by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
Poplawski bought at least three of his guns from Braverman Arms Co., a gun shop on Penn Avenue in Wilkinsburg, a borough in Allegheny County next to Pittsburgh.62 Wilkinsburg had its moment of national attention in 2000, when Ronald Taylor, thirty-nine, a black man, went on a racially motivated shooting spree. Taylor shot to death three white men and wounded two others. Investigators found lists and notes in Taylor’s apartment that denounced whites, Jews, Asians, Italians, police, and the news media.63 The gun Taylor used also was traced back to Braverman Arms Co.64
Of all his guns, Poplawski most loved his AK-47 assault rifle. On December 8, 2008, Poplawski posted a comment on Stormfront’s website, in response to a question posed there, “If You Could Have Just One Weapon—SHTF [shit hits the fan], What Would It Be?” His answer was, “I guess I’d have to say my AK. Which is nice because it doesn’t have to fall from the sky—its [sic] in a case within arms [sic] reach.”65 His friend and co-host Petrovic told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Poplawski “always said that if someone tried to take his weapons away he would do what his forefathers told him to do and defend himself.”66
This is where matters stood early on the morning of Saturday, April 4.
Sometime before seven A.M., Richard’s mother, Margaret, awoke and found that one of the dogs had urinated on the floor. She woke Richard and confronted him about the dog.67 After their argument, she called 911 at 7:03 A.M. and asked that the police come and remove Poplawski.68 A police dispatcher sent the call out at 7:05 A.M. as a domestic disturbance.69
Officer Kelly’s shift was over. Officially off duty, he picked up his oldest daughter, Tameka, twenty-two. She also worked the night shift, as a nursing assistant at a health care facility.70 They were in his personal vehicle, only minutes from their home.
Richard Poplawski later told police that his mother was “extremely stupid” to call the police, knowing how well armed he was. Immediately after the call, he prepared himself for battle. He went into his bedroom, put on his ballistic vest, and grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun. “You’re not going to do this,” his mother said to Richard. But his mind was made up. He later told a police detective that he thought in his head at that moment, “Come on with it.”71
Pittsburgh police officers Paul J. Sciullo II and Stephen J. Mayhle arrived at the Poplawski house at 7:11 A.M., eight minutes after Margaret’s call to 911. She met them at the door, let them in, and said, “Come and take his ass.”72 Walking out of his bedroom with his shotgun, Poplawski saw Sciullo standing in the front doorway.73
“The police arrived much quicker than I expected,” he later said in a statement to police. “I was caught off guard. This led to a snap decision to shoot. [I] just believed police were going to kill me.”74 He fired a single shot from the hip at Officer Sciullo, who was struck and immediately went down in the threshold.75
“What the hell have you done?” Margaret yelled at Richard before fleeing to the basement.76
As Officer Mayhle entered the house, Poplawski tried to shoot him, too. But his shotgun jammed. “Code 3! Code 3! Officer down! Officers are being shot at!” Mayhle shouted into his radio.77
A furious gun battle ensued between the two men, raging through much of the house. A trail of 40 caliber casings fired from Mayhle’s service pistol indicated that the officer chased Poplawski from the living room, through the kitchen, into the dining room, and then into a hallway, where the trail stopped.78 That is when, it appears, Poplawski grabbed his AK-47 and started firing at Mayhle. The officer had fired eight 40 caliber rounds from his gun as he chased Poplawski. Two of his bullets struck Poplawski, one in the chest, near his heart. But Poplawski’s ballistic vest stopped that bullet. Another bullet struck Poplawski in the leg. Mayhle then tried to run out of the house, but was struck down by bullets from Poplawski’s assault rifle. Twenty-eight spent AK-47 casings were found just in the living room. Some of the bullets from those casings ripped through Mayhle’s ballistic vest.79 Poplawski went outside and shot both officers again multiple times as they lay on the ground.80
