Assault-Style Weapons in the Civilian Market : NPR 12/27/12 2:42 PM
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Assault-Style Weapons In The Civilian Market : NPR 12/27/12 2:42 PM < Assault-Style Weapons In The Civilian Market December 20, 2012 9:02 AM Copyright ©2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We're going to talk about how military-style weapons like the assault weapon used in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School became available for purchase by civilians. These weapons will be the focus of debate in Congress next year. Senator Dianne Feinstein has pledged to introduce an assault weapons ban bill. President Obama said yesterday that gun control would be a central issue for him in this term. The NRA has been silent since the massacre but will hold a major news conference tomorrow. My guest, Tom Diaz, is senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, which conducts gun- related research and advocates for ways to reduce gun violence. He wrote a report last year on the militarization of the civilian firearms market and is the author of a book scheduled for publication in the spring called "The Last Gun," about how changes in the gun industry are affecting gun violence. Diaz is a former gun owner and a former NRA member. Tom Diaz, welcome back to FRESH AIR. As we think about the massacre at Sandy Hook in Newtown and other recent massacres, could you compare the toll of gun crimes perpetrated by Americans with acts of terrorism by Islamic extremists on American soil? We've done so much to protect against acts of terrorism. TOM DIAZ: That's actually an excellent comparison because every year in the United States, more people die from gunshot injury than have ever been killed in any terrorist act throughout the history of the recording of these acts, which goes back well into the 1960s. In other words, I'm saying that if you take all of the Americans who have ever died in any terrorist attack that's been recorded, more Americans die every year from gunshot injury. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=167694808 Page 1 of 15 Assault-Style Weapons In The Civilian Market : NPR 12/27/12 2:42 PM It's even more shocking than that, I think. More Americans die every year in our own country from gunshot injury than people of any nationality totaled together in the word die of terrorism. Since September 11, 2001, we've spent several trillion dollars on so-called homeland security. We have made changes in our constitutional protections, particularly in the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, against search and seizure and self-incrimination, that would have shocked people, shocked constitutional scholars before 9/11. And yet we spend a tiny amount of money on public health concerning guns. We forbid the Center for Disease Control and Injury in Atlanta, part of the public health service, from actually researching gun safety. So we have seen terror as a great evil, and we've started a war on terror. We have no war on guns, and yet comparing the actual impact on Americans, it's staggering that we have this war on terror and spend so much money, and apparently don't care about gun death and injury. And I say only apparently because I believe that Americans really are not aware of the extent of the problem. GROSS: So let's talk about assault weapons and how they came to enter the civilian market. Let's start with the Bushmaster, the semiautomatic rifle that was used by Adam Lanza when he massacred the children in Newtown. What was this weapon designed to do? DIAZ: The Bushmaster is a variant of a type of gun called the AR-15, which was the ArmaLite 15, which was designed and developed for military use roughly during the Vietnam War period. It is one of a variety of assault rifles that militaries of the world developed when they realized that most soldiers do not, when they're engaged in combat, do not take accurate aim, do not fire at long distances, but rather just spray bullets in the general direction of the enemy at short to medium range. When the military accepted this as a fact, that soldiers are not marksmen, and they tend to just fire in bursts at ambiguous targets, and in fact most battlefield injuries are the result of just being where the bullet is, not somebody actually aiming at you, the militaries of the world said, OK, we need a type of gun to give our soldiers that will do just that, which is spray enough bullets to kill and injure people more or less randomly in close to medium distance. This was the genesis of the assault rifle. The first one was developed by the Germans in 1944. It was called the StG-44. The Soviet army quickly copied the design or made a design similar to it, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=167694808 Page 2 of 15 Assault-Style Weapons In The Civilian Market : NPR 12/27/12 2:42 PM which is called the AK-47, probably the most widely used rifle in the world. And the United States military developed what they now call the M-16, but which is basically the AR-15. In the 1980s, two things happened, and since then we've seen just an incredible increase in these trends. One, foreign manufacturers, particularly the Chinese, began to dump their products into the United States, their assault weapons. So the AK-47 suddenly became available in large numbers in the United States... GROSS: When you say they dumped them here, how do they sell them here? DIAZ: They sell them through a network of importers who then either distribute them to gun stores or more or less directly. So there's an organized traffic into the United States from foreign manufacturers. Today the assault weapon traffic mostly comes from Eastern Europe. GROSS: Are you talking about legitimate marketing or black market? DIAZ: No, no, I'm talking about legitimate, legal marketing. At about the same time, Colt Manufacturing, which had the military contract for the M-16, recognized that there could also be a civilian market for this rifle. So they developed what they called the AR-15, which was actually the original developmental designation of the rifle. The only difference between these rifles that are sold on the civilian market and the rifles that are issued to our soldiers and soldiers all over the world is that the purely military rifle is capable of firing what's called fully automatic fire. That means if you pull the trigger and hold it down, the gun will continue to fire until it expends all the ammunition in what is known as the magazine, the thing that holds the bullets. Machine guns have been outlawed in the United States, effectively, for civilian use since the mid- 1980s. So what these guns need to be configured to be are semiautomatic. That means you must pull the trigger for each round fired. There's a question about rate of fire which the industry and the NRA and other advocates of having these guns in civilian hands make, and it goes like this: Well, the military guns are fully automatic, therefore they're technically machine guns, but the civilians guns are not. They're semiautomatic, and therefore they're not assault rifles. That's a distinction without a difference, as many writers on the gun side noted in the early 1980s, when even the industry called them assault rifles, until they became involved in unfortunate incidents. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=167694808 Page 3 of 15 Assault-Style Weapons In The Civilian Market : NPR 12/27/12 2:42 PM GROSS: So just so I can clarify, so in a semiautomatic weapon like the Bushmaster that was used in Newtown, you have to pull the trigger for each round that's fired, for each bullet that's fired? DIAZ: Yes, you do. The whole purpose of the semiautomatic, whether it's in a rifle or a handgun, is simply that when you pull the trigger, it fires the gun, and then it automatically moves another round into position to be fired, and it ejects the old empty case. So it -in really old-fashioned guns, before semiautomatic, like the iconic Western revolver, when you pull the trigger, you have to somehow move the cylinder. It's a much slower, more cumbersome process. In semiautomatic weapons, everything happens, and then it's ready to fire again. The reason I say it's a distinction without a difference is that the trigger can be pulled at a very rapid rate in semiautomatic fire, and it's actually more accurate. It sounds - it's a difficult concept to grasp, but in automatic fire the gun has a tendency to rise upward, to travel. If you go to shooting ranges where automatic weapons are used, you'll often see, in the ceiling, bullet holes because you pull the trigger and the characteristic sounds of - bbrruppp - the gun will rise. Semiautomatic fire doesn't do that, which is why the military encourages soldiers to shoot semiautomatic rather than automatic whenever possible. GROSS: What are some of the specific history of the Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle that was used? DIAZ: In 1994, Congress passed a thing called the Semiautomatic Assault Weapons Ban. And it was very flawed.