by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
It must also be noted that although the Secret Service can expand security perimeters, other potential targets—such as government officials at other levels, media and entertainment celebrities, noted figures in business and industry, and law enforcement officers—do not enjoy such protection. Nor are most of them protected in vehicles as heavily armored as presidential limousines and helicopters. The gun industry and its technology is thus making these other potential targets increasingly vulnerable to deadly attack from long range by 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles.
Ronnie Barrett has scoffed at this reality for two decades. “This is not something a drug lord or a bank robber is going to want to use,” he told the New York Times in 1992.62 On February 27, 1992, less than two months after Barrett’s smug pronouncement to the newspaper, a Wells Fargo armored delivery truck was attacked in a “military-style operation” in Chamblee, Georgia, by several men using a smoke grenade and a Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle.63 Barrett’s antiarmor sniper rifle has had a dark side almost from the moment it came into production. A sinister brigade of crackpots, terrorists, and violent criminals lust after it for the same reasons the world’s armies do. And because the gun is virtually unregulated and freely sold on the U.S. civilian market, these evil forces easily obtain Barrett’s antiarmor rifle in quantity. “You just have to have a credit card and clear record, and you can go buy as many as you want. No questions asked,” Florin Krasniqi, a gunrunner who smuggled Barrett sniper rifles to Kosovo, said in 2005. “Most of [sic] non-Americans [buying guns for him] were surprised at how easy it is to get a gun in heartland America. Most of the dealers in Montana and Wyoming don’t even ask you a question. It’s just like a grocery store.”64
Figure 9. Known Sales of 50 Caliber Antiarmor Sniper Rifles to Terrorists, Criminals, and Fringe Groups
Group
Number
Kosovo Liberation Army
At least 140
Gun Trafficking to Mexico
At least 37
Osama bin Laden Organization
25
Church Universal and Triumphant
10
Branch Davidians (David Koresh)
2
Irish Republican Army
2
Traffic to Mexico, federal indictments, and other court documents in the files of the Violence Policy Center; Kosovo Liberation Army, “Clear and Present Danger: National Security Experts Warn About the Danger of Unrestricted Sales of 50 Caliber Anti-Armor Sniper Rifles to Civilians,” July 2005, and sources cited therein; all others, Violence Policy Center, Voting from the Rooftops: How the Gun Industry Armed Osama bin Laden, Other Foreign and Domestic Terrorists, and Common Criminals with 50 Caliber Sniper Rifles (Washington, DC: Violence Policy Center, 2001) and sources cited therein.
Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda acquired at least twenty-five Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifles in the late 1980s. The transaction came to light during the federal trial in New York of terrorists charged with bombing American embassies in Africa. A government witness, Essam al Ridi, testified that he had shipped twenty-five Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifles to Al Qaeda. The testimony is ambiguous as to the exact date of the transaction, but it appears to have been in either 1988 or 1989. When VPC reported this fact in a 2001 report, Ronnie Barrett heatedly retorted that the sales were part of a secret CIA program to supply mujahideen rebels fighting the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan. The VPC then interviewed several former CIA officials who had managed the mujahideen supply program. They confirmed that some Barrett rifles had indeed been supplied through the CIA’s clandestine program to Afghan rebels through Pakistan. But these former officials vehemently denied that any CIA-sponsored money or supplies went to bin Laden, including specifically any Barrett antiarmor sniper rifles. Other evidence supported the CIA officials’ denials.65 It was clear that bin Laden had obtained his Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles through some other channel.
In 2005 Ronnie Barrett came clean. After describing the VPC allegation, the Nashville Tennessean reported, “Barrett doesn’t dispute that sale took place, but says a congressman bought the rifles to supply the fighters, rather than he or the gun industry selling them directly.”66
Although the news report does not identify the congressman in question, the most likely candidate is the late former U.S. Representative Charlie Wilson from Texas. Wilson was the subject of a 2003 book by George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, and a 2007 film derived from the book. Wilson was described by Crile in an interview as a man who “had to pistol-whip the CIA into the biggest war they ever fought.”67 Barrett and Wilson became close friends. According to the Murfreesboro Post, “Barrett still has the personal letter from Charlie Wilson, dated September 22, 1987, ordering the purchase of the Barrett rifles.”68
At about the same time, an official of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a Montana cult, was buying Barrett antiarmor sniper rifles in bulk. The official pled guilty to buying seven of them under a false name. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the group bought a total of ten Barrett rifles.69 Federal law enforcement investigators said that the official—the chief of the cult’s security unit, the “Cosmic Honor Guard”—was “basically buying weapons and paramilitary supplies to outfit a 200-man army”.70 The Barrett rifles seized from the Montana sect were later shipped to Miami and used as bait by federal agents, who arrested a suspected Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorist shopping for weapons. The suspect, who was collared while trying to stuff a five-foot Stinger antiaircraft missile into his car, specifically requested Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles from federal agents posing as arms dealers.71 In the 1990s, at least two Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifles were acquired in the United States by the IRA, whose snipers murdered a total of eleven soldiers and policemen in five years.72
