On July 20, 2012, twenty-four-year-old James Eagan Holmes bought a ticket for the midnight premiere of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises, playing at the Century Aurora 16 complex at Aurora Town Center in Aurora, Colorado.1 Holmes entered the theater, then exited through an emergency door, which he propped open. He reentered the theater about fifteen minutes into the movie.2
When he returned, Holmes was dressed in black and was wearing the gear of a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT)3 team member—ballistic helmet and vest, throat and groin protectors, black tactical gloves, and a gas mask.4 He was also armed as if he were a one-man SWAT team, with a .223 Smith & Wesson M&P15 (an AR-15-type assault rifle), a 40 caliber Glock semiautomatic pistol, and a shotgun. Another 40 caliber Glock pistol was found later in his car.5 He had fitted his Smith & Wesson assault rifle with a drum magazine, which was capable of holding one hundred rounds of ammunition in a single loading. After tossing some sort of incendiary or smoke device into the theater, Holmes allegedly opened fire on the theater’s patrons. Within minutes, twelve people were killed and fifty-eight wounded, several grievously.6
Survivors said Holmes was calm and methodical. “Every few seconds, it was just boom, boom, boom. He would reload and shoot, and anyone who would try to leave would just get killed,” said one. “It almost seemed like fun to him.”7 Holmes was “as calm as can be,” another said. “He was trying to shoot as many people as he could.”8
Shooting as many people as one can is precisely the purpose of the design upon which the Smith & Wesson M&P15 assault rifle is based. Derived from the U.S. military’s M-16 assault rifle, it is one of a devil’s armory of weapons that the gun industry designs for war but aggressively markets to civilians in America. In 2003, four-star General Wesley Clark—a West Point graduate and a man intimately familiar with assault weaponry—said, “I have grown up with guns all my life, but people who like assault weapons . . . should join the United States Army, we have them.”9 The gun industry has turned General Clark’s pithy advice inside out. It perversely promotes sales of military-style guns—assault weapons and high-capacity semiautomatic pistols—by touting the fact that civilians can legally buy virtually the same guns adopted by armed services and police agencies. Advertising, catalogs, and promotional articles in the gun enthusiast media directly link the weapons used by military and law enforcement agencies to the fantasies of potential customers in the civilian market. The marketing message is anything but subtle. Why join the army when you can stay at home and outfit yourself for combat, just like a real soldier?
FN Herstal USA’s 2010 catalog, for example, touts the company’s SCAR 16S assault rifle as “the semi-auto only version of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s newest service rifle.” According to the catalog’s text, owning the gun is “as close as you can get without enlisting.”10 To promote its armor-piercing handgun in the U.S. civilian market, FN likewise emphasizes its military cachet. (This is the model that Major Nidal M. Hasan allegedly used in the November 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, discussed in detail in the introduction.) An ad in the FNH USA 2008 catalog contains a picture of what appear to be troops in the field in the top half and the Five-seveN 5.7mm armor-piercing handgun in the bottom half. The phrase “Built for them” is superimposed over the picture of the troops, and “Built for you” over the handgun. Accompanying text states, “Today FN provides 70% of the small arms used by U.S. Military Forces around the globe. FN is the name you can trust. JUST LIKE THEY DO.” (Capitals in original.)11 Similarly, a Springfield Armory ad for its M1A rifle in the May 2010 edition of the NRA’s American Rifleman invokes a militaristic vision in the phrase, “Any mission, any condition, any foe, at any range.”12
In addition to direct links to military images in product promotion, the industry also relies heavily on “patriotic” and “heroic” imagery to identify ownership of military-style weapons with grand themes of patriotism and homeland defense. For example, the top half of a Beretta ad for its Px4 Storm semiautomatic pistol displays in the background a soldier in field dress, holding a handgun. Text superimposed over the soldier states, “Sweltering heat. Howling wind. Sand that fouls every moving part. This is where we perfected our firearms.” Another section of text next to an illustration of the pistol reads, “You won’t find a more inhospitable place than Iraq. Beretta has been there since day one, on active duty with the U.S. Military. . . . And now, Beretta brings its experience in field-proven sidearms to the Px4 Storm. Whether you’re protecting home or homeland, you need proven reliability in a firearm.”13
Executives of several gun companies have quite openly discussed their strategies to leverage military and law enforcement sales to profit in the larger commercial market. After an intense competition, Beretta, an Italian gun manufacturer, won a Defense Department contract in 1985 to replace the military’s existing sidearm, the Colt Model 1911 .45ACP pistol. In 1993, the top executive of Beretta U.S.A. Corp. told the Baltimore Sun that the military contract was “part of a carefully planned strategy dating back to 1980.” The company’s plan was to use the military contract to make Beretta a household name in the United States. It could then move into the larger law enforcement and commercial markets. To help get the contract, the company sold its pistols to the military at close to production cost.14 The Austrian entrepreneur Gaston Glock had a similar objective when he founded his handgun manufacturing company, won an Austrian army competition in 1982, opened a U.S. subsidiary, and then went after the American law enforcement market. “In marketing terms, we assumed that, by pursuing the law enforcement market, we would then receive the benefits of ‘after sales’ in the commercial market,” Glock told Advertising Age in 1995.15 A full-page ad on the inside cover of the 2011 edition of a Glock infotainment magazine, Glock Annual 11, features a photograph of two men dressed in SWAT team gear and posed as if entering a room through a doorway. The nearer of the two is thrusting a Glock 40 caliber pistol forward.16
