jobu07
Contributing Member
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/st...ry=REGIONOTHER&BCCode=HOME&newsdate=3/29/2006
Now while I don't condone illegal silencers and such, but come on...
Now while I don't condone illegal silencers and such, but come on...
Guns, grenades and armor, but violence may not follow
Possession of cache doesn't prove intent to hurt anyone, expert says
By JORDAN CARLEO-EVANGELIST, Staff writer
Click byline for more stories by writer.
First published: Wednesday, March 29, 2006
COLONIE -- The list of weapons and equipment seized from Brian Sweeney's Fonda Road home last week spans more than a dozen pages and includes throwing knives, body armor, homemade silencers, grenade components and a handgun.
Sweeney now faces felony weapons charges for some of the items, but many of the items, including several bullet-resistant vests, armored helmets, and a pair of night-vision goggles, are perfectly legal in New York.
Advertisement
And while authorities have expressed concerns about the cache Sweeney amassed, police have yet to uncover evidence that the 18-year-old planned to hurt anyone -- a fact some experts say is more significant than the size of his arsenal.
"Certainly, possession of those types of things is a reason for concern, but it's not proof of intention to act," said Dewey G. Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia who specializes in youth violence.
Investigators are now examining computers taken from Sweeney's home that might hold additional clues, an effort that could take a month or longer, said Colonie Police Lt. John Van Alstyne.
Until then, authorities aren't prepared to say what, if anything, Sweeney planned, and they concede they might never know.
Sweeney was arrested March 19 carrying two homemade grenades in woods not far from the town bike path, allegedly pointing his military-style rifle in the direction of nearby houses. Police said they heard Sweeney shooting into the ground shortly before they arrested him.
But Sweeney's family describes him as a curious, if misguided, young man caught up in a desire to serve as an Army Ranger.
His case raises questions about how people with similar interests are viewed and whether a curiosity about violent things automatically makes a person dangerous.
The topic has increased resonance here given the region's recent history.
In 2004, a student fired a shotgun inside Columbia High School, and last year a man fired dozens of rounds from an rifle inside an Ulster County mall.
The day after Sweeney's arrest, his father, Thomas Sweeney, said he feared memories of those incidents -- and this weekend's massacre in Seattle, in which an Albany native was one of six people shot dead -- will brand his son a menace when that is not his nature.
"I happen to know two or three very prominent people in Albany who are neither police officers nor gun nuts who happen to own bulletproof vests," said Thomas King, president of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association.
King doesn't defend the possession of illegal weaponry. Encouraging the enforcement of existing gun laws is often his group's response to attempts to create new ones.
Being a collector doesn't make Sweeney a killer, King said.
"There are a lot of legal and lawful gun owners out there who are military curio collectors as well," King said.
Sweeney's Bushmaster rifle -- a brand propelled to infamy by John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the two snipers who terrorized the nation's capital several years ago -- is legal in New York.
The charges against Sweeney stem from the grenades, the silencers and a handgun not licensed to him and a reckless endangerment charge for having the explosives in his family's home, authorities say.
(Page 2 of 2)
Cornell, the psychologist, said these kinds of cases defy generalization, but he said research shows the factors that lead someone to violence usually involve more than merely access to weapons.
It is a phenomenon that came to be known as "the black trench coat problem" in the years after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, Cornell said. Some schools took measures to ban trench coats similar to those worn by the killers, but Cornell said such a move was illogical because many people who wear such garb never hurt anyone.
"It's sort of the culture of the moment to think that we can understand people by profiling them," Cornell said. "The weaponry alone isn't a reliable sign. A sign-and-symptom approach is not a very useful or valid way to predict violence."
Instead, Cornell advocates a system called "threat assessment," which takes into account things a person says and does, like making threats, to gauge whether they might become violent.
Besides the weaponry, the inventory from the search warrants is largely silent on what Sweeney might have had in mind -- though the list does include two Nazi flags recovered from the basement.
John Gable, Sweeney's attorney, declined to comment last week and could not be reached earlier this week.
In the days after Robert C. Bonelli Jr. opened fire in the Hudson Valley Mall in February 2005, wounding a National Guard recruiter, evidence seized from Bonelli's Saugerties home showed a "lurid" fascination with the Columbine massacre and an "admiration" for the two young men who perpetrated it, said Donald A. Williams, the Ulster County district attorney.
Bonelli's journals also "expressed a wanton disregard for human life, other people's lives," Williams said, declining to get more specific before Bonelli's May sentencing. Bonelli pleaded guilty to assault and other state charges earlier this month. In June, he is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court after pleading guilty to weapons charges.
"I don't think the issue here is the rifle that this kid had," John Morgan, resident agent in charge of the Albany office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said of Sweeney. "I think the issue is what was he up to.
"Improvised hand grenades are extremely dangerous and serve no legitimate purpose. Even on a good day, I wouldn't want to be within a thousand feet of one detonating."
Staff writer Jordan Carleo-Evangelist can be reached at 454-5445 or by e-mail at jcarleo-evangelist@ timesunion.com.
