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Another nifty peice of barfage, got this from our local newspaper at: http://www.cantonrep.com/cantonrep01/menus.php?ID=66528
Note that you can comment on this story from here: http://www.cantonrep.com/cantonrep0...+%91sniper+subculture%92&ID=66528&Category=14
Loose rules for guns strengthen ‘sniper subculture’
Friday, October 11, 2002
By MARIE COCCO Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON -- There is everything to like about Carolyn McCarthy.
The New York congresswoman who got to Washington on the trajectory of tragedy still laughs with gusto and dresses without flash and pulls back her hair in a ponytail like a suburban homemaker. That is what she was when a gunman on a Long Island Rail Road train shattered her old life and launched her toward another.
She took to politics after her husband was killed and her son gravely wounded aboard that commuter train. It was a way, maybe, to do something about guns in America. A way, perhaps, to keep the comfort of someone else’s daily routine from becoming a catastrophe.
McCarthy has been in Congress six years now. But you could, at any moment, imagine her not standing at a microphone but loading groceries into her car, or vacuuming it out, or mowing the lawn.
She is still just like her constituents. And they are just like the people of suburban Washington, terrorized by a sniper who has randomly killed six people and injured two while they were encased in the fragile comfort of daily routines.
So it is easy to like McCarthy. But it is hard to talk to her.
When we talk, it is usually because some new horror requires the conversation. And these conversations remind us only that we have done so little — nothing, really — about the glorification of guns and the way in which we make them so easily available to just about anyone who wants one.
“Did he buy his gun at a gun show?” McCarthy asked of the sniper, who experts say is using high-velocity, military-style bullets designed to cause maximum damage to a target. “Did he go through one of the loopholes that we have been trying to close?”
Maybe, maybe not. Civilian sales of military-style sniper rifles and ammunition are, apparently, all the rage. These may have replaced assault weapons as the latest must-have gadgets. In certain circles, anyway.
The trend was documented in a 1999 report by the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control group. It was, of course, ignored.
“A sniper subculture is burgeoning within the American civilian gun culture,” the report said. “This subculture glorifies the sniper fantasy, diminishes its human cost and teaches everything about sniping — from equipment and shooting skills to military and police sniping tactics.”
Its unofficial motto is “One shot, one kill.” This has, apparently, been taken seriously by Washington’s suburban sniper. He has murdered or wounded each of his victims with a single shot.
“The accuracy, range and power of a sniper rifle could present a grave danger if used by a determined criminal or a deranged gunman, and a serious threat to national security in the hands of a terrorist,” the report said.
McCarthy wonders if this sniper has a history of mental illness. That was the case with the gunman who disturbed another comforting routine — mass at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Lynbrook, N.Y., last March — by killing the priest and a parishioner. The mentally ill are barred under a 1968 federal law from getting guns, but they still do. It is, in part, because states haven’t automated patient records or shared them with federal authorities, so they cannot be checked when a person buys a gun from a licensed dealer.
After the Lynbrook murders, McCarthy sponsored legislation to give states money to automate mental health records and turn them over. It passed easily out of the House Judiciary Committee; the selling point for the pro-gun lawmakers who control the panel was that her bill didn’t create some new law. But the House Republican leadership hasn’t allowed a floor vote.
McCarthy’s bill to keep mentally ill people from getting guns must wait its turn, she said, behind another piece of gun legislation now pending in the House: A measure to prohibit lawsuits against the gun industry.
McCarthy expected the leadership to bring the industry-protection measure up for a vote Thursday. Now it’s been put off. “We understand it was pulled,” she said.
The timing, you see, wasn’t quite right.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is:
cocco@newsday.com
Note that you can comment on this story from here: http://www.cantonrep.com/cantonrep0...+%91sniper+subculture%92&ID=66528&Category=14
Loose rules for guns strengthen ‘sniper subculture’
Friday, October 11, 2002
By MARIE COCCO Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON -- There is everything to like about Carolyn McCarthy.
The New York congresswoman who got to Washington on the trajectory of tragedy still laughs with gusto and dresses without flash and pulls back her hair in a ponytail like a suburban homemaker. That is what she was when a gunman on a Long Island Rail Road train shattered her old life and launched her toward another.
She took to politics after her husband was killed and her son gravely wounded aboard that commuter train. It was a way, maybe, to do something about guns in America. A way, perhaps, to keep the comfort of someone else’s daily routine from becoming a catastrophe.
McCarthy has been in Congress six years now. But you could, at any moment, imagine her not standing at a microphone but loading groceries into her car, or vacuuming it out, or mowing the lawn.
She is still just like her constituents. And they are just like the people of suburban Washington, terrorized by a sniper who has randomly killed six people and injured two while they were encased in the fragile comfort of daily routines.
So it is easy to like McCarthy. But it is hard to talk to her.
When we talk, it is usually because some new horror requires the conversation. And these conversations remind us only that we have done so little — nothing, really — about the glorification of guns and the way in which we make them so easily available to just about anyone who wants one.
“Did he buy his gun at a gun show?” McCarthy asked of the sniper, who experts say is using high-velocity, military-style bullets designed to cause maximum damage to a target. “Did he go through one of the loopholes that we have been trying to close?”
Maybe, maybe not. Civilian sales of military-style sniper rifles and ammunition are, apparently, all the rage. These may have replaced assault weapons as the latest must-have gadgets. In certain circles, anyway.
The trend was documented in a 1999 report by the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control group. It was, of course, ignored.
“A sniper subculture is burgeoning within the American civilian gun culture,” the report said. “This subculture glorifies the sniper fantasy, diminishes its human cost and teaches everything about sniping — from equipment and shooting skills to military and police sniping tactics.”
Its unofficial motto is “One shot, one kill.” This has, apparently, been taken seriously by Washington’s suburban sniper. He has murdered or wounded each of his victims with a single shot.
“The accuracy, range and power of a sniper rifle could present a grave danger if used by a determined criminal or a deranged gunman, and a serious threat to national security in the hands of a terrorist,” the report said.
McCarthy wonders if this sniper has a history of mental illness. That was the case with the gunman who disturbed another comforting routine — mass at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Lynbrook, N.Y., last March — by killing the priest and a parishioner. The mentally ill are barred under a 1968 federal law from getting guns, but they still do. It is, in part, because states haven’t automated patient records or shared them with federal authorities, so they cannot be checked when a person buys a gun from a licensed dealer.
After the Lynbrook murders, McCarthy sponsored legislation to give states money to automate mental health records and turn them over. It passed easily out of the House Judiciary Committee; the selling point for the pro-gun lawmakers who control the panel was that her bill didn’t create some new law. But the House Republican leadership hasn’t allowed a floor vote.
McCarthy’s bill to keep mentally ill people from getting guns must wait its turn, she said, behind another piece of gun legislation now pending in the House: A measure to prohibit lawsuits against the gun industry.
McCarthy expected the leadership to bring the industry-protection measure up for a vote Thursday. Now it’s been put off. “We understand it was pulled,” she said.
The timing, you see, wasn’t quite right.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is:
cocco@newsday.com