The history of the M&P15 model assault rifle that James Eagan Holmes used during his shooting spree in the Aurora theater is bound intimately to this business of military and police marketing cachet. In early 2006, Smith & Wesson announced that it had begun shipping its new line of “tactical rifles.” The terms tactical rifles and modern sporting rifles are two of the most prominent gun-industry euphemisms for semiautomatic assault rifles. The M&P15 was the first true long gun made by Smith & Wesson, which had long been known as a manufacturer of handguns only. The rifle was designed and produced because Smith & Wesson found itself in a marketing corner. Military-style semiautomatic assault rifles had become essential to profit in the U.S. civilian gun market, but Smith & Wesson did not make rifles. It had, however, successfully marketed a line of “Military & Police” semiautomatic handguns to military, police, and civilian customers. Smith & Wesson’s executives decided to introduce their own line of assault rifles, label them with the established M&P brand, and heavily pitch them to civilians. “We believe the features of these tactical rifles make them strong contenders in the military and law enforcement markets,” said Michael Golden, Smith & Wesson’s president and CEO. “We also believe that our M&P rifle series fills a tremendous gap in the marketplace by delivering high-quality, feature-rich tactical rifles that will be readily available in commercial channels.”17
The money rolled into Smith & Wesson’s coffers according to plan. On July 20, 2009—exactly three years to the day before the Aurora mass murder—Golden stated in an interview that a “category that has been extremely hot is tactical rifles, AR style tactical rifles.” On a June 2009 investors conference call, Golden enthused that “tactical rifles were up almost 200% versus the same period the year before. We have increased our capacity on that rifle.” The company was doing so well with its assault rifles that it decided to introduce a new variant in 22 caliber, because that ammunition is much cheaper than the military-style ammunition used in the M&P15. “We have an M&P15 that shoots .223 ammo that sells extremely well,” Golden said. “We have just launched an AR-style rifle that shoots 22 caliber rounds that we think will be extremely popular because of the price of ammo.”18
Public reports of another gun company, Freedom Group Inc., underscore the vital role that military-style weapons play in today’s commercial gun market. A conglomerate, the Freedom Group boasts that its structure includes thirteen widely recognized brands of guns, ammunition, and related products.19 It claims to hold “the #1 commercial market position across all of our major firearms categories in the United States and the #2 commercial market position for ammunition in the United States, the largest firearms and ammunition market in the world.”20 Freedom Group also asserts that it is “the only major U.S. manufacturer of both firearms and ammunition, which provides a significant competitive advantage and supports our market leadership position.”21
A Freedom Group quarterly report stated that “the adoption of the modern sporting rifle has led to increased long-term growth in the long gun market while attracting a younger generation of shooters,” and that the company is “experiencing strong demand for modern sporting firearms and handguns.”22 In another report, the group noted the importance of the fact that assault rifle demand has grown, “especially with a younger demographic of users and those who like to customize or upgrade their firearms.”23 Customizing and upgrading are gun industry jargon for the profitable aftermarket of hardware accessories that can be fitted onto assault weapons, like scopes, bipods, lasers, forward pistol grips, flash hiders and high-capacity ammunition magazines.
Until recently, the Freedom Group’s stable of manufacturers produced only rifles and no handguns, the converse of Smith & Wesson’s market situation. To fill the gap, in January 2012 it acquired the handgun manufacturer Para USA Inc., which was originally a Canadian company.24
With studied banality, the company recently observed that “the continued economic uncertainty and the 2012 presidential election is likely to continue to spur both firearms and ammunition sales. Additionally, returning military are likely to purchase firearms for recreational use and to maintain training.”25 The company’s report did not explain what sort of “training” would be necessary for returning military to “maintain.” That line of thinking, however, will almost certainly be used by the gun industry to justify its sale of military style weapons to the civilian market. Making and selling assault weapons becomes more than a sordid way to make money. It’s elevated to the level of a patriotic act—helping to keep America’s heroes trained for war.
Training for another eventuality—a “Zombie Apocalypse”—has also proved profitable for the gun industry. Although dressed in the thin outer garments of spoof and fun, so-called “zombie shoots” are at their core a clever appeal to gun enthusiasts who believe that they must prepare for social disorder and government breakdown or tyranny. According to Shotgun News, “the younger set is all about zombie shooting, and a whole industry has sprung up to supply the undead in target form.”26 Zombie shoots are organized shooting events that feature three-dimensional humanoid targets, filled with paintballs or other inserts that “bleed” when hit by bullets. One company, Zombie Industries, specializes in designing and making such zombie targets. DPMS, a leading maker of AR-15-type assault rifles in the United States and a star in the Freedom Group’s constellation, sponsors an annual zombie shoot it calls Outbreak: Omega. The company claims that its event is “the world’s premier recreational zombie shoot.”27
At its most superficial level, the zombie shoot craze is simply an example of the industry’s aggressive and exploitative marketing. “We have found that what may have worked in the past with the Baby Boomer generation, doesn’t seem to be working well with the X, Y and Millennium generations,” Rex Gore, president and CEO of Black Wing Shooting Center in Delaware, Ohio, told Shooting Industry magazine in January 2012. “We have hired some younger people to work in our operation, asking them to help us understand what excites and motivates the younger age groups. Then, we are developing shooting activities focused toward that demographic, like bachelor parties, zombie shoots, full-auto shoots and other fast-paced activities.”28