At 7:15 A.M., just a few blocks away, Officer Kelly and his daughter heard the sounds of gunfire as they pulled up to their house. Kelly told his daughter to run into the house. “I was shook up,” she later testified. “He told me to just go in the house, lock the door. He’ll be fine.” She watched her father speed away. “She was banging on the door,” his wife, Marena Kelly recalled. “She was saying, ‘Daddy went down there.’ ”81
Meanwhile, Poplawski had holed up in his mother’s bedroom. He saw Kelly drive up in his white SUV and opened fire on him immediately with his AK-47 assault rifle.82 Kelly was hit by rounds from Poplawski’s AK-47 three times before he could get out of his vehicle. The rounds easily punched through the car’s metal and into Kelly’s body. He was hit at least three more times by AK rounds outside the SUV, one of which was fatal, striking his right kidney, liver, and lung.83
Other officers responded to the scene, and a gun battle began. It lasted for two and a half hours. A detective testified that hundreds of rounds were fired from the guns Poplawski used that day—a 12-gauge shotgun, .357 Magnum revolver, and 7.62 mm AK-47 assault rifle.84 “Bullets were whizzing and pinging everywhere,” Sergeant James Kohnen said. “It was a meat grinder. We were totally outgunned—pistols against assault rifles.”85 A SWAT officer later testified, “We began to run low on ammo because we were sustaining so much fire.” He said each officer carried 125 rounds of ammunition into the fight.86 Margaret Poplawski was seen during the violent standoff, pacing in both the garage and the driveway, smoking cigarettes.87
Richard was eventually engaged in conversation by a police negotiator. “This is really an unfortunate occurrence, sir,” Poplawski said at one point. Later he assured the negotiator, “You know, I’m a good kid, officer.” He also moaned, swore, and spewed racial epithets.88 “Boy, getting shot is really painful,” he complained.89 At one point during the battle, Poplawski considered suicide, he later told police. But he decided against it. Prison wouldn’t be so bad, he concluded.90 Eventually, he was worn down by his own wounds. “I need medical attention. It’s really painful. I’m [expletive] shot. I’m in pain. I’m dizzy,” he said. “Get in here and get me some medication attention.”91
Margaret Poplawski ran out to the police at 10:36 A.M.92 Less than ten minutes later, her son surrendered.93 Richard Poplawski Jr. was convicted of three counts of murder and numerous other offenses. He was sentenced to death for the murders, and an additional 85 to 190 years were added for his other crimes.94
The gun lobby and its enthusiasts obstinately deny the lessons taught by Poplawski’s tale. As chapter 5 discussed and this case demonstrates, concealed-carry-permit holders are not by definition community leaders. A larger question is raised by the murderous actions of Richard Poplawski and James Eagan Holmes. What is there about the civilian semiautomatic assault rifle that enables a single man to kill three armed police officers in less than fifteen minutes and then hold off a huge responding force, including SWAT officers, for almost three hours? Or to murder twelve people and wound another fifty-eight in a few minutes? Why on earth are machines so efficient at killing people so freely available in the United States?
The answers are these. Assault weapons were designed to do in war precisely what Holmes did in a movie theater and Poplawski did in his quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood—kill or wound large numbers of people within short to medium distances. And the gun industry, hand in hand with the NRA, the NSSF, and other members of the gun lobby, has aggressively marketed assault weapons to help keep its foundering fortunes afloat.95
Semiautomatic assault weapons are civilian versions of automatic military assault rifles, such as the AK-47 and the M-16. The civilian guns look the same as their military brethren because they function identically, except for one feature: military assault rifles are machine guns. A machine gun fires continuously as long as its trigger is held back—until it runs out of ammunition. Civilian assault rifles, in contrast, are sem
iautomatic weapons. The trigger of a semiautomatic weapon must be pulled back separately for each round fired. Because federal law has banned the sale of new machine guns to private persons since 1986 and heavily regulates sales to civilians of older model machine guns, the availability of military assault weapons for the civilian market is limited.
