by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
A chillingly similar ambush occurred on August 16, 2012, in Louisiana, leaving two sheriff’s deputies dead and two wounded. The chain of events began early in the morning in a parking lot at an oil refinery. The refinery had hired off-duty deputy sheriffs to direct traffic. St. John Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Boyington was sitting in his car when someone opened fire on him with an assault weapon. Boyington, who was hit several times but survived his wounds, was able to radio in a description of the car from which the shots were fired. Subsequent investigation led three other deputies to a trailer park. While they were interviewing two men, a third emerged from a trailer and began shooting with an assault weapon. Deputies Brandon Nielsen and Jeremy Triche were killed. Deputy Jason Triche was wounded.116 Seven people were arrested in connection with the incident.117 Authorities in Tennessee had previously linked the apparent patriarch of the group to the sovereign citizens movement.118
Common criminals also find themselves well armed to resist police, thanks to the gun industry’s reckless and relentless marketing of military-style weapons. In 2009, only months after Poplawski killed the three Pittsburgh officers with his AK-47, a police officer in a Pittsburgh suburb also was murdered with an assault rifle. Penn Hills police officer Michael Crawshaw, thirty-two, was the first to respond to a 911 call in which dispatchers heard gunshots. Crawshaw was advised to wait in his patrol car until backup arrived. According to a police detective’s testimony, Ronald Robinson, thirty-two, later confessed to the crime. Robinson had shot to death another man in the house over a drug debt. Officer Crawshaw saw Robinson leaving and ordered him to stop. Robinson opened fire with his MAK 90 Sporter, a cheap and popular AK variant. Crawshaw was hit in the head and killed.119
It was just such attacks that led many law enforcement agencies in the late 1980s to demand that the federal government take action to stringently control or ban semiautomatic assault weapons. But the history of attempts to regulate assault weapons since then has been one of political compromise, poor law writing, and, as a result, ultimate failure. The health and safety of law enforcement and the public has been continually trumped by gun industry and NRA muscle. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both attempted to restrict the import of assault weapons by exercising executive power under a federal statute that limits the import of firearms to those that are “generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes.” The administrations of later presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, however, allowed these restrictions to effectively lapse.
Congress has done no better. In 1994, President William J. Clinton signed into law the 1994 federal assault weapons “ban.” The 1994 law, however, was deeply flawed.120 At the outset, the law, forged out of a political rather than a technical compromise, exempted millions of semiautomatic assault weapons by “grandfathering” all such firearms legally owned as of the date of enactment. For the trade in these guns, it was as if the law had never been passed. They continued to be bought and sold, many at gun shows where no questions are asked of prospective buyers in nominally “private” sales.121 Moreover, most of the design characteristics by which new production or imports were to be defined as banned assault weapons were simply a laundry list of superficial cosmetic features that had nothing to do with the weapons’ most deadly functional features. The gun industry quickly and easily evaded the 1994 law by making slight, cosmetic changes to the supposedly banned firearms. Gun manufacturers and importers soon openly boasted of the ease with which they could circumvent the ban. By the time the 1994 law expired by its sunset provision in 2004, there were actually many more types and models of assault weapons legally on the civilian market than before the law was passed.122
For all practical purposes, the federal government has abandoned its attempts to regulate commerce in assault weapons into and within the United States. As a result, an unknown but certainly substantial number of foreign assault weapons poured into the United States during the Bush administration and continues to pour in under the Obama administration. These guns, primarily AK-type designs, are in addition to the enormous number of AR-type assault weapons manufactured domestically. “With the number of companies making those particular black rifles today, it’s tough to keep up them [sic],” a gun industry insider wrote in 2009.123 Another industry insider assessed the importance of the market in assault weapons to the gun industry in October 2008. “If there is an area of good news, it’s still the tactical segment. In the past week, storefront owners and catalog retailers are unequivocally saying that, with the exception of the tactical categories—from AR-style rifles to the polymer pistols increasingly found in the holsters of law enforcement across the country, sales are slow.”124