At a deeper level, however, zombie shoots are thinly disguised events to train for shooting other people in numbers large and small. Shotgun News discussed the phenomenon in its July 20, 2012, issue—published on the very day of James Eagan Holmes’s murderous rampage in Aurora. “A crackhead or a meth addict isn’t a great deal different from a post-apocalyptic zombie,” the industry tabloid newspaper observed, blandly exposing the true mentality underlying the “sport” of zombie shoots. The article noted approvingly that Zombie Industries “has developed special training targets that illustrate the vital organs. These allow shooters to engage the targets at angles rather than strictly head-on. There’s also a psychological dimension; shooting a 3D target is a lot closer to shooting an enemy than is firing on a flat paper target. If the target ‘bleeds,’ well, that’s just an added dimension of realism.”29
The ease of acquiring military-style firepower in the U.S. civilian market has—as noted in chapter 4—generated a massive market for smuggling guns to Mexico, Canada, and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. An online resource maintained by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) contains indictments and other documents related to federal gun-trafficking prosecutions filed since 2006, primarily in the southwest United States. The documents detail specific information, such as the make, model, caliber, manufacturer, and retail source of firearms seized in criminal trafficking cases. These resources confirm that military-style semiautomatic firearms readily available on the U.S. civilian gun market are highly sought after by international gun traffickers; they also describe the methods, such as “straw purchases,” that are commonly employed to obtain weapons in the United States to smuggle to Mexico and other Latin American countries. Categories of guns cataloged on the site, Cross-Border Gun Trafficking, include assault rifles, assault pistols, 50 caliber sniper rifles, body-armor-penetrating handguns, standard pistols and revolvers, as well as other firearm types. As of September 2012, of the 4,454 guns detailed on the site, 2,278 were assault rifles (primarily AK-47 and AR-15 variants), 255 were assault pistols (almost all AK-47 pistol variants), 29 were 50 caliber sniper rifles, and 373 were body-armor-penetrating handguns (all of which were FN Five-seveN pistols, known as the mata policía, or “cop killer,” in Mexico).30
Unfortunately, U.S. law enforcement officers are finding themselves increasingly in the sights of military-style guns, wielded by criminals, the mentally deranged, and radical extremists. A VPC study published in 2010, based on reports of assault weapons in the news over a two-year span—between March 1, 2005, and February 28, 2007—made clear that assault weapons are frequently used in crime and confiscated from criminals. Moreover, it demonstrated that the number of incidents in which law enforcement officers were reported to have been confronted with assault weapons rose dramatically in the two-year period monitored. More than one out of four assault-weapons incidents in the study involved police. Those incidents are likely to involve shots being fired, with injuries to law enforcement personnel, gunmen, and bystanders. Shots were fired from assault weapons (other than police weapons) in three out of every four reported incidents involving police.31
One example of the impact of assault weapons on police occurred in April 2009 in the Stanton Heights area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a “close-knit, family oriented and pet friendly neighborhood” that “appeals to those looking for a quiet and relaxed way of life.”32 Many Pittsburgh police and fire service officers live in Stanton Heights.33 In April 2009, Eric G. Kelly was among them. A fourteen-year veteran of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, Kelly had changed the police zone in which he worked in January. He wanted to be closer to his home, where he lived with his wife and three daughters.34 His new policing area included Stanton Heights.35
Another family lived on Fairfield Street, several blocks away from Officer Kelly. Three generations of the family that lived in this small ranch-style house had immersed themselves in the great American gun culture. The youngest, Richard Jr., held a concealed-carry permit from Allegheny County.36 He was an outspoken advocate for permits. In 2008 he posted on the website of the Pennsylvania Firearms Owners Association, “I want all the guys that deserve them to have their licenses without fear of cracking a fart and the county sheriff smelling it. Ya dig?”37
Richard’s grandfather, the late Charles Scott, was a “deadbeat alcoholic who beat his wife and other family members.” Unemployed for the most part, he drank up to two cases of beer a day and kept a cache of guns in the house.38 He liked to walk around with a handgun stuffed into his belt and was known for uttering racial slurs.39 Scott was a man given to rage. He beat his wife and daughter. He deliberately shot a family kitten to death, fired through the ceiling and roof of his house, and pointed his guns at other family members.40 During one domestic argument, he shot two telephones that his wife tried to use to call for help. When she began studying to get a GED (General Educational Development) diploma,41 he shot up her textbooks because he was against the idea.42
It is perhaps not surprising that Charles’s daughter, Margaret, took up drinking at an early age and (unsuccessfully) attempted suicide at least three times, including shooting herself with a shotgun.43 Her marriage to Richard Poplawski produced the future concealed-carry-permit holder Richard Jr. The elder Poplawski left the home when his son was about three years old. Richard Poplawski Jr. was left largely to the care of his grandparents.44
The younger Poplawski followed the cycle of guns, violence, hatred, and failure. (All references to Poplawski hereafter are to the son, Richard Jr.) Said to have been bright and likable as a child, Poplawski spiraled down into anger and bitterness. By 2009, when he was twenty-two, he had already enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and lasted only three weeks. He had also tried dental school, computers, and a string of other jobs. He failed at them all. He went to Florida for a while, came back, and ended up living at home with his mother. The two had loud and bitter arguments. Within the last year, Richard had acquired two pit bull puppies from an animal rescue center.45 On the morning of Saturday, April 4, 2009, the action of one of the two dogs set off an explosion of violence that stunned Pittsburgh.
