Murfreesboro, Tennessee—another all-American town—lies 745 miles southwest of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where gun rights activist Meleanie Hain was shot to death.1 The seat of Rutherford County, Murfreesboro is in the exact center of Tennessee,2 about 30 miles from Nashville. A comparison of the lives of two of Murfreesboro’s famous sons casts into relief the choice America faces. Save lives by using proven public health and safety methods? Or knuckle under to the gun industry’s aggressive marketing of militarized death under the false flags of Constitutional “right” and faux patriotism? The choice is no less stark than that.
Rutherford County, like Lebanon County, has its share of routine gun violence inflicted by otherwise law-abiding citizens on themselves and each other. The day-to-day shooting is pretty much like the shooting elsewhere in America.3 As in other places, suicide and murder-suicide are prominent. A recent cross-state study—controlled for poverty, unemployment, urbanization, mental illness, and drug and alcohol dependence—found that “in states with more guns there were substantially more suicides because there were more firearms suicides.”4 About 63 percent of the suicide deaths reported in Tennessee in 2010 involved firearms.5 The overall suicide rate in the state has increased significantly in recent years. In 2008, the rate rose by 14.6 percent.6
As tragic as the needless deaths in Rutherford County are, they are not extraordinary. Identical stories occur every day, all over America. But in recent years, Murfreesboro and Rutherford County have grappled with another species of gun violence, fed by the deliberate design and marketing decisions that the magnates of the gun business have made—and continue to make—to keep their industry alive.
In 2012, this plague touched the upscale community of Amber Glen, described by a local real estate broker as a long established Murfreesboro neighborhood “of beautiful manicured lawns and well-maintained homes.” Prices asked for homes listed on another broker’s website in March 2012 ranged from $ 129,900 to $250,000.7 The ethnicity of the neighborhood elementary school’s children is 66 percent white, 21 percent black, 9 percent Asian-Pacific Islander, and 5 percent Hispanic.8
At about five ten P.M. on Presidents’ Day, February 20, 2012, gunfire broke out on the elementary school’s basketball court. Fourteen-year-old Taylor Schulz fell, shot twice in the leg. As many as a dozen children were playing on the school grounds at the time. Schulz required multiple surgeries. Two fifteen-year-old boys were arrested and charged with the shooting. Three other youths and one adult were charged with conspiracy.9 The accounts of witnesses and the accused youths agree that the conflict involved rivalry over a girl. The conspirators allegedly arrived at the school armed with two pistols taken from a parent’s gun cabinet. The cabinet was locked, according to police, but the youths knew where the keys were. Rude gestures and words were exchanged. Shots were fired.10
What made this shooting stand out was that even in quiet, upscale Amber Glen the gunfire ignited alarm about criminal gangs.11 It now appears that there was no gang connection. But fear and concern that the shooting might be related to gangs was not fanciful; Murfreesboro and Rutherford County have both suffered a burst of gang-related gun violence in recent years. Perspective about its causes and the choices America faces can be found in the contrast between the lives and work of two of Murfreesboro’s honored sons.
The first, Dr. Robert Sanders, “Dr. Seat Belt,” devoted his life to protecting children. When Dr. Sanders died in 2006, the Nashville Tennessean praised his life and accomplishments. “He fought . . . for Tennessee citizens, particularly Tennessee’s children,” the paper’s editors eulogized. “This state is deeply in his debt.”12 Dr. Sanders’s life is a model of the comprehensive, fact-based public health and safety approach that could dramatically reduce gun death and injury in the United States.