As noted, manufacturers like Smith & Wesson have recently expanded their production lines and their promotion of assault rifles in 22 caliber. Not only is the 22 caliber ammunition considerably cheaper than the .223 ammunition of the usual AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, the lighter weapons also provide an entry model for later transition to higher-caliber rifles. One gun writer enthused, “The M&P15–22 might be the first .22 LR AR platform that actually is appropriate for consumers, law enforcement and military use that can be used to teach AR operations and basic marksmanship skills and know there will be no modifications necessary to transition to the myriad of other AR calibers available.”125
The gun industry is diligently working to smother any rekindling of efforts to regulate assault weapons, while at the same time promoting assault weapons as part of the sporting mainstream. A key axis in this two-pronged campaign is the rebranding effort of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. In November 2009, NSSF announced that—“due to gun owners’ concerns over President-elect Obama and possible legislation regulating the Second Amendment rights of Americans”—it had placed on its website a “media resource . . . to help clear up much of the confusion and misinformation about so-called ‘assault weapons.’ ”126
This was the opening salvo in the industry’s meretricious campaign to rebrand semiautomatic assault weapons as “modern sporting rifles.”127 The point of the campaign is apparently that semiautomatic assault rifles are really just another sporting gun, no different from an older generation of bolt-action and low-capacity rifles. It is not merely incidental that, as the Freedom Group noted, there is a tremendous after-market in accessories for these assault rifles.
Unfortunately for the NSSF and the industry, some within their own ranks apparently never got the rebranding memo. They continue to call semiautomatic assault rifles exactly what they are—assault rifles—and even write lurid prose promoting the most dangerous features of these guns. For example, the August 2010 edition of Gun World magazine headlined “Ruger’s Mini-14 Tactical Rifle” as “ ‘Combat Customized’ from the Factory.”128
Among other outbursts of naked candor in this enthusiastic article were these verbatim gems: “Ruger’s Mini-14 Tactical Rifle is a version of the well established Mini-14 incorporating many of the assault rifle features that end users have being [sic] applying themselves for decades, this time straight from the factory,” according to the article. “Being seen over the years as a sort of ‘poor man’s assault rifle’ the Mini-14 has spawned a huge array of after-market parts that may be applied to make it more ‘assault rifle-y’ Recently Sturm, Ruger & Co. finally decided to get into the act themselves by producing their Mini-14 Tactical Rifles.”129 This spasm of honesty is typical of the “wink and nod” game that the gun industry plays when it talks to itself and to its hard-core consumers: call them what you will—“black rifles,” “tactical rifles,” or “modern sporting rifles”—semiautomatic assault weapons are plainly and simply military-style assault weapons.
A rapidly emerging and particularly deadly variant in the gun industry’s marketing program has been the sale of civilian assault pistols. Not since the late 1980s and early 1990s—the height of the domestic drug wars—has there been such a wide selection of assault pistols available fo
r sale in the United States. During that period, UZI pistols, MAC-10s, and TEC-9s were the prominent assault pistols seen on television and movie screens as well as displayed on gun store counters. Today, more assault pistol makes and models are available than ever before for civilian sale in the United States. They range from models that were named under the now-expired federal assault weapons ban (such as the UZI pistol, MAC-10, and Calico) to newer models, such as AK-47 and AR-15 pistols. As a 2011 article published in Handguns magazine titled “AR Pistols: The Hugely Popular Rifle Platform Makes a Pretty Cool Handgun as Well” noted, “There’s no doubt in the last few years that AR pistols have become extremely popular.”130