On Friday night, April 3, Officer Kelly worked the 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. shift.46 Richard Poplawski partied with friends,47 came home late, and surfed the Web. Among the sites he visited Saturday morning between 3:30 A.M. and 5:00 A.M. was the website of the white supremacist organization Stormfront.48
Poplawski left markers of his disintegrating identity and festering hatred on the Internet beginning in high school. According to Mark Pitcavage, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s investigative research department, Poplawski’s first Internet writings were about smoking marijuana and making dope pipes, which Poplawski said his mother was “cool with.” He first appeared on white supremacist sites in 2007, when he scribbled about his hatred of minorities and a government collapse that was supposedly coming. Poplawski believed that the federal government was building concentration camps for dissenters and that under President Obama’s leadership it was planning to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and confiscate Americans’ firearms.49 “If a total collapse is what it takes to wake our brethren and guarantee future generations of white children walk this continent, if that is what it takes to restore our freedoms and recapture our land: let it begin this very second and not a moment later,” he wrote in March 2009.50 In 2007, Poplawski explained his hatred for blacks on the Stormfront hate site. “I attribute it, in part, to my solid upbringing . . . my mother made it clear that it would be frowned upon (to say the least, she actually told me she would bust me with a frying pan) to bring home a non-white girlfriend long before I had started thinking about bringing home any girls period, lol.”51
Poplawski also posted several hundred times on the website of the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association, beginning in December 2007. Most of his posts there—made under the name of “RWhiteman”—discussed concealed-weapons permits, police arrests and gun confiscations he believed were illegal, and buying and selling guns.52 In an early post, Poplawski made a twisted allusion to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” in which King said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”53 In December 2007, Poplawski wrote, “I can only hope I would be judged not on the make of my firearm, but on the content of my character.”54 In the same year, he posted this statement about police:
I dont [sic] care to bend at all from harassment from the police If I’m doing nothing more than exercising a right. If that means pissing a cop or two off, then so be it, if they are so ignorant as to try to trample my rights or inconvenience me in any way for no reason. I mean Im [sic] not talking about DISRESPECTING any cops, just not bending for them in fear as so many people do.55
Poplawski discussed his private “hit list” on a white supremacist Internet radio program he co-hosted sometime in the weeks before April 4, 2009. The list included a Pittsburgh police officer, a black, a Jew, his ex-girlfriend, her parents, and neighbors’ pets.56 “You have an individual who is, by any stretch of the imagination, a total failure in life with very deep feelings of inadequacy and filled with tons of hatred,” Louis B. Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2011. “This guy had a mind-set that was anti-government and conspiratorial. He had organizations like these white supremacist groups telling him that it wasn’t him. It was foreigners, minorities and the government causing his problems.”57
In addition to getting his concealed-carry permit—he encouraged Eddie Perkovic, his hate radio co-host, to get one too58—Poplawski bought body armor (popularly called a bulletproof vest) from a friend.59 He built up an arsenal at home. His guns included a .380 semiautomatic pistol, a 22 caliber rifle, a .357 Magnum handgun, a shotgun, and an AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle. He had more than a thousand rounds of ammunition, better than nine hundred rounds of it for his AK-47.60 “Hand everybody an AK and a sidearm,” Poplawski wrote on a Penguin hockey team fan website in December 2008. “Everybody. And see how long these mass murdering spree’s [sic] last, if anybody even dares to attempt them.”61
Poplawski bought at least three of his guns from Braverman Arms Co., a gun shop on Penn Avenue in Wilkinsburg, a borough in Allegheny County next to Pittsburgh.62 Wilkinsburg had its moment of national attention in 2000, when Ronald Taylor, thirty-nine, a black man, went on a racially motivated shooting spree. Taylor shot to death three white men and wounded two others. Investigators found lists and notes in Taylor’s apartment that denounced whites, Jews, Asians, Italians, police, and the news media.63 The gun Taylor used also was traced back to Braverman Arms Co.64
Of all his guns, Poplawski most loved his AK-47 assault rifle. On December 8, 2008, Poplawski posted a comment on Stormfront’s website, in response to a question posed there, “If You Could Have Just One Weapon—SHTF [shit hits the fan], What Would It Be?” His answer was, “I guess I’d have to say my AK. Which is nice because it doesn’t have to fall from the sky—its [sic] in a case within arms [sic] reach.”65 His friend and co-host Petrovic told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Poplawski “always said that if someone tried to take his weapons away he would do what his forefathers told him to do and defend himself.”66
This is where matters stood early on the morning of Saturday, April 4.
Sometime before seven A.M., Richard’s mother, Margaret, awoke and found that one of the dogs had urinated on the floor. She woke Richard and confronted him about the dog.67 After their argument, she called 911 at 7:03 A.M. and asked that the police come and remove Poplawski.68 A police dispatcher sent the call out at 7:05 A.M. as a domestic disturbance.69
Officer Kelly’s shift was over. Officially off duty, he picked up his oldest daughter, Tameka, twenty-two. She also worked the night shift, as a nursing assistant at a health care facility.70 They were in his personal vehicle, only minutes from their home.
Richard Poplawski later told police that his mother was “extremely stupid” to call the police, knowing how well armed he was. Immediately after the call, he prepared himself for battle. He went into his bedroom, put on his ballistic vest, and grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun. “You’re not going to do this,” his mother said to Richard. But his mind was made up. He later told a police detective that he thought in his head at that moment, “Come on with it.”71
Pittsburgh police officers Paul J. Sciullo II and Stephen J. Mayhle arrived at the Poplawski house at 7:11 A.M., eight minutes after Margaret’s call to 911. She met them at the door, let them in, and said, “Come and take his ass.”72 Walking out of his bedroom with his shotgun, Poplawski saw Sciullo standing in the front doorway.73
“The police arrived much quicker than I expected,” he later said in a statement to police. “I was caught off guard. This led to a snap decision to shoot. [I] just believed police were going to kill me.”74 He fired a single shot from the hip at Officer Sciullo, who was struck and immediately went down in the threshold.75
“What the hell have you done?” Margaret yelled at Richard before fleeing to the basement.76
As Officer Mayhle entered the house, Poplawski tried to shoot him, too. But his shotgun jammed. “Code 3! Code 3! Officer down! Officers are being shot at!” Mayhle shouted into his radio.77