Dr. Sanders was born in Tennessee. After completing his medical education, he went to work in 1966 as the Rutherford County Health Department’s chief physician, in 1969 became its chief health official, and in 1983 took on the additional job of county medical examiner.13 Rutherford County had a strong public health tradition going back to a decade before the Great Depression of the 1930s, when “Murfreesboro and its rural surroundings were the beneficiaries of an amazing infusion of finances and training” for public health.14
Dr. Sanders brought two elements to this public health-conscious environment. The first was the compassion of a gifted man who had seen and “detested the horribleness of car crashes and what they did to unrestrained babies and young children.”15 The second was that during his postgraduate study in Sweden, he saw seat belts that a safety-conscious doctor had designed and installed by himself in his car. “Dr. Sanders was impressed with this doctor’s innovative idea, and that’s when his interest in seat belts and safety devices began.”16
In October 1974 Dr. Sanders was impressed by a speech about hazards to children by the public safety advocate Ralph Nader at the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in San Francisco.17 At the time, only a few countries had any laws requiring seat belts in motor vehicles. There were no laws anywhere in the world mandating restraints for children, even though unsuccessful attempts to pass such laws had been made in at least thirty states. Dr. Sanders took on the issue of protecting children in motor vehicle crashes.18
He and a handful of allies promoted a bill in the Tennessee legislature requiring use of child restraints. One of the early surprises was how many people—even within the medical community—opposed the legislation. The arguments against child safety restraints were remarkably similar to those stubbornly clung to by gun enthusiasts today. The strongest opposition was that requiring seat belts invaded individual liberties. Some parents with bigger families objected to the cost of car seats.19 The bill did not reach the floor of the legislature in 1976, the first year it was introduced.20
Dr. Sanders did not give up. He and his wife enlisted an “army of pediatricians” for a grassroots lobbying effort. In 1977, the bill was passed into law. It became effective in January 1978. Tennessee was the first state in the union to require children under four years of age to ride in a car seat. By 1985, every state and the District of Columbia had similar laws.21
Those who sought passage of child safety laws in other states had to overcome the same ill-informed polemics that Dr. Sanders had faced in Tennessee. The New York Times, for example, quoted State Representative James S. ("Trooper Jim”) Foster of Florida arguing in 1982 against a proposed child seat law. “We’ve got people out there with three or four young ’uns,” Foster said. “You’re going to hear them squalling and carrying on something terrible. You don’t do that to a biddy young ’uns.”22 Foster, who ironically was formerly a public relations safety officer with the Florida Highway Patrol, and a country singer,23 also argued the same year against a proposed seventy-two-hour “cooling-off” period on handgun sales.24
The Tennessee child-restraint law had dramatic results. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1984 found that the law had been “a remarkable success.”25 Six years after it went into effect, motor vehicle fatalities among children younger than four years had been cut in half. The children who died were “almost exclusively . . . transported without benefit of child restraint devices.” Not a single child younger than four years old traveling in a child-restraint device died in a motor vehicle accident in Tennessee during 1982 and 1983. In contrast, seventeen such children who were not restrained died.26
Researchers, however, noted a tragic problem stemming from the conventional wisdom that inspired what was known as the “babes in arms” exemption in the original bill. They noted, “A particularly troublesome aspect of the child restraint question is the sentiment that the best place for a baby to travel is in its mother’s arms. Proponents of this view have not been easily swayed by studies that have shown that no human can successfully hold on to even a 4.5-kg [9.92-pound] child under the stress of the decelerative forces involved in a 30-mph crash, and that the adult holding the child usually becomes a huge blunt object that crushes the baby against the dashboard.”27 One article reported that children who were in their mothers’ arms in vehicle accidents in 1982 and 1983 “suffered injuries and death at a rate approaching that of entirely unrestrained children.”28 In short, parents who were either ignorant of the facts or thought they knew better than the experts were killing their own children. The exemption, which came to be known as the child-crusher exemption, was removed from the law in 1981.
This sad waste of young life is the precise analog of the gun enthusiasts’ devotion to the myth that a gun in the home protects the family, in the face of study after study showing otherwise. A recent cross-state study, for one example, found that “compared to children in states with low gun ownership, children in states with high gun ownership were more than twice as likely to be murdered with a gun, fourteen times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and ten times more likely to die in an unintentional shooting.”29
The child-restraint law not only saved the lives of children; it saved Tennessee taxpayers money that would have been spent on medical care. According to researchers, “the use of child restraint devices saved $2 million in Tennessee in 1982 and 1983 alone.” The savings in these direct costs of medical care would have been $8.4 million if all children who traveled in the state had been in child-restraint devices. “Many of these costs are borne directly by the taxpayers through Medicaid and other government-supported health care programs; another portion is paid indirectly by the public through higher insurance premiums.”30
The same medical cost shifting occurs with gun injuries. The cost of medical care for gun violence victims in the United States is about $4 billion per year. National data reported in 2001 show that government programs pay for about 49 percent of this amount, 18 percent is covered by private insurance, and 33 percent is paid by all other sources.31 It should be noted that direct medical costs are only part of the burden America bears because of guns. The overall economic cost—including health care, disability, unemployment, and other intangibles—is about $ 100 billion per year.32
Dr. Sanders accepted no commissions from car seat manufacturers, and scrupulously avoided profiting from his activism.33 The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that from 1975 through 2009, child restraints saved 9,310 lives.34
Dr. Robert Sanders’s life stands as a model for selfless service devoted to public health and safety. Its antipode is that of another of Murfreesboro’s widely-known sons, Ronnie Gene Barrett. In 1982, at about the same time that Trooper Jim Foster was trying unsuccessfully to save “biddy young ’uns” from child-restraint laws in Florida, Ronnie Barrett began work on an invention that would make him rich, powerful, and famous—at least among gun enthusiasts. It was an extremely accurate sniper rifle that fires a massive bullet with such force that it blasts through an inch of steel at a thousand yards.
