Insanely busy today, and insanely unmotivated after the long layoff. Horrible combination - I feel like I'm sulking like Stephon Marbury after Larry Brown's latest tirade
Couldn't let this pass though:
Civilian Sales of Military Rifle Raise Concerns About Terrorism When American soldiers need to penetrate a tank's armor from a mile away, they count on a weapon that evolved from the garage tinkering of a former wedding photographer.The weapon, a .50-caliber rifle created by the photographer, Ronnie Barrett, and sold by his company, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, is also the most powerful firearm civilians can buy. It weighs about 30 pounds and can hit targets up to 2,000 yards away with armor-piercing bullets.
That kind of power has drawn the United States military, which has been buying Mr. Barrett's rifles since the 1980's and using them in combat since the Persian Gulf war of 1991. But the gun also has critics, who say it could be used by terrorists to bring down commercial airliners or penetrate rail cars or storage plants holding hazardous materials.
“These are ideal weapons of terrorist attack,” said Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst with the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group based in Washington.
Mr. Diaz said the guns should be more regulated and harder to buy. They can now be bought by anyone 18 or older who passes a background check.
..
And a 1999 investigation by the General Accounting Office, the predecessor of the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, found that ammunition dealers were willing to sell armor-piercing bullets, even when an agent pretending to be a buyer said he wanted the ammunition for use against armored limousines or “to take a helicopter down.”
I'm no gun nut, so of course, my outrage is understandable, but regardless: WTF do civilians need with .50-caliber rifles? That's a big ass gun. Those deer and ducks must have stolen all the armored vests earmarked for troops deployed in Iraq.
Tags: assassination, /NRA