The phenomenon of the militarized criminal is not a fantasy of some future American dystopia. It is here now. The Violence Policy Center keeps tabs on news media reports of 50 caliber sniper rifles linked to criminal activity in the United States. As of June 2012, it had documented more than three dozen incidents of such criminal use or possession of the antiarmor sniper rifles since 1989.73 One of the better known of this growing list of criminal incidents in the United States is the use of Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles by members of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult at their compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993. The Davidians’ arsenal included two Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifles and armor-piercing ammunition. The weapons’ ability to penetrate “any tactical vehicle in the FBI’s inventory” prompted the agency to request military armored vehicles “to give FBI personnel adequate protection from the 50 caliber rifles” and other more powerful weapons the Branch Davidians might have had. Cult members did in fact fire the 50 caliber sniper rifles at federal agents during the initial gun battle on February 28, 1993.74
The biggest civilian buyer of Barrett’s rifles in bulk, so far as is publicly known, was the gunrunner Florin Krasniqi. He bought at least one hundred and probably several hundred 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles in the United States and shipped them to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) over a period of several years, beginning in 1998. Krasniqi created a network of straw buyers among his compatriots. He declined to say on camera on 60 Minutes in 2005 how many of these rifles he and his comrades bought and shipped to Kosovo. But Stacy Sullivan—who documented Krasniqi’s activities in her book, Be Not Afraid, for You Have Sons in America—told 60 Minutes in the same program that she believes Krasniqi probably shipped “a couple hundred.” This estimate by Sullivan, who covered the Balkans for Newsweek magazine and spent five years researching her book with the cooperation of Krasniqi, is buttressed by a 1999 Congressional staff report, Suspect Organizations and Individuals Possessing Long-Range Fifty Caliber Sniper Weapons, that reported a KLA claim that it had 140 Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles at the time.75
Examination
of the most recent gun trafficking involving Ronnie Barrett’s antiarmor sniper rifle brings us straight back to the 2012 schoolyard shooting in Murfreesboro’s tranquil Amber Glen community.
Federal agents have been investigating the smuggling of 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles to Mexico for use by drug cartels since at least 1999.76 An ongoing Violence Policy Center analysis of federal indictments and other documents filed in U.S. courts in connection with criminal gun trafficking cases found that between February 2006 and September 2012, at least twenty-nine 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles destined for Mexico were seized by U.S. law enforcement officials. Of these, nineteen were Barrett rifles.77 By definition, this count includes only cases in which the guns were discovered and seized before they got to Mexico. It does not include guns successfully smuggled. Nevertheless, these seized rifles are representative of the huge flow of guns from the U.S. civilian market to criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
This is a marriage made in hell.
Guns from the wide-open U.S. civilian market directly empower these ruthless cartels—who produce and ship illegal drugs to the United States—to wage merciless paramilitary war among themselves and against the governments of Mexico and, increasingly, Central America. In the past, Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have used guns to establish and maintain control of drug trafficking routes and entry points into the United States. In recent years, however, these organizations have demanded more sophisticated and more powerful arms and have used them to confront not only each other but the Mexican government and civil society. According to a 2010 report on firearms trafficking to Mexico:
While DTOs still use firearms to establish control over drug trafficking routes leading to the United States, in the last few years they more regularly use firearms in open combat with rival DTOs, Mexican authorities, and the public. Such open confrontations with the Mexican state indicate a move “into a sphere that is typically inhabited by groups with a much more overt political stance, such as terrorists, guerrillas or paramilitaries.” Mexican DTOs are also demanding more sophisticated firearms and larger quantities of arms and ammunition.78
The vast majority of the firearms seized in Mexico between 2007 and 2011 and traced by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) came from the United States, according to ATF trace data released in April 2012. According to ATF, “Trace information shows that between calendar years 2007 and 2011 the Government of Mexico recovered and submitted more than 99,000 firearms to ATF for tracing. Of those firearms more than 68,000 were U.S.-sourced. . . . Law enforcement in Mexico now report that certain types of rifles, such as the AK and AR variants with detachable magazines, are used more frequently to commit violent crime by drug trafficking organizations.” ATF also released trace data showing that 99 percent of the guns traced in Canada during this period came from the United States as well as data on U.S. guns recovered in the Caribbean.79
It is difficult to exaggerate the harm that this traffic in guns is doing, both to Mexico and to the United States. An investigation into sales from just one gun store in Houston, Texas—Carter’s Country gun store—revealed that twenty-three buyers had purchased 339 guns worth $366,450 in a fifteen-month period. These were mostly AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, FN Herstal 5.7mm rifles and pistols, and Beretta pistols. One or more of these guns were later found at crime scenes in Mexico where police had been murdered, judicial personnel had been executed, the military had been fired on, or a businessman had been kidnapped and murdered. A total of eighteen Mexican law enforcement officers and civilians were killed with these guns, from a single U.S. gun store.80