A measure of the man—and of his self-estimation—may be found under the pontifical rubric “Meet the Maker” on the Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Inc., website.
You can’t share the history of Barrett without talking about Ronnie. It all started in 1982 when he created the world’s first shoulder-fired .50 caliber rifle. Thousands of rifles later, the company that bears his name has become a revered icon in the world of firearms manufacturing.35
A self-described dyslexic with attention deficit disorder,36 Barrett never went to college.37 He never served in military uniform, so far as has been publicly reported, although he does claim to have served for an unspecified period of time and place as a reserve deputy.38 A lifelong gun enthusiast and Second Amendment fundamentalist, now on the board of the NRA, he became a commercial photographer by trade, getting his start shooting weddings.39
According to the company’s buttery hagiography, the idea for Barrett’s deadly invention came to him in 1982 while he was taking pictures on a Tennessee river for another gun company. The photos were of a river patrol boat armed with two Browning 50 caliber machine guns. “Barrett was wowed by the amazing Browning Ma Deuce. He wondered to himself if the incredible .50-caliber cartridge could be fired from a rifle; maybe one operated from the shooter’s shoulder. He decided to find out. With no manufacturing or engineering experience, Barrett drew a three-dimensional sketch of his idea for a .50-caliber, semiautomatic rifle to show how it should function.”40
The Browning 50 caliber heavy machine gun was developed by John Browning in 1918 at the end of World War I.41 After several modifications, the standard M2 machine gun became known as the Ma Deuce. Big, heavy, and usually mounted on a tripod, it is still relied on by the U.S. military and armed forces all over the world.42 “Employed as an anti-personnel and anti-aircraft weapon, it is highly effective against light armored vehicles, low flying aircraft, and small boats,” according to the U.S. Army.43 Barrett proposed to put the 50 caliber’s massive firepower and unequalled range into a rifle that could be fired by one person from the shoulder.
Barrett’s 1987 patent called his invention an anti-armor gun. He described the .50 BMG rifle in his patent claim as a “shoulder-fireable, armor-penetrating gun.” Barrett related the genius of his invention as follows:
The recoil and weight of the Browning M-2 heavy-barrel machine gun (50 cal.), belt-fed, make it unsuitable for firing from the shoulder. The bolt-fed sniper rifle of smaller weight and caliber will not penetrate armored targets. The bolts of guns of a caliber that will penetrate armored targets are often broken by recoil because of excessive strain on the lock lugs. Thus, there is a need for a light-weight, shoulder-fireable, armor-penetrating gun that can stand up to heavy duty use. After extended investigation I have come up with just such a gun.44
Barrett calls his antiarmor rifle an “adult toy” when he talks to the news media. “It’s a target rifle. It’s a toy. It’s a high-end adult recreational toy,” he said on the 60 Minutes television program in 2005.45 “It’s like, what does a 55-year-old man do with a Corvette?,” Barrett told the Associated Press in the same year. “You drive it around and enjoy it.” He also boasted in the same interview that his customers included doctors, lawyers, moviemakers, and actors. “I know all the current actors who are Barrett rifle shooters, some Academy Award-winning people. But they don’t publicize it. They love to play with them and have fun. Shooting is very fun.”46
The 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle is not a toy at all, but a deadly serious weapon of war, the most powerful gun available to ordinary civilians in America. Quite unlike the car seats for children that Dr. Sanders promoted to save lives, Ronnie Barrett’s sniper rifle has taken countless lives in war and criminal violence all over the world. Regulated by federal law only to the same extent as an ordinary hunting rifle, Barrett’s 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle is the archetype of the gun industry’s ruthless militarization of the civilian gun market. It has spawned dozens of imitators. But, according to the company, “Barrett dominates this market and enjoys customer allegiance approaching a cult following.”47 With the exception of a few states, including California, these armor-piercing, long-range killing machines are legally and easily available throughout the entire country.
