Well, I was going to add something but it's all been covered.
What the heck,
Article Last Updated: 2/13/2005 12:29 AM
.50-caliber rifles called a threat
By Christopher Smith
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON - From the headquarters of the Fifty Caliber Shooters Association in the central Utah town of Monroe, John Robertson publishes a magazine for the group's worldwide members extolling the virtues of the most powerful gun available to the public.
With a .50-caliber rifle, an experienced marksman can hit a rock the size of a Volkswagen Beetle from a distance of two miles. The gun can drop a bull moose dead in its tracks even after the bullet passes through a 5-inch-diameter tree branch. And a shot from the gun will pierce anything from a 3 1/2 -inch-thick manhole cover to a 600-pound safe or a stack of cinder blocks.
While enthusiasts revel in the gun's next-zip-code range and staggering impact velocity, those same features have some members of Congress declaring it a menace to national security.
"They are so accurate, so powerful and so deadly that they should only be used in a military setting," Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., said this week on Capitol Hill, where he and other lawmakers introduced legislation to restrict sales of the gun made by several companies, including two from Utah.
Around a news conference table set with one of the bazooka-like rifles, Moran, the bill's Democratic co-sponsors, gun-control advocates and law enforcement officials discussed various potential terrorist scenarios using the gun, from shooting down airliners to detonating chemical weapons.
"If one of these weapons were used to puncture a rail car carrying a hazardous substance like chlorine gas, it would be catastrophic," said Moran, whose bill would require federal licensing of .50-caliber owners, similar to existing laws for machine gun owners.
The bill's chances of passage in a Republican dominated Congress are slim. All of Utah's federal lawmakers have at least a "B-plus" pro-gun voting record by the National Rifle Association and those House members contacted Friday said they had yet to see Moran's bill and had no comment on it.
Robertson, a longtime officer of the gun owners' association and editor of Very High Power magazine, doesn't refute that .50-caliber guns are accurate, powerful and lethal.
"We just don't see it as being the threat to the country as these people say it is and if it was, we'd back away from it," he said of the 3,500-member group. "It's never been used in the commission of a felony, nobody has been hurt in 20 years of [target-shooting] competition and our safety record is better than your local high school cheerleading team."
Robertson's group was founded in 1985 after a Tennessee gunmaker created the first civilian rifle to fire the .50 BMG shell used by the military. "BMG" stands for Browning Machine Gun, and the rifle's cartridge was invented in 1918 by renowned firearms designer John Browning of Ogden. Mounted on vehicles, ships and aircraft, Browning's legendary machine gun gave the U.S. military a distinct advantage in every conflict of the 20th century.
Because the single-shot offspring of Browning's automatic weapon is expensive, long and heavy, Robertson argues it's unlikely a criminal or terrorist would choose a .50-caliber gun.
"Terrorists are not going to go out and spend $6,000 to $10,000 for a rifle they can't move around with easily and that they will probably have to abandon," he said. "You have to go through the same waiting period as a handgun, you usually have to order them, you have to buy a scope, the cartridges cost $5 apiece and you need a lot of practice on the range to shoot over such long distances with accuracy."
But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has raised concerns about easy access to .50-caliber rifles. A study by Congress' investigative arm found "the accessibility of these weapons in the United States is becoming known worldwide." Last month, CBS' newsmagazine "Sixty Minutes" dubbed the gun "the Rolls Royce of sniper rifles."
A law banning .50-caliber gun sales in California was signed by GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and went into effect last month. Fifty-caliber prohibition campaigns have been launched in other state legislatures, including Connecticut, Maryland, Washington and Colorado.
State bans and a potential federal crackdown worry David Larisch, vice president of L.A.R. Manufacturing in West Jordan, which makes the $2,195 Grizzly 50 Big Boar. The sleek rifle is billed as "the most accurate single shot .50-caliber on the market" with an effective range of 3,000 yards, or 30 football fields end to end.
But the threats of extinction are also a boon to business.
"Usually, when a scare like this comes, that's when sales go up," Larisch said. "When they came out with the California ban, we put a hold on all other orders for the months of October, November and December just to try to meet our California customers and they still were upset we weren't able to make more."
Producing 50 to 200 of the big guns monthly, L.A.R. is the largest of the two Utah companies in the .50-caliber trade. The other is Christensen Arms in Fayette, which markets a $5,500 "Carbon Ranger" .50-caliber that weighs 19 pounds. Larisch said .50-caliber weapons make up "just a small part" of L.A.R.'s $3 million annual revenue, but he sees the fate of the big gun as critical to the 40-employee firm.
"After the .50-caliber, what's next?" he said. "Show me one incident with a .50-caliber gun shooting down an airliner or an oil tanker. These anti-gun people doing this, they are just advertising ideas for terrorists who are going to find a way to get a .50-caliber if they want, regardless if it happens to be banned in certain states."
Tom Diaz of the gun-control group Violence Policy Center said such charges are hypocritical coming from an industry that has fostered a paramilitary image for the .50-caliber.
"I've got several books marketed by these enthusiast groups and their 'sniper schools' that lay out elaborate scenarios of attacking airfields and shooting down helicopters, showing you exactly where to shoot to knock it down," said Diaz. "Yes, nobody has ever been killed by these things. But does that mean we can't have a public policy until people become better shots and hit a fully loaded jetliner on a taxiway?"
Maybe. But if you believe that the 2nd Ammendment is there to act as "the reset button on the Constitution" (I love that phrase--who said it first?), then those are the weapons you would need. Remember who you would be fighting.