...Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal talks about the AK-47 clone used to fire at the White House recently.
The WASR-10 is a Romanian version of the AK-47 assault weapon and definitely not for hunting deer amid the fall foliage in the Pennsylvania hills.
The WASR-10 is imported into this country by Century International Arms in Florida. You can buy it online for less than $500.
Why am I taking up your time with this? Because the WASR-10 was the weapon that Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez allegedly used to shoot the bullets stopped by ballistic glass on the second floor of the White House this week.
Mr. Ortega-Hernandez is said to have obtained his WASR-10 from a friend who purchased it in Idaho Falls, ID.
It’s a reminder of how lax American gun laws are and why that matters.
And this goes far beyond whether an unbalanced person tried to kill the president. The WASR-10 sells for about $400 in shops on the U.S.-Mexican border — but $2,000 to $3,000 in Mexico. Why the premium? Mexican gun laws are much stricter than those in the United States. So the re-militarized gun has to be smuggled into gun-shy Mexico from gun-crazy America.
According to the Center for Public Integrity, more than 500 of the Romanian AK-47/WASR-10s have been recovered in Mexico that were first imported by Century from Romania into the United States.
He then does the usual NRA-bashing. Nowhere in the article, however, are the words "Fast," "Furious" or "gunwalking" mentioned.
Go on over there and leave him a comment, won't you?
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Nowhere in the article, however, are the words "Fast," "Furious" or "gunwalking" mentioned.
That's probably because they have nothing to do with the article. The question is not whether the government should sponsor harebrained schemes to provide guns to criminals to then catch them in the act. The question is why bother have laws that can be so easily circumvented and why can't we have a civil debate about gun regulation.
@Mich: actually, Mich, the WASR-10 AK-47 clones mentioned in the article are the same models of guns that BATFE allowed to "walk" into Mexico and into the hands of drug cartels. Two of these weapons were found at the scene of the murder of Border Patrol officer Brian Terry.
And your side's idea of "civil debate" always seems to involve gun owners having their rights incrementally eroded. Which is, of course, the point, since the American people can no longer be counted on to support the sort of broad gun bans your side once hoped to implement.
"my side" doesn't want mentally unstable people to have easy access to guns. Your side does.
See, that's what I mean about not being able to have a dialogue. I would genuinely like someone to explain to me why they need an assault weapon as a civilian. I promise I would listen. And why it makes sense to have different regulations based on where you buy a gun (gun shop vs gun show).
@Mich: "my side" doesn't want mentally unstable people to have guns, either. Some on "your side" would have us believe that simply wanting a gun for self-defense purposes is prima facie evidence of paranoia, i.e., mental instability.
See, I can throw red herrings out there, too.
"Assault weapon" is just a loaded term invented by the gun ban crowd to scare people. Like "Saturday Night Specials" and "cop-killer bullets," it is a term designed to evoke a visceral response. It is used as a catch-all to describe a host of semi-automatic rifles of military heritage, but most often the AK-47 family of weapons. As to "need," a perfect example of that was displayed by Korean shopkeepers in Los Angeles in the riots that followed in the wake of the Rodney King verdict: standing outside their stores openly displaying their rifles, those Korean shopkeepers were not subject to the looting and vandalism that other businesses in LA were.
I'd be willing to bet that you've never attended a gun show. If you had, you would know that, when you go up to a vendor's table to buy a gun, you would be required to fill out the same federal forms, and be required to undergo the same NICS instant background check, that you would at a gun store. The "gun show loophole" that Mayor Bloomberg is so fond of railing against is, in fact, the private sale of guns between individuals that can take place at a gun show. So what "your side" is interested in when it talks of "closing the gun show loophole" is the banning of private transfer of guns between individuals. Thus, "closing the gun show loophole" would make a criminal of a father passing a .22 rifle to his son, or an elderly man desiring to pass his hunting and skeet shotguns to his family upon his death, etc. Again, incremental erosion of the right to keep and bear arms.
The round used by the AK and its clones is no more powerful than a 30-30, which is used for deer quite a bit.
If you're going to talk about "assault weapons", Mich, you might find it advisable to actually know what you're talking about, rather than parroting talking heads who know nothing at all.
Thanks for the info Bob. Some of those things I did not know. Enjoyed our little chat. Hope you're having a nice Thanksgiving.
Mich
@Mich: A very happy holiday to you and your family. Thanks for visiting.
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