Its lethality cannot be exaggerated. “The .50 BMG is infinitely more powerful than any other shoulder-fired rifle on the planet,” enthuses a 2004 book aimed at civilian fans. “The point to be made here is that no matter how you measure energy and stopping power, the .50 BMG is well off the charts. It is far more powerful than any other rifle cartridge known according to any measuring system yet devised.”48
“A bullet of such size and weight traveling at well over Mach 2 can be called a missile in the modern context without a high-altitude flight of fancy,” the same book exclaims. The author notes the extraordinary range of the 50 caliber round in comparison to the 30–06, one of the 30 caliber rounds common in hunting rifles. “The trajectory of the two rounds is similar out to the limits of the 30–06’s stability, but when the 30-caliber bullet is ready to call it a day and dive for the dirt, the .50 is still charging along with more than enough authority to cut a man in half and keep on going.”49 Another enthusiastic reviewer of the Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle’s accuracy and power reported firing match-grade armor-piercing ammunition “against 1-inch-thick armor steel at 300 meters distance. Not only did the rounds penetrate with enough behind-armor effect to be lethal, but the three-round group we fired could be covered with the palm of the hand. Two rounds were actually touching.”50
According to the U.S. Army, the rifle’s effective range is five times that 300-meter distance. A U.S. Army News Service article summarized the capabilities of the Barrett “.50-caliber long range sniper rifle”—called the M-107 in Army nomenclature—as follows:
The M-107 enables Army snipers to accurately engage personnel and material [sic] targets out to a distance of 1,500 to 2,000 meters respectively. . . . The weapon is designed to effectively engage and defeat materiel targets at extended ranges including parked aircraft, computers, intelligence sites, radar sites, ammunition, petroleum, oil and lubricant sites, various lightly armored targets and command, control and communications. In a counter-sniper role, the system offers longer stand-off ranges and increased terminal effects against snipers using smaller-caliber weapons.51
One need only consider the civilian equivalents of such military targets to understand the concern that many security experts have about the unrestricted sale of long-range antiarmor sniper rifles to civilians. The Violence Policy Center has published a number of monographs detailing the rifle’s capabilities, its proponents’ often specious claims, its use by criminals and terrorists, and the concerns of security experts going back at least as far as a classified report written for the U.S. Secret Service.52
In 1985, the deputy assistant director of the Office of Protective Operations, U.S. Secret Service, wrote a research paper for the faculty of the National War College of the National Defense University titled “Large Caliber Sniper Threat to U.S. National Command Authority Figures.” The “National Command Authority” refers to the president and the secretary of defense.53 After reviewing developments in the marketing of these antiarmor rifles and their use in earlier terror attacks and assassinations, the author concluded that such “large caliber long range weapons pose a significant threat for U.S. National Command Authority figures if used by terrorists or other assailants.”54 His report then summarized the specific threats that 50 caliber antiarmor rifles present to agencies charged with security, such as the Secret Service:
The weapons are capable of defeating light armor of the type used in limousines, aircraft, ballistic shields, etc. When so used modern ammunition makes them highly effective.
The weapons are more accurate than shoulder fired antitank rockets and, if used against aircraft, immune to electronic counter measures. They are man portable and easily concealed.
Large caliber long range weapons can be employed effectively from places of concealment outside the scope of normal security measures against personnel, aircraft, lightly armored vehicles and buildings. They thus pose a threat in environments generally thought secure.55
Recent developments have made the domestic threat from anti-armor sniper rifles much more serious than those envisioned by the Secret Service in 1985. In a 2007 report prepared for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on terrorist use of conventional weapons, the RAND Corporation included sniper rifles and recently evolved technology supporting snipers among what it called “game changing weapons.” In the hands of terrorists, such weapons “would force the defender to dramatically alter its behavior.”56 The report noted that “in recent years, considerable advances have been made in sniper technology that have changed the requirements for effective use of sniper tactics.” These advances include small ballistic computers to correct for wind and temperature, platforms that allow a rifle to be fired by remote control, improved scopes and other optics, and night vision devices.57 This technology “has made it so that advanced rifle marksmanship skills are no longer necessary in sniping.”58 It has also extended the effective range of sniping rifles to a mile or more, and made the impact on the target more devastating.59
The result is that terrorists can now “carry out line-of-sight attacks or assassinations that would previously not have been possible, either because of their lack of skill and training or because the security perimeter around a very important person (VIP) target would be on the lookout for attacks from a shorter range.”60 The report warns that “since such sniping systems are now widely available, it appears that the Secret Service will be forced to expand its secured perimeter to deny line of sight out to beyond 2 km.”61
It must also be noted that although the Secret Service can expand security perimeters, other potential targets—such as government officials at other levels, media and entertainment celebrities, noted figures in business and industry, and law enforcement officers—do not enjoy such protection. Nor are most of them protected in vehicles as heavily armored as presidential limousines and helicopters. The gun industry and its technology is thus making these other potential targets increasingly vulnerable to deadly attack from long range by 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles.
