by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
What made this shooting stand out was that even in quiet, upscale Amber Glen the gunfire ignited alarm about criminal gangs.11 It now appears that there was no gang connection. But fear and concern that the shooting might be related to gangs was not fanciful; Murfreesboro and Rutherford County have both suffered a burst of gang-related gun violence in recent years. Perspective about its causes and the choices America faces can be found in the contrast between the lives and work of two of Murfreesboro’s honored sons.
The first, Dr. Robert Sanders, “Dr. Seat Belt,” devoted his life to protecting children. When Dr. Sanders died in 2006, the Nashville Tennessean praised his life and accomplishments. “He fought . . . for Tennessee citizens, particularly Tennessee’s children,” the paper’s editors eulogized. “This state is deeply in his debt.”12 Dr. Sanders’s life is a model of the comprehensive, fact-based public health and safety approach that could dramatically reduce gun death and injury in the United States.
Dr. Sanders was born in Tennessee. After completing his medical education, he went to work in 1966 as the Rutherford County Health Department’s chief physician, in 1969 became its chief health official, and in 1983 took on the additional job of county medical examiner.13 Rutherford County had a strong public health tradition going back to a decade before the Great Depression of the 1930s, when “Murfreesboro and its rural surroundings were the beneficiaries of an amazing infusion of finances and training” for public health.14
Dr. Sanders brought two elements to this public health-conscious environment. The first was the compassion of a gifted man who had seen and “detested the horribleness of car crashes and what they did to unrestrained babies and young children.”15 The second was that during his postgraduate study in Sweden, he saw seat belts that a safety-conscious doctor had designed and installed by himself in his car. “Dr. Sanders was impressed with this doctor’s innovative idea, and that’s when his interest in seat belts and safety devices began.”16
In October 1974 Dr. Sanders was impressed by a speech about hazards to children by the public safety advocate Ralph Nader at the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in San Francisco.17 At the time, only a few countries had any laws requiring seat belts in motor vehicles. There were no laws anywhere in the world mandating restraints for children, even though unsuccessful attempts to pass such laws had been made in at least thirty states. Dr. Sanders took on the issue of protecting children in motor vehicle crashes.18
He and a handful of allies promoted a bill in the Tennessee legislature requiring use of child restraints. One of the early surprises was how many people—even within the medical community—opposed the legislation. The arguments against child safety restraints were remarkably similar to those stubbornly clung to by gun enthusiasts today. The strongest opposition was that requiring seat belts invaded individual liberties. Some parents with bigger families objected to the cost of car seats.19 The bill did not reach the floor of the legislature in 1976, the first year it was introduced.20
Dr. Sanders did not give up. He and his wife enlisted an “army of pediatricians” for a grassroots lobbying effort. In 1977, the bill was passed into law. It became effective in January 1978. Tennessee was the first state in the union to require children under four years of age to ride in a car seat. By 1985, every state and the District of Columbia had similar laws.21
Those who sought passage of child safety laws in other states had to overcome the same ill-informed polemics that Dr. Sanders had faced in Tennessee. The New York Times, for example, quoted State Representative James S. ("Trooper Jim”) Foster of Florida arguing in 1982 against a proposed child seat law. “We’ve got people out there with three or four young ’uns,” Foster said. “You’re going to hear them squalling and carrying on something terrible. You don’t do that to a biddy young ’uns.”22 Foster, who ironically was formerly a public relations safety officer with the Florida Highway Patrol, and a country singer,23 also argued the same year against a proposed seventy-two-hour “cooling-off” period on handgun sales.24
The Tennessee child-restraint law had dramatic results. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1984 found that the law had been “a remarkable success.”25 Six years after it went into effect, motor vehicle fatalities among children younger than four years had been cut in half. The children who died were “almost exclusively . . . transported without benefit of child restraint devices.” Not a single child younger than four years old traveling in a child-restraint device died in a motor vehicle accident in Tennessee during 1982 and 1983. In contrast, seventeen such children who were not restrained died.26
Researchers, however, noted a tragic problem stemming from the conventional wisdom that inspired what was known as the “babes in arms” exemption in the original bill. They noted, “A particularly troublesome aspect of the child restraint question is the sentiment that the best place for a baby to travel is in its mother’s arms. Proponents of this view have not been easily swayed by studies that have shown that no human can successfully hold on to even a 4.5-kg [9.92-pound] child under the stress of the decelerative forces involved in a 30-mph crash, and that the adult holding the child usually becomes a huge blunt object that crushes the baby against the dashboard.”27 One article reported that children who were in their mothers’ arms in vehicle accidents in 1982 and 1983 “suffered injuries and death at a rate approaching that of entirely unrestrained children.”28 In short, parents who were either ignorant of the facts or thought they knew better than the experts were killing their own children. The exemption, which came to be known as the child-crusher exemption, was removed from the law in 1981.