A furious gun battle ensued between the two men, raging through much of the house. A trail of 40 caliber casings fired from Mayhle’s service pistol indicated that the officer chased Poplawski from the living room, through the kitchen, into the dining room, and then into a hallway, where the trail stopped.78 That is when, it appears, Poplawski grabbed his AK-47 and started firing at Mayhle. The officer had fired eight 40 caliber rounds from his gun as he chased Poplawski. Two of his bullets struck Poplawski, one in the chest, near his heart. But Poplawski’s ballistic vest stopped that bullet. Another bullet struck Poplawski in the leg. Mayhle then tried to run out of the house, but was struck down by bullets from Poplawski’s assault rifle. Twenty-eight spent AK-47 casings were found just in the living room. Some of the bullets from those casings ripped through Mayhle’s ballistic vest.79 Poplawski went outside and shot both officers again multiple times as they lay on the ground.80
At 7:15 A.M., just a few blocks away, Officer Kelly and his daughter heard the sounds of gunfire as they pulled up to their house. Kelly told his daughter to run into the house. “I was shook up,” she later testified. “He told me to just go in the house, lock the door. He’ll be fine.” She watched her father speed away. “She was banging on the door,” his wife, Marena Kelly recalled. “She was saying, ‘Daddy went down there.’ ”81
Meanwhile, Poplawski had holed up in his mother’s bedroom. He saw Kelly drive up in his white SUV and opened fire on him immediately with his AK-47 assault rifle.82 Kelly was hit by rounds from Poplawski’s AK-47 three times before he could get out of his vehicle. The rounds easily punched through the car’s metal and into Kelly’s body. He was hit at least three more times by AK rounds outside the SUV, one of which was fatal, striking his right kidney, liver, and lung.83
Other officers responded to the scene, and a gun battle began. It lasted for two and a half hours. A detective testified that hundreds of rounds were fired from the guns Poplawski used that day—a 12-gauge shotgun, .357 Magnum revolver, and 7.62 mm AK-47 assault rifle.84 “Bullets were whizzing and pinging everywhere,” Sergeant James Kohnen said. “It was a meat grinder. We were totally outgunned—pistols against assault rifles.”85 A SWAT officer later testified, “We began to run low on ammo because we were sustaining so much fire.” He said each officer carried 125 rounds of ammunition into the fight.86 Margaret Poplawski was seen during the violent standoff, pacing in both the garage and the driveway, smoking cigarettes.87
Richard was eventually engaged in conversation by a police negotiator. “This is really an unfortunate occurrence, sir,” Poplawski said at one point. Later he assured the negotiator, “You know, I’m a good kid, officer.” He also moaned, swore, and spewed racial epithets.88 “Boy, getting shot is really painful,” he complained.89 At one point during the battle, Poplawski considered suicide, he later told police. But he decided against it. Prison wouldn’t be so bad, he concluded.90 Eventually, he was worn down by his own wounds. “I need medical attention. It’s really painful. I’m [expletive] shot. I’m in pain. I’m dizzy,” he said. “Get in here and get me some medication attention.”91
Margaret Poplawski ran out to the police at 10:36 A.M.92 Less than ten minutes later, her son surrendered.93 Richard Poplawski Jr. was convicted of three counts of murder and numerous other offenses. He was sentenced to death for the murders, and an additional 85 to 190 years were added for his other crimes.94
The gun lobby and its enthusiasts obstinately deny the lessons taught by Poplawski’s tale. As chapter 5 discussed and this case demonstrates, concealed-carry-permit holders are not by definition community leaders. A larger question is raised by the murderous actions of Richard Poplawski and James Eagan Holmes. What is there about the civilian semiautomatic assault rifle that enables a single man to kill three armed police officers in less than fifteen minutes and then hold off a huge responding force, including SWAT officers, for almost three hours? Or to murder twelve people and wound another fifty-eight in a few minutes? Why on earth are machines so efficient at killing people so freely available in the United States?
The answers are these. Assault weapons were designed to do in war precisely what Holmes did in a movie theater and Poplawski did in his quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood—kill or wound large numbers of people within short to medium distances. And the gun industry, hand in hand with the NRA, the NSSF, and other members of the gun lobby, has aggressively marketed assault weapons to help keep its foundering fortunes afloat.95
Semiautomatic assault weapons are civilian versions of automatic military assault rifles, such as the AK-47 and the M-16. The civilian guns look the same as their military brethren because they function identically, except for one feature: military assault rifles are machine guns. A machine gun fires continuously as long as its trigger is held back—until it runs out of ammunition. Civilian assault rifles, in contrast, are semiautomatic weapons. The trigger of a semiautomatic weapon must be pulled back separately for each round fired. Because federal law has banned the sale of new machine guns to private persons since 1986 and heavily regulates sales to civilians of older model machine guns, the availability of military assault weapons for the civilian market is limited.
The distinctive look of assault weapons like Poplawski’s AK-47 is not merely cosmetic, as the gun industry and its lobby often argue. The assault weapon’s physical appearance is the result of design following function. All assault weapons—military and civilian alike—incorporate specific features that were designed to provide a specific combat function. That function is laying down a high volume of fire over a wide killing zone, also known as “hosing down” an area. Civilian assault weapons keep the specific design features that make this deadly spray-firing easy. The most important of these design features are:
• High-capacity detachable ammunition magazines (often called “clips”) that may hold more than a hundred rounds of ammunition.96 According to gun expert Chuck Taylor, “This allows the high volume of fire critical to the ‘storm gun’ concept.”97 A gun that held the three to five rounds of a traditional hunting rifle or the six rounds of a classic revolver would have to be reloaded many times to discharge as many bullets as are available in a single high-capacity magazine.
• A rear pistol grip (handle), including so-called “thumb-hole stocks” and extended ammunition magazines that function like pistol grips.
• A forward grip or barrel shroud. Forward grips (located under the barrel or the forward stock) “give a shooter greater control over a weapon during recoil,” according to gun expert Duncan Long.98 The front and rear grips allow the shooter to hold the gun in a manner that is convenient for either spray-firing from the hip or more controlled aiming from the shoulder. Forward grips and barrel shrouds also make it possible to hold the gun with the non-trigger hand, even though the barrel gets extremely hot from firing multiple rounds. In the case of assault pistols, the forward grip is often an ammunition magazine or a barrel shroud (a heat-dissipating vented tube surrounding the gun barrel).