Ronnie Barrett has scoffed at this reality for two decades. “This is not something a drug lord or a bank robber is going to want to use,” he told the New York Times in 1992.62 On February 27, 1992, less than two months after Barrett’s smug pronouncement to the newspaper, a Wells Fargo armored delivery truck was attacked in a “military-style operation” in Chamblee, Georgia, by several men using a smoke grenade and a Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle.63 Barrett’s antiarmor sniper rifle has had a dark side almost from the moment it came into production. A sinister brigade of crackpots, terrorists, and violent criminals lust after it for the same reasons the world’s armies do. And because the gun is virtually unregulated and freely sold on the U.S. civilian market, these evil forces easily obtain Barrett’s antiarmor rifle in quantity. “You just have to have a credit card and clear record, and you can go buy as many as you want. No questions asked,” Florin Krasniqi, a gunrunner who smuggled Barrett sniper rifles to Kosovo, said in 2005. “Most of [sic] non-Americans [buying guns for him] were surprised at how easy it is to get a gun in heartland America. Most of the dealers in Montana and Wyoming don’t even ask you a question. It’s just like a grocery store.”64
Figure 9. Known Sales of 50 Caliber Antiarmor Sniper Rifles to Terrorists, Criminals, and Fringe Groups
Group |
Number |
Kosovo Liberation Army |
At least 140 |
Gun Trafficking to Mexico |
At least 37 |
Osama bin Laden Organization |
25 |
Church Universal and Triumphant |
10 |
Branch Davidians (David Koresh) |
2 |
Irish Republican Army |
2 |
Traffic to Mexico, federal indictments, and other court documents in the files of the Violence Policy Center; Kosovo Liberation Army, “Clear and Present Danger: National Security Experts Warn About the Danger of Unrestricted Sales of 50 Caliber Anti-Armor Sniper Rifles to Civilians,” July 2005, and sources cited therein; all others, Violence Policy Center, Voting from the Rooftops: How the Gun Industry Armed Osama bin Laden, Other Foreign and Domestic Terrorists, and Common Criminals with 50 Caliber Sniper Rifles (Washington, DC: Violence Policy Center, 2001) and sources cited therein.
Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda acquired at least twenty-five Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifles in the late 1980s. The transaction came to light during the federal trial in New York of terrorists charged with bombing American embassies in Africa. A government witness, Essam al Ridi, testified that he had shipped twenty-five Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifles to Al Qaeda. The testimony is ambiguous as to the exact date of the transaction, but it appears to have been in either 1988 or 1989. When VPC reported this fact in a 2001 report, Ronnie Barrett heatedly retorted that the sales were part of a secret CIA program to supply mujahideen rebels fighting the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan. The VPC then interviewed several former CIA officials who had managed the mujahideen supply program. They confirmed that some Barrett rifles had indeed been supplied through the CIA’s clandestine program to Afghan rebels through Pakistan. But these former officials vehemently denied that any CIA-sponsored money or supplies went to bin Laden, including specifically any Barrett antiarmor sniper rifles. Other evidence supported the CIA officials’ denials.65 It was clear that bin Laden had obtained his Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles through some other channel.
In 2005 Ronnie Barrett came clean. After describing the VPC allegation, the Nashville Tennessean reported, “Barrett doesn’t dispute that sale took place, but says a congressman bought the rifles to supply the fighters, rather than he or the gun industry selling them directly.”66
Although the news report does not identify the congressman in question, the most likely candidate is the late former U.S. Representative Charlie Wilson from Texas. Wilson was the subject of a 2003 book by George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, and a 2007 film derived from the book. Wilson was described by Crile in an interview as a man who “had to pistol-whip the CIA into the biggest war they ever fought.”67 Barrett and Wilson became close friends. According to the Murfreesboro Post, “Barrett still has the personal letter from Charlie Wilson, dated September 22, 1987, ordering the purchase of the Barrett rifles.”68
At about the same time, an official of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a Montana cult, was buying Barrett antiarmor sniper rifles in bulk. The official pled guilty to buying seven of them under a false name. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the group bought a total of ten Barrett rifles.69 Federal law enforcement investigators said that the official—the chief of the cult’s security unit, the “Cosmic Honor Guard”—was “basically buying weapons and paramilitary supplies to outfit a 200-man army”.70 The Barrett rifles seized from the Montana sect were later shipped to Miami and used as bait by federal agents, who arrested a suspected Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorist shopping for weapons. The suspect, who was collared while trying to stuff a five-foot Stinger antiaircraft missile into his car, specifically requested Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles from federal agents posing as arms dealers.71 In the 1990s, at least two Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifles were acquired in the United States by the IRA, whose snipers murdered a total of eleven soldiers and policemen in five years.72