This sad waste of young life is the precise analog of the gun enthusiasts’ devotion to the myth that a gun in the home protects the family, in the face of study after study showing otherwise. A recent cross-state study, for one example, found that “compared to children in states with low gun ownership, children in states with high gun ownership were more than twice as likely to be murdered with a gun, fourteen times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and ten times more likely to die in an unintentional shooting.”29
The child-restraint law not only saved the lives of children; it saved Tennessee taxpayers money that would have been spent on medical care. According to researchers, “the use of child restraint devices saved $2 million in Tennessee in 1982 and 1983 alone.” The savings in these direct costs of medical care would have been $8.4 million if all children who traveled in the state had been in child-restraint devices. “Many of these costs are borne directly by the taxpayers through Medicaid and other government-supported health care programs; another portion is paid indirectly by the public through higher insurance premiums.”30
The same medical cost shifting occurs with gun injuries. The cost of medical care for gun violence victims in the United States is about $4 billion per year. National data reported in 2001 show that government programs pay for about 49 percent of this amount, 18 percent is covered by private insurance, and 33 percent is paid by all other sources.31 It should be noted that direct medical costs are only part of the burden America bears because of guns. The overall economic cost—including health care, disability, unemployment, and other intangibles—is about $ 100 billion per year.32
Dr. Sanders accepted no commissions from car seat manufacturers, and scrupulously avoided profiting from his activism.33 The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that from 1975 through 2009, child restraints saved 9,310 lives.34
Dr. Robert Sanders’s life stands as a model for selfless service devoted to public health and safety. Its antipode is that of another of Murfreesboro’s widely-known sons, Ronnie Gene Barrett. In 1982, at about the same time that Trooper Jim Foster was trying unsuccessfully to save “biddy young ’uns” from child-restraint laws in Florida, Ronnie Barrett began work on an invention that would make him rich, powerful, and famous—at least among gun enthusiasts. It was an extremely accurate sniper rifle that fires a massive bull
et with such force that it blasts through an inch of steel at a thousand yards.
A measure of the man—and of his self-estimation—may be found under the pontifical rubric “Meet the Maker” on the Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Inc., website.
You can’t share the history of Barrett without talking about Ronnie. It all started in 1982 when he created the world’s first shoulder-fired .50 caliber rifle. Thousands of rifles later, the company that bears his name has become a revered icon in the world of firearms manufacturing.35
A self-described dyslexic with attention deficit disorder,36 Barrett never went to college.37 He never served in military uniform, so far as has been publicly reported, although he does claim to have served for an unspecified period of time and place as a reserve deputy.38 A lifelong gun enthusiast and Second Amendment fundamentalist, now on the board of the NRA, he became a commercial photographer by trade, getting his start shooting weddings.39
According to the company’s buttery hagiography, the idea for Barrett’s deadly invention came to him in 1982 while he was taking pictures on a Tennessee river for another gun company. The photos were of a river patrol boat armed with two Browning 50 caliber machine guns. “Barrett was wowed by the amazing Browning Ma Deuce. He wondered to himself if the incredible .50-caliber cartridge could be fired from a rifle; maybe one operated from the shooter’s shoulder. He decided to find out. With no manufacturing or engineering experience, Barrett drew a three-dimensional sketch of his idea for a .50-caliber, semiautomatic rifle to show how it should function.”40
The Browning 50 caliber heavy machine gun was developed by John Browning in 1918 at the end of World War I.41 After several modifications, the standard M2 machine gun became known as the Ma Deuce. Big, heavy, and usually mounted on a tripod, it is still relied on by the U.S. military and armed forces all over the world.42 “Employed as an anti-personnel and anti-aircraft weapon, it is highly effective against light armored vehicles, low flying aircraft, and small boats,” according to the U.S. Army.43 Barrett proposed to put the 50 caliber’s massive firepower and unequalled range into a rifle that could be fired by one person from the shoulder.
Barrett’s 1987 patent called his invention an anti-armor gun. He described the .50 BMG rifle in his patent claim as a “shoulder-fireable, armor-penetrating gun.” Barrett related the genius of his invention as follows:
The recoil and weight of the Browning M-2 heavy-barrel machine gun (50 cal.), belt-fed, make it unsuitable for firing from the shoulder. The bolt-fed sniper rifle of smaller weight and caliber will not penetrate armored targets. The bolts of guns of a caliber that will penetrate armored targets are often broken by recoil because of excessive strain on the lock lugs. Thus, there is a need for a light-weight, shoulder-fireable, armor-penetrating gun that can stand up to heavy duty use. After extended investigation I have come up with just such a gun.44
Barrett calls his antiarmor rifle an “adult toy” when he talks to the news media. “It’s a target rifle. It’s a toy. It’s a high-end adult recreational toy,” he said on the 60 Minutes television program in 2005.45 “It’s like, what does a 55-year-old man do with a Corvette?,” Barrett told the Associated Press in the same year. “You drive it around and enjoy it.” He also boasted in the same interview that his customers included doctors, lawyers, moviemakers, and actors. “I know all the current actors who are Barrett rifle shooters, some Academy Award-winning people. But they don’t publicize it. They love to play with them and have fun. Shooting is very fun.”46
The 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle is not a toy at all, but a deadly serious weapon of war, the most powerful gun available to ordinary civilians in America. Quite unlike the car seats for children that Dr. Sanders promoted to save lives, Ronnie Barrett’s sniper rifle has taken countless lives in war and criminal violence all over the world. Regulated by federal law only to the same extent as an ordinary hunting rifle, Barrett’s 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle is the archetype of the gun industry’s ruthless militarization of the civilian gun market. It has spawned dozens of imitators. But, according to the company, “Barrett dominates this market and enjoys customer allegiance approaching a cult following.”47 With the exception of a few states, including California, these armor-piercing, long-range killing machines are legally and easily available throughout the entire country.