Military assault rifles usually feature what is known as “selective fire”—the ability to change, with the flick of a small lever, from semiautomatic fire to fully automatic fire. Is this selective ability to use automatic fire an essential feature of a “real” assault weapon? The answer is, “absolutely not.” But that hasn’t kept the gun industry from using this line of argument to pretend that civilian assault weapons simply don’t exist. For example, in June 2010, Tom Givens, a gun writer who also runs a gun training range (complete with gun shop) in Memphis, Tennessee, told the Commercial Appeal that the AR-15 is not an assault rifle because it is semiautomatic.99 This red herring began to be raised by the gun lobby only after civilian assault weapons were widely criticized. The criticism understandably arose after mass murderers and drug traffickers began to “hose down” America’s streets and schoolyards with civilian assault weapons. The argument is entirely semantic. By limiting the definition of assault weapon to machine guns, the gun industry and its friends hope to define the problem away. But fully automatic fire has little to do with the killing power of assault weapons. As pro-assault weapons expert Duncan Long wrote in his 1986 publication, Assault Pistols, Rifles and Submachine Guns, “The next problem arises if you make a semiauto-only model of one of these selective-fire rifles. According to the purists, an assault rifle has to be selective fire. Yet, if you think about it, it’s a little hard to accept the idea that firearms with extended magazines, pistol grip stock, etc. cease to be assault rifles by changing a bit of metal.”100
Long’s point is well taken, because military and civilian experts (including an NRA magazine) agree that semiautomatic fire is actually more—not less—likely to hit the target than is automatic fire and is thus more deadly.101 In fact, Long wrote about the semiautomatic UZI in another book, “One plus of the semiauto version is that it has a greater potential accuracy.”102 In any case, an NRA magazine reported that a person of moderate skill—like Richard Poplawski—can fire a semiautomatic assault weapon at an extremely fast rate of fire.103
The history of assault weapons confirms Long’s view that the fundamental design of the assault weapon has little to do with automatic fire and everything to do with high capacity and ease of firing. The German army developed the first assault rifle during World War II. The STG 44 (Sturmgewehr, or “storm gun”) was the “father of all assault rifles. . . . After the war it was examined and dissected by almost every major gunmaking nation and led, in one way and another, to the present-day 5.56mm assault rifles.”104 The Soviet Army’s AK-47 was derived from the STG-44 shortly after the war.105
After studying over three million casualty reports from three wars, the U.S. Army’s Operations Research Office (ORO) found that, “in the overall picture, aimed fire did not seem to have any more important role in creating casualties than randomly fired shots. Marksmanship was not as important as volume. . . . From this data, ORO concluded that what the Army needed was a low recoil weapon firing a number of small projectiles. . . . The [Armalite] AR-15 was chosen as the best small caliber weapon and it was adopted as the M16.”106 One gun expert put the army’s reasoning into plain words. “The studies showed that. . . in spite of the huge amounts of money spent by the military services in training combat infantrymen to be marksmen, few were capable of firing effectively beyond ranges of 200 to 300 meters in the heat of battle. ‘Spray and pray’ would come to be the practice on the future battlefields of Vietnam.”107 More recently, in September 2009, a gun industry observer summed up the assault rifle’s design concept. “From the minute you get your first modern, AR-style rifle, the first thing that you notice is the fact that it truly is one of the most ergonomic long guns you’ll ever put to your shoulder. Makes sense, it was designed to take young men, many of whom had never fired a gun of any sort before, and quickly make them capable of running the rifle—effectively—in the most extreme duress, armed combat.”108
Why are these weapons of war on America’s streets? Simply to make money for the gun industry. In the 1980s, foreign manufacturers began dumping semiautomatic versions of the Soviet-designed AK-47 military assault rifle onto the U.S. civilian firearms market. Colt Industries, a domestic manufacturer, marketed the AR-15, the semiautomatic version of the M16, the standard U.S. military infantry rifle. When Colt’s basic patent expired, other gun makers jumped into the civilian market.
Assault weapons have become hot items on the civilian market for a variety of reasons. For manufacturers, assault weapons originally helped counter the mid-1980s decline in handgun sales. Criminals—especially drug traffickers—were drawn to assault weapons’ massive firepower, useful for fighting police and competing traffickers. Survivalists—who envisioned themselves fending off a horde of desperate neighbors from within their bomb shelters—loved the combat features of high ammunition capacity and antipersonnel striking power of assault weapons. Right-wing paramilitary extremists made these easily purchased firearms their gun of choice. And for gun enthusiast fans of popular entertainment, semiautomatic assault weapons offered the look and feel of the “real thing.”
Since the 1980s, the gun industry has aggressively used as selling points the military character of semiautomatic assault weapons and the lethality of their distinctive designs.109 Poplawski’s murderous attack amply demonstrates that these civilian semiautomatic assault weapons, like their military counterparts, are every bit as deadly as the gun industry promises. Examples of the use of assault weapons against law enforcement officers by extremists and criminals continue to abound, as fatal attacks on police officers have grown to alarming numbers. FBI data for 2011 reported that seventy-two officers were killed by criminal suspects in 2011—a 25 percent increase from 2010 and a 75 percent increase from the forty-one reported killed in 2008. The year 2011 was the first one in which more officers were killed by suspects than in car accidents, and the total was the highest in nearly two decades (not including officers murdered in the 2001 terrorist attacks and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing).110 Guns were used in sixty-three of the seventy-two murders. Forty-nine of the victims were wearing body armor.111
One bloody instance of this escalating carnage began on May 20, 2010, in West Memphis, Arkansas, when police officer Thomas “Bill” Evans stopped a van driven by Jerry Kane, forty-five, of Forest, Ohio, along 1–40. Soon afterward, Sergeant Brandon Paudert arrived to back up Evans. Within minutes, Kane’s son, Joseph Kane, seventeen, jumped out of the van and shot both officers with an AK-47 assault rifle. Sergeant Paudert was shot fourteen times, including three times in the head. Officer Evans was shot eight times in the chest, back, and arms.112
About ninety minutes after Paudert and Evans were slain, two more law enforcement officers were critically wounded when they spotted and cornered the Kanes’ van in a Walmart parking lot. A blazing fifteen-minute shootout with law enforcement officers ensued, and both Kanes were killed.113
The Kanes were members of the so-called sovereign citizens movement. Among the members’ beliefs are that the United States is under martial law and they are entitled to use armed force to resist police. As of February 2012, members of the movement had killed six police officers since 2000. In what the Los Angeles Times described as a “notable shift in policy,” federal agencies have begun intensively monitoring the movement.114 No amount of “monitoring,” however, has kept assault weapons out of the hands of these violent radicals.