The phenomenon of the militarized criminal is not a fantasy of some future American dystopia. It is here now. The Violence Policy Center keeps tabs on news media reports of 50 caliber sniper rifles linked to criminal activity in the United States. As of June 2012, it had documented more than three dozen incidents of such criminal use or possession of the antiarmor sniper rifles since 1989.73 One of the better known of this growing list of criminal incidents in the United States is the use of Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles by members of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult at their compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993. The Davidians’ arsenal included two Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifles and armor-piercing ammunition. The weapons’ ability to penetrate “any tactical vehicle in the FBI’s inventory” prompted the agency to request military armored vehicles “to give FBI personnel adequate protection from the 50 caliber rifles” and other more powerful weapons the Branch Davidians might have had. Cult members did in fact fire the 50 caliber sniper rifles at federal agents during the initial gun battle on February 28, 1993.74
The biggest civilian buyer of Barrett’s rifles in bulk, so far as is publicly known, was the gunrunner Florin Krasniqi. He bought at least one hundred and probably several hundred 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles in the United States and shipped them to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) over a period of several years, beginning in 1998. Krasniqi created a network of straw buyers among his compatriots. He declined to say on camera on 60 Minutes in 2005 how many of these rifles he and his comrades bought and shipped to Kosovo. But Stacy Sullivan—who documented Krasniqi’s activities in her book, Be Not Afraid, for You Have Sons in America—told 60 Minutes in the same program that she believes Krasniqi probably shipped “a couple hundred.” This estimate by Sullivan, who covered the Balkans for Newsweek magazine and spent five years researching her book with the cooperation of Krasniqi, is buttressed by a 1999 Congressional staff report, Suspect Organizations and Individuals Possessing Long-Range Fifty Caliber Sniper Weapons, that reported a KLA claim that it had 140 Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles at the time.75
Examination of the most recent gun trafficking involving Ronnie Barrett’s antiarmor sniper rifle brings us straight back to the 2012 schoolyard shooting in Murfreesboro’s tranquil Amber Glen community.
Federal agents have been investigating the smuggling of 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles to Mexico for use by drug cartels since at least 1999.76 An ongoing Violence Policy Center analysis of federal indictments and other documents filed in U.S. courts in connection with criminal gun trafficking cases found that between February 2006 and September 2012, at least twenty-nine 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles destined for Mexico were seized by U.S. law enforcement officials. Of these, nineteen were Barrett rifles.77 By definition, this count includes only cases in which the guns were discovered and seized before they got to Mexico. It does not include guns successfully smuggled. Nevertheless, these seized rifles are representative of the huge flow of guns from the U.S. civilian market to criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
This is a marriage made in hell.
Guns from the wide-open U.S. civilian market directly empower these ruthless cartels—who produce and ship illegal drugs to the United States—to wage merciless paramilitary war among themselves and against the governments of Mexico and, increasingly, Central America. In the past, Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have used guns to establish and maintain control of drug trafficking routes and entry points into the United States. In recent years, however, these organizations have demanded more sophisticated and more powerful arms and have used them to confront not only each other but the Mexican government and civil society. According to a 2010 report on firearms trafficking to Mexico:
While DTOs still use firearms to establish control over drug trafficking routes leading to the United States, in the last few years they more regularly use firearms in open combat with rival DTOs, Mexican authorities, and the public. Such open confrontations with the Mexican state indicate a move “into a sphere that is typically inhabited by groups with a much more overt political stance, such as terrorists, guerrillas or paramilitaries.” Mexican DTOs are also demanding more sophisticated firearms and larger quantities of arms and ammunition.78
The vast majority of the firearms seized in Mexico between 2007 and 2011 and traced by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) came from the United States, according to ATF trace data released in April 2012. According to ATF, “Trace information shows that between calendar years 2007 and 2011 the Government of Mexico recovered and submitted more than 99,000 firearms to ATF for tracing. Of those firearms more than 68,000 were U.S.-sourced. . . . Law enforcement in Mexico now report that certain types of rifles, such as the AK and AR variants with detachable magazines, are used more frequently to commit violent crime by drug trafficking organizations.” ATF also released trace data showing that 99 percent of the guns traced in Canada during this period came from the United States as well as data on U.S. guns recovered in the Caribbean.79