Its lethality cannot be exaggerated. “The .50 BMG is infinitely more powerful than any other shoulder-fired rifle on the planet,” enthuses a 2004 book aimed at civilian fans. “The point to be made here is that no matter how you measure energy and stopping power, the .50 BMG is well off the charts. It is far more powerful than any other rifle cartridge known according to any measuring system yet devised.”48
“A bullet of such size and weight traveling at well over Mach 2 can be called a missile in the modern context without a high-altitude flight of fancy,” the same book exclaims. The author notes the extraordinary range of the 50 caliber round in comparison to the 30–06, one of the 30 caliber rounds common in hunting rifles. “The trajectory of the two rounds is similar out to the limits of the 30–06’s stability, but when the 30-caliber bullet is ready to call it a day and dive for the dirt, the .50 is still charging along with more than enough authority to cut a man in half and keep on going.”49 Another enthusiastic reviewer of the Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle’s accuracy and power reported firing match-grade armor-piercing ammunition “against 1-inch-thick armor steel at 300 meters distance. Not only did the rounds penetrate with enough behind-armor effect to be lethal, but the three-round group we fired could be covered with the palm of the hand. Two rounds were actually touching.”50
According to the U.S. Army, the rifle’s effective range is five times that 300-meter distance. A U.S. Army News Service article summarized the capabilities of the Barrett “.50-caliber long range sniper rifle”—called the M-107 in Army nomenclature—as follows:
The M-107 enables Army snipers to accurately engage personnel and material [sic] targets out to a distance of 1,500 to 2,000 meters respectively. . . . The weapon is designed to effectively engage and defeat materiel targets at extended ranges including parked aircraft, computers, intelligence sites, radar sites, ammunition, petroleum, oil and lubricant sites, various lightly armored targets and command, control and communications. In a counter-sniper role, the system offers longer stand-off ranges and increased terminal effects against snipers using smaller-caliber weapons.51
One need only consider the civilian equivalents of such military targets to understand the concern that many security experts have about the unrestricted sale of long-range antiarmor sniper rifles to civilians. The Violence Policy Center has published a number of monographs detailing the rifle’s capabilities, its proponents’ often specious claims, its use by criminals and terrorists, and the concerns of security experts going back at least as far as a classified report written for the U.S. Secret Service.52
In 1985, the deputy assistant director of the Office of Protective Operations, U.S. Secret Service, wrote a research paper for the faculty of the National War College of the National Defense University titled “Large Caliber Sniper Threat to U.S. National Command Authority Figures.” The “National Command Authority” refers to the president and the secretary of defense.53 After reviewing developments in the marketing of these antiarmor rifles and their use in earlier terror attacks and assassinations, the author concluded that such “large caliber long range weapons pose a significant threat for U.S. National Command Authority figures if used by terrorists or other assailants.”54 His report then summarized the specific threats that 50 caliber antiarmor rifles present to agencies charged with security, such as the Secret Service:
The weapons are capable of defeating light armor of the type used in limousines, aircraft, ballistic shields, etc. When so used modern ammunition makes them highly effective.
The weapons are more accurate than shoulder fired antitank rockets and, if used against aircraft, immune to electronic counter measure
s. They are man portable and easily concealed.
Large caliber long range weapons can be employed effectively from places of concealment outside the scope of normal security measures against personnel, aircraft, lightly armored vehicles and buildings. They thus pose a threat in environments generally thought secure.55
Recent developments have made the domestic threat from anti-armor sniper rifles much more serious than those envisioned by the Secret Service in 1985. In a 2007 report prepared for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on terrorist use of conventional weapons, the RAND Corporation included sniper rifles and recently evolved technology supporting snipers among what it called “game changing weapons.” In the hands of terrorists, such weapons “would force the defender to dramatically alter its behavior.”56 The report noted that “in recent years, considerable advances have been made in sniper technology that have changed the requirements for effective use of sniper tactics.” These advances include small ballistic computers to correct for wind and temperature, platforms that allow a rifle to be fired by remote control, improved scopes and other optics, and night vision devices.57 This technology “has made it so that advanced rifle marksmanship skills are no longer necessary in sniping.”58 It has also extended the effective range of sniping rifles to a mile or more, and made the impact on the target more devastating.59
The result is that terrorists can now “carry out line-of-sight attacks or assassinations that would previously not have been possible, either because of their lack of skill and training or because the security perimeter around a very important person (VIP) target would be on the lookout for attacks from a shorter range.”60 The report warns that “since such sniping systems are now widely available, it appears that the Secret Service will be forced to expand its secured perimeter to deny line of sight out to beyond 2 km.”61