The 50 caliber rifles among the guns smuggled from the United States also play a prominent role in this tragic bloodbath. In Ciudad Juarez, for example, gunmen used a 50 caliber rifle to murder the head of local police operations. In Tijuana in October 2008, a Mexican Special Forces soldier was shot in the head as his unit entered a drug lord’s neighborhood. After a two-hour standoff, police found a Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle, along with four other rifles. U.S. District Court documents show that the guns were bought in Las Vegas.81
How does all of this relate to Murfreesboro’s gun violence problem? The Mexican criminal organizations are not a local phenomenon whose violent power and noxious influence is restricted to Mexico. They are transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). In other words, their criminal structure and operations reach across borders, into the United States, Canada, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.82 “Mexican-based TCOs and their associates dominate the supply and wholesale distribution of most illicit drugs in the United States. These organizations control much of the production, transportation, and wholesale distribution of illicit drugs destined for and in the United States.”83
The tentacles of the Mexican TCOs reach all the way into communities like Murfreesboro through criminal gangs. “Criminal gangs—that is street, prison, and outlaw motorcycle gangs—remain in control of most of the retail distribution of drugs throughout much of the United States, particularly in major and midsize cities. Gangs vary in size and in sophistication from loose coalitions to highly structured multinational enterprises, but they form the bedrock of retail drug distribution in the United States.”84
The national economic impact of this international web is estimated to total $193,096,930,000, with the majority share attributable to lost productivity.85 But it has a more violent effect. It begins when the drug trafficking organizations “regularly employ lethal force to protect their drug shipments in Mexico and while crossing the US-Mexico border.”86 It continues down to the street level in communities all over America, and every indication is that it is going to get worse. “Gang members are acquiring high-powered, military-style weapons and equipment, resulting in potentially lethal encounters with law enforcement officers, rival gang members, and innocent bystanders. Law enforcement officials in several regions nationwide report gang members in their jurisdiction are armed with military-style weapons, such as high-caliber semiautomatic rifles, semiautomatic variants of AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and body armor.”87
The FBI warns that this trend is ominous. “Gang members armed with high-powered weapons and knowledge and expertise acquired from employment in law enforcement, corrections, or the military may pose an increasing nationwide threat, as they employ these tactics and weapons against law enforcement officials, rival gang members, and civilians.”88
In sum, the wide-open U.S. civilian market in military-style weapons, like the Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle and others of its ilk, directly contribute to the power of the international criminal drug organizations. This evil has inevitably seeped down into towns like Murfreesboro. By 2007, the Murfreesboro police had identified a hundred gang members in the city. Carter Smith, who began investigating gangs as a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division agent and helped form the Tennessee Gang Investigators Association, told the local newspaper that some gang members migrated to smaller cities like Murfreesboro, Smyrna, and La Vergne after they were pushed out of nearby Nashville. “They don’t play by the same rules the rest of society does,” Smith said. “They don’t care if something is illegal. If they need something, they find a way to get it even if it means killing you or someone else.”89
Someone else did get killed in Murfreesboro when a gang war erupted in late 2007 over distribution of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines. On November 14, 2007, Moss James Dixon, sixty-six, an innocent bystander, was shot to death when gangsters shot up a West Main Street apartment. Murders and retaliatory killing continued through 2008. In October 2009, a sixty-four-count federal indictment was handed up, charging gang members in Nashville and Murfreesboro with racketeering, including several charges of murder, drug trafficking, and various violent acts.90
Although local authorities pronounced the problem abated with the indictment, the Murfreesboro Police Department nonetheless was reported in January 2012 to have found u
se for a federal grant to strengthen its new gang unit, increase antigang education in schools, and track gang activities.91 It was against all of this background—the arming of Mexican drug traffickers, the increasing militarization of gangs, and local gang wars—that the anxious reaction to the shooting of fourteen-year-old Taylor Schulz on Presidents’ Day, just one month later, must be judged.
As the gun industry is pushed more and more into the position of attempting to defend the indefensible—the recklessly unrestricted sale of militarized weapons—it has fallen back on the plaintive plea that its civilian sales are necessary to support manufacture for the armed forces. “If it weren’t for the civilian sales, I wouldn’t be here. There’s a lot of defense contractors that would not be here,” Ronnie G. Barrett told 60 Minutes.92 He went on to say that he “would never have been in business” if he could not sell to civilians.93
Barrett’s story in 2005 was different from what he told the ATF in 1984. Records from Barrett’s federal firearms license file indicate that he told the ATF back then that his intention was to market his newly designed 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle primarily to the military and law enforcement. Thus, the written report of the ATF agent who delivered Barrett’s first federal firearms manufacturer’s license to the company in 1984 states:
Mr. Barrett said that this is a sniper-type weapon, and he intends to try to market it to the U.S. military or police departments prior to considering sales to the public. He said that it will be quite expensive and probably of interest only to collectors. He said that the number manufactured will be limited unless a large military sale is possible.94
Moreover, Barrett has claimed that he was losing money selling to civilians and was $1.5 million in debt until he made his first big military sale, to the Swedish army in 1989.95