It is difficult to exaggerate the harm that this traffic in guns is doing, both to Mexico and to the United States. An investigation into sales from just one gun store in Houston, Texas—Carter’s Country gun store—revealed that twenty-three buyers had purchased 339 guns worth $366,450 in a fifteen-month period. These were mostly AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, FN Herstal 5.7mm rifles and pistols, and Beretta pistols. One or more of these guns were later found at crime scenes in Mexico where police had been murdered, judicial personnel had been executed, the military had been fired on, or a businessman had been kidnapped and murdered. A total of eighteen Mexican law enforcement officers and civilians were killed with these guns, from a single U.S. gun store.80
The 50 caliber rifles among the guns smuggled from the United States also play a prominent role in this tragic bloodbath. In Ciudad Juarez, for example, gunmen used a 50 caliber rifle to murder the head of local police operations. In Tijuana in October 2008, a Mexican Special Forces soldier was shot in the head as his unit entered a drug lord’s neighborhood. After a two-hour standoff, police found a Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle, along with four other rifles. U.S. District Court documents show that the guns were bought in Las Vegas.81
How does all of this relate to Murfreesboro’s gun violence problem? The Mexican criminal organizations are not a local phenomenon whose violent power and noxious influence is restricted to Mexico. They are transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). In other words, their criminal structure and operations reach across borders, into the United States, Canada, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.82 “Mexican-based TCOs and their associates dominate the supply and wholesale distribution of most illicit drugs in the United States. These organizations control much of the production, transportation, and wholesale distribution of illicit drugs destined for and in the United States.”83
The tentacles of the Mexican TCOs reach all the way into communities like Murfreesboro through criminal gangs. “Criminal gangs—that is street, prison, and outlaw motorcycle gangs—remain in control of most of the retail distribution of drugs throughout much of the United States, particularly in major and midsize cities. Gangs vary in size and in sophistication from loose coalitions to highly structured multinational enterprises, but they form the bedrock of retail drug distribution in the United States.”84
The national economic impact of this international web is estimated to total $193,096,930,000, with the majority share attributable to lost productivity.85 But it has a more violent effect. It begins when the drug trafficking organizations “regularly employ lethal force to protect their drug shipments in Mexico and while crossing the US-Mexico border.”86 It continues down to the street level in communities all over America, and every indication is that it is going to get worse. “Gang members are acquiring high-powered, military-style weapons and equipment, resulting in potentially lethal encounters with law enforcement officers, rival gang members, and innocent bystanders. Law enforcement officials in several regions nationwide report gang members in their jurisdiction are armed with military-style weapons, such as high-caliber semiautomatic rifles, semiautomatic variants of AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and body armor.”87
The FBI warns that this trend is ominous. “Gang members armed with high-powered weapons and knowledge and expertise acquired from employment in law enforcement, corrections, or the military may pose an increasing nationwide threat, as they employ these tactics and weapons against law enforcement officials, rival gang members, and civilians.”88
In sum, the wide-open U.S. civilian market in military-style weapons, like the Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle and others of its ilk, directly contribute to the power of the international criminal drug organizations. This evil has inevitably seeped down into towns like Murfreesboro. By 2007, the Murfreesboro police had identified a hundred gang members in the city. Carter Smith, who began investigating gangs as a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division agent and helped form the Tennessee Gang Investigators Association, told the local newspaper that some gang members migrated to smaller cities like Murfreesboro, Smyrna, and La Vergne after they were pushed out of nearby Nashville. “They don’t play by the same rules the rest of society does,” Smith said. “They don’t care if something is illegal. If they need something, they find a way to get it even if it means killing you or someone else.”89
Someone else did get killed in Murfreesboro when a gang war erupted in late 2007 over distribution of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines. On November 14, 2007, Moss James Dixon, sixty-six, an innocent bystander, was shot to death when gangsters shot up a West Main Street apartment. Murders and retaliatory killing continued through 2008. In October 2009, a sixty-four-count federal indictment was handed up, charging gang members in Nashville and Murfreesboro with racketeering, including several charges of murder, drug trafficking, and various violent acts.90
Although local authorities pronounced the problem abated with the indictment, the Murfreesboro Police Department nonetheless was reported in January 2012 to have found use for a federal grant to strengthen its new gang unit, increase antigang education in schools, and track gang activities.91 It was against all of this background—the arming of Mexican drug traffickers, the increasing militarization of gangs, and local gang wars—that the anxious reaction to the shooting of fourteen-year-old Taylor Schulz on Presidents’ Day, just one month later, must be judged.
