Monday, February 25, 2008

.50 Caliber Crime? Not so much.

Hawaii has decided it wants to ban the .50 Caliber rifle. Of course this is nothing but a feel good legislation because high powered rifles in civilian hands scares people...and for no reason other then hype usually by people that have no idea what they are talking about.

Using statements like "The rifle can fire 10 rounds in 10 seconds" (that's actually pretty slow), and "It does concern us -- shooting down airplanes four miles distances" (good luck hitting with that shot...ever and never more than once) the gun grabbers simply try to strike fear into sheep in order to get guns banned.

Well in part of the discussion on this I challenge gun grabbers to cite ANY case where a .50 was actually used to commit a crime (besides war). Someone mentioned to me one Albert Petrosky who used a .50 BMG to kill a cop. I had to research it to find out. Well seems that Petrosky actually used an SKS to kill the cop and never actually fired his .50 BMG in commission of any crime...he just had one is all.

In research of this of course I stumbled on VPC's "Criminal Use of the 50 Caliber Sniper Rifle" page. The VPC much like the Brady Campaign and other gun grabbers use LOTS of dishonesty here.

They list 22 cases where the .50 Caliber was "used to commit crimes" between 1989 and 2007. Think about that for a minute. That's 18 years. 22 cases. That is slightly more than one case per year. Yet this gun is a crime wave menace that must be banned.

Then I decided to look at the "crimes" themselves. I researched every single one of the "crimes" listed. Of the 22 crimes listed only one was definitely the .50 Caliber that may have been used to kill someone. However the problem there is that it is an unverifiable news report. So maybe, maybe not.

The VPC of course lists the Petrosky case I mentioned earlier, but the VPC claims that the BMG was used to actually commit the crime of robbery and subsequently cop killing. This is a lie. The SKS was used, and not the BMG.

Of the 22 crimes listed 12 of those were actually other crimes, but the suspect owned a .50 either in his car at the time or at his premises found later in investigation. In those 12 cases the .50 was not actually used in the crime.

That leaves 10 crimes left over 18 years. Looking further at those 10 crimes we find that a few of them the crime was having a gun while being a felon. Suspects didn't actually use said guns, they just had them as a felon which is illegal. The .50 caliber was among the gun(s) they owned.

One case involved conspiracy to sell 50 .50 Calibers to FARC (a Columbian terrorist organization). Well problem is that the people arrested didn't actually even HAVE an .50 Calibers. They were just arrested for conspiracy to sell them.

The VPC also listed the Branch Dravidian assault in Waco, Texas as a .50 Caliber gun crime. Do I really need to explain this one?

In the end this leaves 3 crimes using the .50 BMG. One of those this guy mounted some .50's to his armor plated bulldozer and drove the bulldozer through several buildings. It doesn't look like the .50s were ever actually fired. Though why would you need to with an armor plated bulldozer.

So two crimes left, and neither of them are verifiable if the shooters actually used their .50 calibers to commit crimes. Verifiable as in the news articles don't exist. One of them still has comments, but the article has long since been pulled so it may have been inaccurate or fake. Either way doesn't exist any longer.

Just like my post last year Every 48 Hours, this is the type of dishonesty that exists with the gun banners. Spin the facts to make things look different then they actually are.

So the question still exists. When has the .50 Caliber actually ever been used to commit a crime that would warrant it's banning?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd like to know this too. I was interested in getting a barrett and stumble across that same list.

TB

Anonymous said...

so we agree, Branch Dravidian killed law enforcement personnel with a 50 cal?

Domandred said...

Apparently I do actually have to explain this one.

No. In fact the inventory of the weapons recovered at the Branch Davidian's compound did not include any .50 caliber weapons.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/waco/treasury.html

There were a few parts, but unusable as weapons without the weapon itself.

The ATF simply said the Branch Dividians could have obtained them, but none were found. The FBI reported seeing a muzzle, but has not been verifiable.

So the VPC using the Branch Dividians as a .50 cal gun crime is a fallacy, regardless if the way the government handled the siege was a cluster fuck or not.