“Brandon and Bill had no chance against an AK-47,” Sergeant Paudert’s father, West Memphis Police Chief Bob Paudert, said. “They were completely outgunned. We are dealing with people who rant and rave about killing. They want government officials dead. We had a 16-year-old better armed than the police.”115 (It was later learned that Joseph Kane was actually seventeen years old.)
A chillingly similar ambush occurred on August 16, 2012, in Louisiana, leaving two sheriff’s deputies dead and two wounded. The chain of events began early in the morning in a parking lot at an oil refinery. The refinery had hired off-duty deputy sheriffs to direct traffic. St. John Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Boyington was sitting in his car when someone opened fire on him with an assault weapon. Boyington, who was hit several times but survived his wounds, was able to radio in a description of the car from which the shots were fired. Subsequent investigation led three other deputies to a trailer park. While they were interviewing two men, a third emerged from a trailer and began shooting with an assault weapon. Deputies Brandon Nielsen and Jeremy Triche were killed. Deputy Jason Triche was wounded.116 Seven people were arrested in connection with the incident.117 Authorities in Tennessee had previously linked the apparent patriarch of the group to the sovereign citizens movement.118
Common criminals also find themselves well armed to resist police, thanks to the gun industry’s reckless and relentless marketing of military-style weapons. In 2009, only months after Poplawski killed the three Pittsburgh officers with his AK-47, a police officer in a Pittsburgh suburb also was murdered with an assault rifle. Penn Hills police officer Michael Crawshaw, thirty-two, was the first to respond to a 911 call in which dispatchers heard gunshots. Crawshaw was advised to wait in his patrol car until backup arrived. According to a police detective’s testimony, Ronald Robinson, thirty-two, later confessed to the crime. Robinson had shot to death another man in the house over a drug debt. Officer Crawshaw saw Robinson leaving and ordered him to stop. Robinson opened fire with his MAK 90 Sporter, a cheap and popular AK variant. Crawshaw was hit in the head and killed.119
It was just such attacks that led many law enforcement agencies in the late 1980s to demand that the federal government take action to stringently control or ban semiautomatic assault weapons. But the history of attempts to regulate assault weapons since then has been one of political compromise, poor law writing, and, as a result, ultimate failure. The health and safety of law enforcement and the public has been continually trumped by gun industry and NRA muscle. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both attempted to restrict the import of assault weapons by exercising executive power under a federal statute that limits the import of firearms to those that are “generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes.” The administrations of later presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, however, allowed these restrictions to effectively lapse.
Congress has done no better. In 1994, President William J. Clinton signed into law the 1994 federal assault weapons “ban.” The 1994 law, however, was deeply flawed.120 At the outset, the law, forged out of a political rather than a technical compromise, exempted millions of semiautomatic assault weapons by “grandfathering” all such firearms legally owned as of the date of enactment. For the trade in these guns, it was as if the law had never been passed. They continued to be bought and sold, many at gun shows where no questions are asked of prospective buyers in nominally “private” sales.121 Moreover, most of the design characteristics by which new production or imports were to be defined as banned assault weapons were simply a laundry list of superficial cosmetic features that had nothing to do with the weapons’ most deadly functional features. The gun industry quickly and easily evaded the 1994 law by making slight, cosmetic changes to the supposedly banned firearms. Gun manufacturers and importers soon openly boasted of the ease with which they could circumvent the ban. By the time the 1994 law expired by its sunset provision in 2004, there were actually many more types and models of assault weapons legally on the civilian market than before the law was passed.122
For all practical purposes, the federal government has abandoned its attempts to regulate commerce in assault weapons into and within the United States. As a result, an unknown but certainly substantial number of foreign assault weapons poured into the United States during the Bush administration and continues to pour in under the Obama administration. These guns, primarily AK-type designs, are in addition to the enormous number of AR-type assault weapons manufactured domestically. “With the number of companies making those particular black rifles today, it’s tough to keep up them [sic],” a gun industry insider wrote in 2009.123 Another industry insider assessed the importance of the market in assault weapons to the gun industry in October 2008. “If there is an area of good news, it’s still the tactical segment. In the past week, storefront owners and catalog retailers are unequivocally saying that, with the exception of the tactical categories—from AR-style rifles to the polymer pistols increasingly found in the holsters of law enforcement across the country, sales are slow.”124
As noted, manufacturers like Smith & Wesson have recently expanded their production lines and their promotion of assault rifles in 22 caliber. Not only is the 22 caliber ammunition considerably cheaper than the .223 ammunition of the usual AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, the lighter weapons also provide an entry model for later transition to higher-caliber rifles. One gun writer enthused, “The M&P15–22 might be the first .22 LR AR platform that actually is appropriate for consumers, law enforcement and military use that can be used to teach AR operations and basic marksmanship skills and know there will be no modifications necessary to transition to the myriad of other AR calibers available.”125
The gun industry is diligently working to smother any rekindling of efforts to regulate assault weapons, while at the same time promoting assault weapons as part of the sporting mainstream. A key axis in this two-pronged campaign is the rebranding effort of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. In November 2009, NSSF announced that—“due to gun owners’ concerns over President-elect Obama and possible legislation regulating the Second Amendment rights of Americans”—it had placed on its website a “media resource . . . to help clear up much of the confusion and misinformation about so-called ‘assault weapons.’ ”126
This was the opening salvo in the industry’s meretricious campaign to rebrand semiautomatic assault weapons as “modern sporting rifles.”127 The point of the campaign is apparently that semiautomatic assault rifles are really just another sporting gun, no different from an older generation of bolt-action and low-capacity rifles. It is not merely incidental that, as the Freedom Group noted, there is a tremendous after-market in accessories for these assault rifles.