As the gun industry is pushed more and more into the position of attempting to defend the indefensible—the recklessly unrestricted sale of militarized weapons—it has fallen back on the plaintive plea that its civilian sales are necessary to support manufacture for the armed forces. “If it weren’t for the civilian sales, I wouldn’t be here. There’s a lot of defense contractors that would not be here,” Ronnie G. Barrett told 60 Minutes.92 He went on to say that he “would never have been in business” if he could not sell to civilians.93
Barrett’s story in 2005 was different from what he told the ATF in 1984. Records from Barrett’s federal firearms license file indicate that he told the ATF back then that his intention was to market his newly designed 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle primarily to the military and law enforcement. Thus, the written report of the ATF agent who delivered Barrett’s first federal firearms manufacturer’s license to the company in 1984 states:
Mr. Barrett said that this is a sniper-type weapon, and he intends to try to market it to the U.S. military or police departments prior to considering sales to the public. He said that it will be quite expensive and probably of interest only to collectors. He said that the number manufactured will be limited unless a large military sale is possible.94
Moreover, Barrett has claimed that he was losing money selling to civilians and was $1.5 million in debt until he made his first big military sale, to the Swedish army in 1989.95
Proposals to regulate 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles are part of a struggle between good and evil, in Barrett’s view.96 “When you have governments disarming citizens, you have catastrophe on your hands,” Barrett told a reporter.97
The gun situation in America is not the inevitable corollary of a free society. The Harvard public health professor David Hemenway, for example, compared the U.S. record with those of the three other developed “frontier” nations where English is spoken: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Hemenway points out that, although the four countries are similar in per capita incomes, cultures, histories, and rates of violent and property crimes, “What distinguishes the United States is its high rate of lethal violence.” The difference, he concluded, is that these other countries “do a much better job of regulating their guns.”98 Like the tobacco industry before it, the American gun industry and its lobby have successfully employed political intimidation, the crassest form of flag-waving propaganda, and mass-marketing techniques appealing to fear and loathing to prevent being called to account for the public health disaster it has inflicted on America and to avoid meaningful regulation.
What drives the gun industry is, perhaps surprisingly, not success but failure. The civilian firearms industry in the United States has been in decline for several decades. Although it has from time to time enjoyed brief peaks in sales, it has been essentially stagnant. For example, demand for firearms apparently increased beginning in 2008 because of fears that “high unemployment would lead to an increase in crime” and that the administration of President Barack Obama would “clamp down” on gun ownership by regulating assault weapons. But demand fell back as neither of these happened.99 Unlike many other consumer product industries, the gun industry has failed to keep up with population growth. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. population grew from 226,545,805 to 281,421,906—a 24 percent increase.100 Over the same period, total domestic small arms production fell from 5,645,117 to 3,763,345—a 33 percent decrease.101
In short, as America has gotten bigger, the gun industry has gotten smaller. But like a snake in its death throes, the gun industry has also become more dangerous. This trend began in the mid-1980s, when China began dumping semiautomatic AK-47 and SKS assault rifles on the last great civilian market, the United States. Militarization gathered steam through the 1990s, and is now hurtling through America. As a recent article in an industry publication observed, “If you’re a company with a strong line of high-capacity pistols and AR-style rifles, you’re doing land office business. If you’re heavily dependent on hunting, you are hurting.”102
The gun industry today feverishly designs, manufactures, imports, and sells firearms in the civilian market that are to all intents and purposes the same as military arms. It then bombards its target market with the message that civilian consumers—just like real soldiers—can easily and legally own the firepower of militarized weapons. The industry has done this through three major types of firearms: high-capacity handguns like the FN Five-seveN used by Major Hasan, assault rifles and pistols like the AK-47 clones that are flooding in from the factories of Eastern Europe, and sniper rifles like the Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor rifle.
One last story from Murfreesboro serves as a bridge to further discussion of the industry’s effect on America in the next chapter.
In March 2009, Stephen Summers, a fifty-one-year-old Murfreesboro man, was showing his wife, Evy Elaine Summers, fifty-three, how to clean and disassemble his Glock pistol. Summers, the holder of a concealed handgun carry permit, and his wife were watching television at the same time. “Mr. Summers advised that he and his wife were watching ‘Cher’ on television and must have been distracted,” a Murfreesboro police officer reported. “Mr. Summers cocked the Glock and it went off and struck Mrs. Summers in her right wrist, left breast and (traveled) out her left tricep.” Police checked Summers’s story with his hospitalized wife. “She advised that her husband . . . racked the slide and the gun went off,” police reported.103
The report naturally generated wry criticism, including the sarcastic observation that “one of those highly trained, absolutely responsible, law-abiding citizens who are licensed to carry handguns in Tennessee almost killed his wife with his Glock,” and the incident was “more proof of how much safer Tennessee has become since our elected officials, in their infinite wisdom, decided to let a couple hundred thousand Barney Fifes walk around with loaded handguns.”104
This, however, is precisely what advocates of allowing the unrestricted carrying of handguns argue: that more guns in circulation make us all safer. The next chapter examines this rationale and links it to a long-standing gun industry marketing and legislative campaign to sell more—and more powerful—handguns.