This increase in the quantity of makes and models has been matched by an increase in the quality of their lethality. The earlier generation of assault pistols were primarily high-capacity military-style pistols in 9mm or 45 caliber. The most popular models today are derived from assault rifles and thus have the penetrating power of an assault rifle in the concealable form of a pistol. Whereas the most commonly worn levels of police body armor would be able to protect the wearer from a 9mm or 45 caliber handgun round, the .223 or 7.62 assault rifle rounds would be far more likely to penetrate. As one poster on Survivalist Boards.com wrote about the Draco AK-47 pistol, “It can penetrate body armor and holds 30+ rounds. . . . I figure this is a lot of firepower in a legal and small package.”131 After detailing the pistol’s military pedigree and suitability as a PDW (personal defense weapon), Tactical Weapons magazine approvingly noted that the “result is a 5.5 pound pistol with an overall length of 20.5 inches that offers full rifle power in a very compact package—A desirable combination for many!”132 As noted earlier, it’s clear that AK-47 pistols are a “weapon of choice” of illegal gun traffickers who purchase firearms in the United States and then smuggle them into Mexico.133
A related design and marketing innovation has been the sale to civilians of “vest busters,” handguns specifically designed to penetrate body armor. The FN Five-seveN—known as the “cop killer” in Mexico—is a virtual poster child for this aspect of the militarization trend. The 5.7x28mm round it fires was specifically designed to defeat body armor on the modern battlefield. Given its use by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, it’s ironic that this handgun was designed for use by counterterrorism teams. FN clearly recognized the danger of the genie it was releasing when it introduced the Five-seveN. The company originally claimed that it would restrict the sale of its new armor-piercing ammunition and pistol. A company spokesman told the Sunday Times (London) in 1996 that the pistol was “too potent” for normal police duties and was designed for antiterrorist and hostage-rescue operations.134
The gun industry press, which invariably fawns over any new gun at its debut, played along with FN’s righteous fiction. The NRA’s American Rifleman claimed in 1999, “Law enforcement and military markets are the target groups of FN’s new FiveseveN pistol,” and told its readers, “Don’t expect to see this cartridge sold over the counter in the United States. In this incarnation, it is strictly a law enforcement or military round.”135 Similarly, American Handgunner magazine assured the public in 2000, “For reasons that will become obvious, neither the gun nor the ammunition will ever be sold to civilians or even to individual officers.”136
In fact, however, greed overcame caution, and both the gun and its ammunition are easily, legally, and widely available in the United States.
The gun industry’s campaigns to sell death-dealing military firepower is in large degree enabled by the stranglehold it has on official sources of information and data about the consequences. The vacuum of reliable data enables the industry and its lobby to manufacture phony “facts” to suit its case—and successfully peddle its specious assertions to ill-informed politicians, policymakers, and news media. The next chapter explores the terrain of this Alice-in-Wonderland world.
7
TOP SECRET: AMERICA’S GUNS
“We’re at Desert Hills Shooting Club near Boulder City, and Paul Barrett steps up with a Glock 17,” reported the Las Vegas Sun in January 2012. “He fires the 9mm semi-automatic pistol 18 times in about five seconds and hits the target every time.”1
An assistant managing editor and senior feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, Barrett writes “cover articles on subjects that range from the energy industry to the gun business.”2 He was in Las Vegas during NSSF’s annual SHOT Show in 2012 to promote his new book about the Austrian gunmaker Glock and its high-capacity semiautomatic pistol design, which Barrett calls “America’s gun.”3 Careful to maintain the appearance of journalistic neutrality, Barrett’s book won a friendly reception both from gun enthusiasts, who are one of the most defensively critical audiences in the world, and from some gun control advocates.4
“The Glock became to handguns what Google became to Internet searches,” Barrett told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “It’s a Glock world.”5
If Glock’s pistols are collectively “America’s gun” in a “Glock world,” Barrett’s firepower demonstration graphically illustrated why Glocks have had a special appeal to mass murderers in the United States. At Barrett’s reported recreational amateur’s firing rate of roughly 3.6 bullets per second, a Glock pistol can pump out 33 bullets (from a legal and commonly available Glock high-capacity magazine) in less than 10 seconds.6 Easily reloaded by dropping the expended magazine with a simple push of a button and shoving a new magazine into the grip, the Glock has turned tranquil scenes all over America into screaming, bloody, human abattoirs. Figure 10 lists some of the more notorious examples of mass shooting incidents in the United States in which the shooter chose to use a Glock pistol.