The distinctive look of assault weapons like Poplawski’s AK-47 is not merely cosmetic, as the gun industry and its lobby often argue. The assault weapon’s physical appearance is the result of design following function. All assault weapons—military and civilian alike—incorporate specific features that were designed to provide a specific combat function. That function is laying down a high volume of fire over a wide killing zone, also known as “hosing down” an area. Civilian assault weapons keep the specific design features that make this deadly spray-firing easy. The most important of these design features are:
•High-capacity detachable ammunition magazines (often called “clips”) that may hold more than a hundred rounds of ammunition.96 According to gun expert Chuck Taylor, “This allows the high volume of fire critical to the ‘storm gun’ concept.”97 A gun that held the three to five rounds of a traditional hunting rifle or the six rounds of a classic revolver would have to be reloaded many times to discharge as many bullets as are available in a single high-capacity magazine.
•A rear pistol grip (handle), including so-called “thumb-hole stocks” and extended ammunition magazines that function like pistol grips.
•A forward grip or barrel shroud. Forward grips (located under the barrel or the forward stock) “give a shooter greater control over a weapon during recoil,” according to gun expert Duncan Long.98 The front and rear grips allow the shooter to hold the gun in a manner that is convenient for either spray-firing from the hip or more controlled aiming from the shoulder. Forward grips and barrel shrouds also make it possible to hold the gun with the non-trigger hand, even though the barrel gets extremely hot from firing multiple rounds. In the case of assault pistols, the forward grip is often an ammunition magazine or a barrel shroud (a heat-dissipating vented tube surrounding the gun barrel).
Military assault rifles usually feature what is known as “selective fire”—the ability to change, with the flick of a small lever, from semiautomatic fire to fully automatic fire. Is this selective ability to use automatic fire an essential feature of a “real” assault weapon? The answer is, “absolutely not.” But that hasn’t kept the gun industry from using this line of argument to pretend that civilian assault weapons simply don’t exist. For example, in June 2010, Tom Givens, a gun writer who also runs a gun training range (complete with gun shop) in Memphis, Tennessee, told the Commercial Appeal that the AR-15 is not an assault rifle because it is semiautomatic.99 This red herring began to be raised by the gun lobby only after civilian assault weapons were widely criticized. The criticism understandably arose after mass murderers and drug traffickers began to “hose down” America’s streets and schoolyards with civilian assault weapons. The argument is entirely semantic. By limiting the definition of assault weapon to machine guns, the gun industry and its friends hope to define the problem away. But fully automatic fire has little to do with the killing power of assault weapons. As pro-assault weapons expert Duncan Long wrote in his 1986 publication, Assault Pistols, Rifles and Submachine Guns, “The next problem arises if you make a semiauto-only model of one of these selective-fire rifles. According to the purists, an assault rifle has to be selective fire. Yet, if you think about it, it’s a little hard to accept the idea that firearms with extended magazines, pistol grip stock, etc. cease to be assault rifles by changing a bit of metal.”100
Long’s point is well taken, because military and civilian experts (including an NRA magazine) agree that semiautomatic fire is actually more—not less—likely to hit the target than is automatic fire and is thus more deadly.101 In fact, Long wrote about the semiautomatic UZI in another book, “One plus of the semiauto version is that it has a greater potential accuracy.”102 In any case, an NRA magazine reported that a person of moderate skill—like Richard Poplawski—can fire a semiautomatic assault weapon at an extremely fast rate of fire.103
The history of assault weapons confirms Long’s view that the fundamental design of the assault weapon has little to do with automatic fire and everything to do with high capacity and ease of firing. The German army developed the first assault rifle during World War II. The STG 44 (Sturmgewehr, or “storm gun”) was the “father of all assault rifles. . . . After the war it was examined and dissected by almost every major gunmaking nation and led, in one way and another, to the present-day 5.56mm assault rifles.”104 The Soviet Army’s AK-47 was derived from the STG-44 shortly after the war.105
After studying over three million casualty reports from three wars, the U.S. Army’s Operations Research Office (ORO) found that, “in the overall picture, aimed fire did not seem to have any more important role in creating casualties than randomly fired shots. Marksmanship was not as important as volume. . . . From this data, ORO concluded that what the Army needed was a low recoil weapon firing a number of small projectiles. . . . The [Armalite] AR-15 was chosen as the best small caliber weapon and it was adopted as the M16.”106 One gun expert put the army’s reasoning into plain words. “The studies showed that. . . in spite of the huge amounts of money spent by the military services in training combat infantrymen to be marksmen, few were capable of firing effectively beyond ranges of 200 to 300 meters in the heat of battle. ‘Spray and pray’ would come to be the practice on the future battlefields of Vietnam.”107 More recently, in September 2009, a gun industry observer summed up the assault rifle’s design concept. “From the minute you get your first modern, AR-style rifle, the first thing that you notice is the fact that it truly is one of the most ergonomic long guns you’ll ever put to your shoulder. Makes sense, it was designed to take young men, many of whom had never fired a gun of any sort before, and quickly make them capable of running the rifle—effectively—in the most extreme duress, armed combat.”108
Why are these weapons of war on America’s streets? Simply to make money for the gun industry. In the 1980s, foreign manufacturers began dumping semiautomatic versions of the Soviet-designed AK-47 military assault rifle onto the U.S. civilian firearms market. Colt Industries, a domestic manufacturer, marketed the AR-15, the semiautomatic version of the M16, the standard U.S. military infantry rifle. When Colt’s basic patent expired, other gun makers jumped into the civilian market.
