What's a few dead cops to the gun lobby?

Posted on Thu, Jun. 05, 2008
What's a few dead cops to the gun lobby?
BY FRED GRIMM
Miami Herald

The shock was in the weight of the thing. Less than six pounds.
It was a cop's weapon, a semiautomatic assault rifle of dull anodized black steel, stripped down to an unadorned functionality.

How light it felt in my hands. Like a toy gun.

I thought how easy it would be for some kid, some 110-pound wild-dog street punk, to heft an AR-6520 and wield it to hellish effect.

No wonder Fort Lauderdale is spending $82,000 for guns designed to kill enemy soldiers. Police know that since the expiration of the federal assault weapon ban, young criminals have ginned up the arms race.

Gun peddlers visit gun stores and shows where they make legal purchases of semiautomatic military assault guns powerful enough to penetrate walls, doors, cars -- powerful enough to render a police officer's bulletproof vest obsolete.

They flip them. Sell them out of car trunks at twice the price to gangbangers, drug dealers and armed robbers who want to upgrade to cop killers. Sell them to felons. Sell them to kids. Sell them to certifiably crazy people as long as crazy people can ante up a cold three grand.

PRO-GUN CONGRESS

Last year, the feds indicted four gun merchants on charges they had purchased more than 150 assault weapons and accessories, including a 90-round clip, and resold them in northwest Miami-Dade's toughest neighborhoods.

Chew on that: A young aspiring criminal no longer thinks his 9mm automatic pistol packs enough death. He's willing to pay street prices for an AK-47 with a 90-round clip.

The Fort Lauderdale police department held a news conference Wednesday to talk about the purchase of 100 Colt AR-6520 rifles. The city's cops were authorized semiautomatic weapons back in 2001 but it was up to individual patrolmen to buy their own. A lot has changed since 2001.

In 2004, Congress allowed the ban on assault weapons to expire. The federal law suffered major loopholes, but it still had the effect of tamping down the firepower cops faced on the streets. Since the ban was jettisoned, police groups like the International Association of Chiefs of Police have lamented that the bad guys have the cops outgunned.

NEW REALITY

Nationwide, even as police departments beg Congress to reinstate the assault weapon ban, they're reluctantly dealing with the new reality. Last month, Washington D.C., announced that city patrol cars would be equipped with AR-15 assault rifles, following cities like Miami, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, even Waterloo, Iowa.

The danger has become painfully obvious to any department in the vicinity of Miami-Dade County. Two officers have been murdered in the past nine months by gunmen carrying variations of the AK-47. In September, Miami-Dade officer Jose Somohano was killed and two other officers wounded. In February, Miami Detective James Walker was murdered as he sat in his car.

Fort Lauderdale cops see the increase in firearm savagery a few miles south. They understand the new reality.

Congress demonstrated in 2004 how much value was placed on the mythical right of private citizens to own semiautomatic military assault rifles.

How much? More than a few dead cops.