Editorials
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Carnage control This past January, children in Stockton, California, were playing unperturbed in a schoolyard at recess when a ripple of bullets splayed out with no warning. Five died and...
...The political clout of the NRA is legendary and it rests not just on successful political lobbying, lots of money, and appeals to the constitutional right to own and bear arms, but on the bedrock fantasy of too many Americans that all else failing-reach for your gun...
...By March, he was feeling "a pulse change," and seeing the possibility of an "accommodation" between sportsmen and police "who put their lives on the line every single day...
...Testing the limits...
...What is more, so is its uncommon directness, crisp, like the speech of its Basque author, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray...
...But George Bush, sportsman and president, is only part of the problem...
...So this statement, this indictment, from the Vatican is timely and necessary...
...Colt Industries announced it would stop selling AR-15s, its civilian model of a military weapon recently adopted by drug gangs...
...Doctors, faced with increasing numbers of assault rifle injuries, describe their work as "trench medicine" and their wards as "MASH units": their patients have blood losses that strain hospital reserves, mangled organs that cannot be sewn up, and pulverized bones that cannot be set...
...Unfortunately, it does not adequately acknowledge the church's own systemic historic failures, but puts the onus largely on individual church members...
...The requirements FN sought, says the report, were "increased incapacitation, optimized target acquisition, improved hit probability, and affordable first and maintenance costs...
...In China, black is not beautiful...
...He died within hours...
...The result: "[A] very small submachine gun firing an entirely new 5.7mm cartridge...
...Sales by mail and across state borders will continue and are virtually impossible to control without strict federal standards...
...ET CETERA FORTIFY TOUR FOREARM From National Defense, a monthly journal specializing in military technology, we learn of progress made by Fabrique Nationale (FN), a Belgian arms manufacturer, with its Project 90, a new concept in the field of "personal weapons...
...After the Stockton killings, President Bush-a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association-said he opposed banning semi-automatic firearms: "I'm not about to do that....The states have a lot of laws on these things, let them enforce them...
...Controlling guns and their owners is not the same as banning them...
...Practically, the document notes that acts of racism must be exposed, denounced, and its victims defended...
...The 5,7mm bullet will defeat a standard steel helmet at 150 meters...
...Worse, they can be converted into fully automatic weapons...
...This was too much...
...With optimized incapacitation, increased perforation effect, and high loss of energy into soft targets, it sounds perfect for schoolyards.perfect for schoolyards...
...policemen permanently disabled in gun battles...
...The sale and possession of semi-automatics are not only legal, in some states the weapons are easier to come by than a driver's license...
...Across the United States there is the growing phenomenon of "skinheads," young nihilists whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as "the most indiscriminately violent group of white supremacists in decades...
...Bush's rhetoric that an accommodation between the police and hunters might count as a fact, but not the lives of innocent children and ordinary citizens...
...three words that resonate from "The Church and Racism," the timely and relatively concise (8000 words) statement on racism issued in February by the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission...
...In Azerbaijan, Armenians beware...
...Thus] it would make an excellent 'instinctive' weapon, since it would virtually become part of the man's forearm...
...Well said, Mr...
...In the most violent corners of our inner cities, where gangs are at war and guns are imported along with huge shipments of cocaine, it is horrible, yet predictable, that innocent bystanders are caught in crossfires over drugs...
...In light of recent church teaching, particularly the encyclical Sollki-tudo rei socialis and the 1979 pastoral letter of the bishops of the United States ("Brothers and Sisters to Us"), the document points out that there is little difference between those who...
...While in this instance the document is concerned concretely with processes of genetic manipulation, recalling specifically the eugenic racism of the Nazis, its intuition is much broader and anticipatory...
...The domestic arms race has been escalating...
...When a joint bill is passed, California will be the first state to outlaw assault rifles...
...In David Duke's victorious race for the Louisiana legislature, white is right...
...Semi-automatics release only one shell per trigger pull, but they rapidly fire multiple rounds of ammunition as long as the trigger is squeezed and are powerful enough to perforate a concrete wall from a distance...
...But the report does not stop simply with "its own...
...After two previous failed attempts, California has finally passed bills in both its assembly and senate to ban semi-automatics and register those already sold...
...Five died and twenty-nine others plus a teacher were wounded...
...the parents of the children gunned down in Stockton...
...The ammunition had to have an optimized drag coefficient, optimized projectile design, minimum weight and maximum velocity giving high loss of energy into soft targets, greatly increased perforation effect, a low recoil impulse for maximum control, and maximum operator comfort...
...State-by-state restrictions, however, will not suffice and Colt's competitors will continue to manufacture these weapons...
...But this bullet, fired from an assault rifle, had such velocity that the shock waves, not a direct hit, swelled the victim's brain...