Figure 10. Examples of Mass Shootings with Glocks in the United States
Mass Shooting Incident
Casualties
Firearm (s)
Safeway parking lot Tucson, Arizona January 8, 2011 Shooter: Jared Loughner
6 dead, 13 wounded
Glock 19 pistol
Virginia Tech Blacksburg, Virginia April 16, 2007 Shooter: Seung-Hui Cho
33 dead (including shooter), 17 wounded
Glock 19 pistol, Walther P22 pistol
Xerox Office Building Honolulu, Hawaii November 2, 1999 Shooter: Byran Uyesugi
7 dead
Glock 17 9mm pistol
Thurston High School Springfield, Oregon May 21, 1998 Shooter: Kip Kinkel
4 dead, 22 wounded
Glock 9mm pistol, .22 Sturm Ruger rifle, .22 Sturm Ruger pistol
Connecticut State Lottery Headquarters Newington, Connecticut March 6, 1998 Shooter: Matthew Beck
5 dead (including shooter)
Glock 9mm pistol
Luby’s Cafeteria Killeen, Texas October 16, 1991 Shooter: George Hennard
24 dead (including shooter), 20 wounded
Glock 9mm pistol, Sturm Ruger P-89 9mm pistol
Violence Policy Center, “The Glock Pistol: A Favorite of Mass Shooters,” July 2011, www.vpc.org/fact_sht/GlockBackgrounderJuly2011.pdf
The examples in figure 10 were extracted by VPC from news reports. Flawed and incomplete as media reports may be, they are often the only available source about the details of gun violence in America.
Given the pestilential effect guns have on America, it is little short of incredible that the gun industry and its relentless lobby have succeeded in preventing the federal government from collecting, organizing, analyzing, and—most of all—releasing detailed data about guns and gun death, injury, and crime in America. What data exists is scattered over several different federal agencies in collections that are more often than not inconsistent, incomplete, and incompatible with each other. Information that might shed light on, for example, what makes and models of guns are used in crimes, and how frequently, is locked up tight. Laws slipped through Congress by lawmakers friendly to the gun industry’s agenda bar the release of data—even to members of Congress—that was once freely available and routinely released to the public.
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sp; The sluggish bureaucracy at ATF takes the laws a step further by spinning timid rationales to avoid releasing information. No wonder. ATF’s executive ranks have been brazenly infiltrated by the gun industry. In 2006, Shooting Industry gleefully reported—under the headline “Our Man at ATF”—that “John Badowski, a five-plus-year veteran of the National Shooting Sports Foundation staff, is now the Firearms Industry Technical Adviser at ATF”7 During his tenure at NSSF, Badowski helped start the National Association of Firearm Retailers to “provide federal firearms licensees with a unified voice in regulatory and legislative affairs.”8 He also promoted the NSSF’s “Retailer University,” which offered gun dealers such courses as Developing a Place to Shoot, and Winning Sales Techniques for Your Staff.”9 In 2003 the “university” announced a course titled Dealing with the Media. Badowski described the curriculum to Shooting Industry. “Let’s say a firearm has been used inappropriately and the retailer gets a phone call from a news director who says, ‘Hey, we’re on the way over with a news crew for an interview. What do you do? This is high-powered training about how to deal with the media in an adverse situation.”10
The gun industry may have learned how to “deal with the media,” but it nevertheless keeps its business as secret as possible. The greater part of the industry is privately held, foreign based, or both. The few public companies—Ruger and Smith & Wesson—stick to what they are required to file by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates public trading in stocks. The rest of what is known about the business of guns in America must be meticulously panned out of a steady stream of hyperbolic promotional releases, the occasional memoir by an insider,11 and intra-industry business publications. Is the gun industry booming or failing? Are women buying more or fewer guns? The industry can—and does—put the rosiest public spin on such questions to conceal its declining fortunes and validate in the American psyche the goodness of guns.