. Even in the Maryland gubernatorial race, a decision by Townsend last week to run a TV ad in which she attacked Ehrlich on the gun issue may have backfired somewhat for that reason, based on a poll which indicated voter disapproval.
As Election Day nears, the political implications of an elusive sniper in the region surrounding the nation's capital are still unclear. Much depends, of course, on what kind of person is actually doing the shooting. Still, whether the shooter is the product of right-wing sniper subculture or an international terrorist, the NRA and its supporters will have something to answer for -- because in either case, the NRA's role as intransigent opponent of laws and technologies that might better track down either category of killer is well-known.
The NRA has been quick to criticize its opponents for playing politics with the sniper shootings, a reaction which strikes Sudbay as both ironic and hypocritical. "With every other consumer group, when there are deaths or injuries or something horrific happening, the first thing they say is, 'How do we prevent this from happening again?' But when we do it in gun control, we're accused of playing politics."
The NRA might see it as playing politics, but to gun-violence-prevention groups who are pointing out shortcomings that could be improved to reduce the danger of future sniper killings, it's more a case of common sense. It's also a case of available alternatives. The problem with guns is that, unlike almost all other consumer products, they were exempted from regulation when the Consumer Product Safety Act was passed in 1976.
Of course, one might question why the NRA, the most powerful gun organization in the land, doesn't take some sort of lead in the effort to reduce the likelihood of future sniper killings. But the NRA's role is protecting gun owners and the gun industry--not saving lives.
The D.C. Sniper and the Gun Issue: What Are the Implications? Feature article, Join Together Online (www.jointogether.org), October 22, 2002.