...It's about time that Congress and state legislatures made that clear to the NRA...
...Three words worthy of a revolution...
...Yet the year is 1989...
...Until March 14-when the Bush administration temporarily banned imports of some models- there were no federal restrictions for citizens on buying and selling assault weapons...
...And an American fantasy...
...The figures are clearly diaturbing: a 41 percent increase in reported cases of anti-Semitic harassment, and an 18.5 percent increase in anti-Jewish vandalism last year alone...
...Thus it was no surprise that while the Vatican was issuing its statement, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith was releasing its own audit of anti-Semitic incidents for 1988...
...In turn, individuals, increasingly fearful that the police cannot protect them, have been arming themselves...
...There is a reflex, sight which...appears to allow aiming from the hip...
...With a .22 or a .38, he would have been home the next day," the doctor said...
...Racism has an infinite number of masks, but always the same face...
...It challenges the church as well as the world...
...While it calls on the church to live up to its mission to be a sign of universal reconciliation, it misses an opportunity to square its own history with this compelling insight...
...In Soweto and the West Bank, the word endures: "You are not worthy...
...A BLASPHEMING CANCER Tolerance, fraternity, solidarity...
...We think Hugh Brock of Brock's Army Surplus in Decatur, Georgia (also a lifetime member of the NRA) has got his priorities a little clearer...
...They had been ravaged by shots from a high-powered semiautomatic rifle, once a weapon of war...
...Is another statement on racism necessary...
...In Amazonia, where have the Yanomami Indians gone...
...Leadership...
...The message the church preaches is a strong and potentially enriching one: "Every person is my brother or sister," and all acts of discrimination must be denounced vigorously and immediately...
...In West Berlin, neo-Nazis win eleven seats in the city parliament and two in the national parliament...
...What is hindering the development of stringent controls...
...In South Africa, the white Dutch Reformed church cannot finally agree that apartheid is a sin...
...Although conversion is illegal and carries stiff penalties, semi-automatics can readily be transformed (in some models, by inserting a match or a nickel) into fully automatic machine guns-capable of firing hundreds of rounds at one pull of the trigger...
...Controlling the sales of all guns-by requiring waiting periods, checking buyers' records, and licensing owners only for legitimate purposes of self-defense or hunting-would go a long way in reducing the level of violence in drug-infested neighborhoods, domestic quarrels, and all those situations when Americans find it easier to shoot first and talk later...
...The nation's police forces, having lost too many officers to criminals armed with automatic and semi-automatic rifles, have begun to augment their service revolvers with custom-made, concealable submachine guns, in self-defense...
...He denied that the temporary ban on imported semi-automatic assault rifles was a reversal of his earlier position, pledging a decision made "in a cool way, based on facts and not swayed one way or another by the temper of the debate...
...It notes a spreading "decline in civility" in American society, one that demeans blacks, homosexuals, the homeless, and women, and tests the very limits of human civility...
...Brock...
...Finally, it pronounces unequivocally that racial prejudice is a sin that blasphemes the Creator...
...It has peered into the future and seen signs of a forbidding new world...
...Like much of the document, this section deserves additional reflection, further study and development, and committed response...
...California's "playground massacre" seems finally to have galvanized the public and politicians to action on carnage control, if not yet on gun control...
...Three words meant to help battle a worldwide cancer...
...The weapon is formed from plastic, with a kind of thumb-hole stock which allows a good grip while holding the weapon along the crook of the elbow...
...He is not angry at the president over the ban: "He has to be everybody's president, not just the NRA's president...
...they are everybody's lawmakers, not just the NRA's...
...In this country, anumber of groups over the years have consistently defended the rights of the racially and religiously oppressed...
...exploit others because of race and those who exploit others because of class, economics, or national origin...
...The "playground massacre" has pulled that instinct up short-at least for the moment...
...More important, the national psyche needs a serious talking to by victims of our unwarranted approval of guns: James Brady, who took a bullet in the head in the 1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan's life...
...But children in a schoolyard fired on with a combat weapon...
...Is it only a curiosity of Mr...
...It forthrightly denounces anti-Semitism in all its strains...
...Perhaps the most prescient aspect of the Vatican document is its warning about "new and as yet unknown forms of racism...
...But as the church should have learned when it condemned Nazi racism in 1938, denunciations themselves will never be enough...
...At about the same time, in nearby Oakland, a surgeon at the Highland Hospital stood before a patient whose head had been grazed by a bullet...
...Congress and gun control forces should seize the moment to introduce stringent measures against assault weapons and to bring arms control to our domestic battlefields...
...It deals with both the structures of institutionalized racism and the snarled corridors of the individual heart...
Vol. 116 • April 1989 • No. 7