Assault weapons have become hot items on the civilian market for a variety of reasons. For manufacturers, assault weapons originally helped counter the mid-1980s decline in handgun sales. Criminals—especially drug traffickers—were drawn to assault weapons’ massive firepower, useful for fighting police and competing traffickers. Survivalists—who envisioned themselves fending off a horde of desperate neighbors from within their bomb shelters—loved the combat features of high ammunition capacity and antipersonnel striking power of assault weapons. Right-wing paramilitary extremists made these easily purchased firearms their gun of choice. And for gun enthusiast fans of popular entertainment, semiautomatic assault weapons offered the look and feel of the “real thing.”
Since the 1980s, the gun industry has aggressively used as selling points the military character of semiautomatic assault weapons and the lethality of their distinctive designs.109 Poplawski’s murderous attack amply demonstrates that these civilian semiautomatic assault weapons, like their military counterparts, are every bit as deadly as the gun industry promises. Examples of the use of assault weapons against law enforcement officers by extremists and criminals continue to abound, as fatal attacks on police officers have grown to alarming numbers. FBI data for 2011 reported that seventy-two officers were killed by criminal suspects in 2011—a 25 percent increase from 2010 and a 75 percent increase from the forty-one reported killed in 2008. The year 2011 was the first one in which more officers were killed by suspects than in car accidents, and the
total was the highest in nearly two decades (not including officers murdered in the 2001 terrorist attacks and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing).110 Guns were used in sixty-three of the seventy-two murders. Forty-nine of the victims were wearing body armor.111
One bloody instance of this escalating carnage began on May 20, 2010, in West Memphis, Arkansas, when police officer Thomas “Bill” Evans stopped a van driven by Jerry Kane, forty-five, of Forest, Ohio, along 1–40. Soon afterward, Sergeant Brandon Paudert arrived to back up Evans. Within minutes, Kane’s son, Joseph Kane, seventeen, jumped out of the van and shot both officers with an AK-47 assault rifle. Sergeant Paudert was shot fourteen times, including three times in the head. Officer Evans was shot eight times in the chest, back, and arms.112
About ninety minutes after Paudert and Evans were slain, two more law enforcement officers were critically wounded when they spotted and cornered the Kanes’ van in a Walmart parking lot. A blazing fifteen-minute shootout with law enforcement officers ensued, and both Kanes were killed.113
The Kanes were members of the so-called sovereign citizens movement. Among the members’ beliefs are that the United States is under martial law and they are entitled to use armed force to resist police. As of February 2012, members of the movement had killed six police officers since 2000. In what the Los Angeles Times described as a “notable shift in policy,” federal agencies have begun intensively monitoring the movement.114 No amount of “monitoring,” however, has kept assault weapons out of the hands of these violent radicals.
“Brandon and Bill had no chance against an AK-47,” Sergeant Paudert’s father, West Memphis Police Chief Bob Paudert, said. “They were completely outgunned. We are dealing with people who rant and rave about killing. They want government officials dead. We had a 16-year-old better armed than the police.”115 (It was later learned that Joseph Kane was actually seventeen years old.)