Unfortunately for the NSSF and the industry, some within their own ranks apparently never got the rebranding memo. They continue to call semiautomatic assault rifles exactly what they are—assault rifles—and even write lurid prose promoting the most dangerous features of these guns. For example, the August 2010 edition of Gun World magazine headlined “Ruger’s Mini-14 Tactical Rifle” as “ ‘Combat Customized’ from the Factory.”128
Among other outbursts of naked candor in this enthusiastic article were these verbatim gems: “Ruger’s Mini-14 Tactical Rifle is a version of the well established Mini-14 incorporating many of the assault rifle features that end users have being [sic] applying themselves for decades, this time straight from the factory,” according to the article. “Being seen over the years as a sort of ‘poor man’s assault rifle’ the Mini-14 has spawned a huge array of after-market parts that may be applied to make it more ‘assault rifle-y’ Recently Sturm, Ruger & Co. finally decided to get into the act themselves by producing their Mini-14 Tactical Rifles.”129 This spasm of honesty is typical of the “wink and nod” game that the gun industry plays when it talks to itself and to its hard-core consumers: call them what you will—“black rifles,” “tactical rifles,” or “modern sporting rifles”—semiautomatic assault weapons are plainly and simply military-style assault weapons.
A rapidly emerging and particularly deadly variant in the gun industry’s marketing program has been the sale of civilian assault pistols. Not since the late 1980s and early 1990s—the height of the domestic drug wars—has there been such a wide selection of assault pistols available for sale in the United States. During that period, UZI pistols, MAC-10s, and TEC-9s were the prominent assault pistols seen on television and movie screens as well as displayed on gun store counters. Today, more assault pistol makes and models are available than ever before for civilian sale in the United States. They range from models that were named under the now-expired federal assault weapons ban (such as the UZI pistol, MAC-10, and Calico) to newer models, such as AK-47 and AR-15 pistols. As a 2011 article published in Handguns magazine titled “AR Pistols: The Hugely Popular Rifle Platform Makes a Pretty Cool Handgun as Well” noted, “There’s no doubt in the last few years that AR pistols have become extremely popular.”130
This increase in the quantity of makes and models has been matched by an increase in the quality of their lethality. The earlier generation of assault pistols were primarily high-capacity military-style pistols in 9mm or 45 caliber. The most popular models today are derived from assault rifles and thus have the penetrating power of an assault rifle in the concealable form of a pistol. Whereas the most commonly worn levels of police body armor would be able to protect the wearer from a 9mm or 45 caliber handgun round, the .223 or 7.62 assault rifle rounds would be far more likely to penetrate. As one poster on Survivalist Boards.com wrote about the Draco AK-47 pistol, “It can penetrate body armor and holds 30+ rounds. . . . I figure this is a lot of firepower in a legal and small package.”131 After detailing the pistol’s military pedigree and suitability as a PDW (personal defense weapon), Tactical Weapons magazine approvingly noted that the “result is a 5.5 pound pistol with an overall length of 20.5 inches that offers full rifle power in a very compact package—A desirable combination for many!”132 As noted earlier, it’s clear that AK-47 pistols are a “weapon of choice” of illegal gun traffickers who purchase firearms in the United States and then smuggle them into Mexico.133
A related design and marketing innovation has been the sale to civilians of “vest busters,” handguns specifically designed to penetrate body armor. The FN Five-seveN—known as the “cop killer” in Mexico—is a virtual poster child for this aspect of the militarization trend. The 5.7x28mm round it fires was specifically designed to defeat body armor on the modern battlefield. Given its use by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, it’s ironic that this handgun was designed for use by counterterrorism teams. FN clearly recognized the danger of the genie it was releasing when it introduced the Five-seveN. The company originally claimed that it would restrict the sale of its new armor-piercing ammunition and pistol. A company spokesman told the Sunday Times (London) in 1996 that the pistol was “too potent” for normal police duties and was designed for antiterrorist and hostage-rescue operations.134
The gun industry press, which invariably fawns over any new gun at its debut, played along with FN’s righteous fiction. The NRA’s American Rifleman claimed in 1999, “Law enforcement and military markets are the target groups of FN’s new FiveseveN pistol,” and told its readers, “Don’t expect to see this cartridge sold over the counter in the United States. In this incarnation, it is strictly a law enforcement or military round.”135 Similarly, American Handgunner magazine assured the public in 2000, “For reasons that will become obvious, neither the gun nor the ammunition will ever be sold to civilians or even to individual officers.”136
In fact, however, greed overcame caution, and both the gun and its ammunition are easily, legally, and widely available in the United States.
The gun industry’s campaigns to sell death-dealing military firepower is in large degree enabled by the stranglehold it has on official sources of information and data about the consequences. The vacuum of reliable data enables the industry and its lobby to manufacture phony “facts” to suit its case—and successfully peddle its specious assertions to ill-informed politicians, policymakers, and news media. The next chapter explores the terrain of this Alice-in-Wonderland world.