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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The gun lobby has helped arm countless psychos. And now it's expanding its market to kids.
Nov 1, 2002 | Hours after the arrest of the two suspects in the sniper killings last week, a nursing student at the University of Arizona shot to death three professors before committing suicide. The same afternoon, a depressed teenage boy in Oklahoma killed two and wounded eight in a three-town rampage before being captured. This week rapper Jam Master Jay was shot to death in his Queens recording studio.
Seems like a good time for American gun-control activists to make a big push for limiting weapons possession. But that's not so easy. Even this recent wave of gun terror hasn't been enough to create a mandate for change. The best that activists can do is to focus on what gun-control advocate Josh Sugarmann calls "discrete issues" and incremental change.
Sugarmann, the author of "Every Handgun Is Aimed at You," is the executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control think tank. According to the National Rifle Association, the organization is "the most effective, and most untruthful anti-gun rabble-rouser in Washington." It's an assessment the VPC wears with pride, even posting it on its Web site.
Sugarmann, talking with Salon from his office in Washington, spoke about the power of the gun industry, the impact of the sniper shootings on the gun-control debate, the Bush administration and the NRA, and one of the best places to investigate the gun industry's impact on youth: your local 7-Eleven.
So there are finally arrests in the sniper case and immediately we see more shootings in Arizona and Oklahoma. Are we witnessing a major new wave of gun violence?
In my office, collecting this kind of news is what we do day in and day out. One thing that has happened as a result of the sniper shootings, because of their grotesque nature, and the length of time that they occurred, is that there's been a renewed focus on the issue of gun violence by the press. But these shootings happen all the time.
That's a sad commentary on the issue of gun violence in this country. Every time there is a truly horrible shooting, it does focus public attention and policymaker attention on the issue of gun violence. You can focus on the assassinations in the '60s to things like Columbine and up to the sniper shootings. In essence, each shooting trumps the prior, but it also raises the bar of what shocks us as a nation, which is one of the disheartening aspects of all of this.
What key issues do you see after this last wave of killings?
First of all, there is a sniper subculture in this country that's a predictable result of gun-industry marketing. [A 1999 VPC report, "One Shot, One Kill," claimed that gun-industry marketing touting the lethality of a single shot from high-tech firearms was helping to create a "sniper subculture" and a new threat to public safety.]
The second issue concerns the weapon that was used by the shooter. Since the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons ban, we've seen a concerted effort by the gun industry to circumvent the intent of that ban, and Bushmaster [the maker of the rifle used by the sniper suspects] is really the object lesson of companies like this.
When you read the news accounts, Bushmaster comes across as so surprised and so upset. That's just not the case. The company was purposely evading the assault-weapons ban. [The company was] thumbing its nose at Congress' intent. Incidents like the sniper attack and others involving Bushmaster, including the rolling gun battle that occurred in L.A. three years ago, are very predictable. Bushmaster has made its living exploiting loopholes in the Federal Assault Weapons ban. Unfortunately, it's not alone.
One thing that will happen between now and the end of 2004 is that Congress has to address the Federal Assault Weapons ban, because the sun sets in 2004. The ban has a 10-year life span. What this incident makes clear is that we can't just renew the ban. We also have to improve the ban, to make sure that bad actors like Bushmaster and others can't continue to make assault weapons that can be purchased by people like the shooters in the sniper case.
