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EVERY 48 HOURS An
Analysis Of Assault Rifles An Analysis Of Assault Rifles Traced
To Crime In Maryland September
2006 authored
by CeaseFire Maryland Inc. Board Member Susan Peschin 1st comment on Ceasefire's
"EVERY 48 HOURS" Phil
Lee1 Dec 5, 2006
(rev. 3/8/08) [ Testimony
] This note represents the first of several analyses of
the “Every
48 Hours” report. In p2, Introduction, Ms. Peschin says: "Not coincidentally, two of America's most notorious mass murders involved high-powered assault weapons. In 1999, the country watched as two high school students armed with assault weapons and shotguns killed 13 and injured 23 before turning the guns on themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. And, closer to home, in 2002, residents in the greater DC Metropolitan area were terrorized by snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo armed with a Bushmaster XM15 assault rifle." The FBI Crime Classification Manual calls a killer a
mass murderer if he kills four or more people in close succession in a single
locale, or in closely related locales.
This differs from a spree killer, who kills in a series of loosely
related or unrelated locations. By
the FBI criteria, the Muhammad-Malvo killers were spree killers and not mass
murderers despite their killing of 10 people and wounding of three more in
the DC area. Ms. Peschin's idea of "two of America's most
notorious mass murder" overlooks the murder of 2,973 American on
9/11/2001 and many other mass murders that do not conveniently fit her mold
of murder with assault weapons.
Context is important to understand the social evil of mass
murder. It is worth considering other
similar crimes from our history for context.
So, we list a few notorious mass murders that may not be remembered so
well: 1) Andrew Kehoe killed 45 people
and injured 58, mostly children in second to sixth grades, at the Bath
Consolidated School, Bath, Michigan, on May 18, 1927 using dynamite and
pyroto to bomb the school; 2) Howard Unruh killed 13 people
and wounded three using a handgun in Camden, N.J. on September 6, 1949; 3) Charles Starkweather killed
by shooting with a shotgun and stabbing 7 people between January 21, 1958 and
January 29, 1958. Starkweather had
killed Robert Colvert earlier (Dec. 1, 1957) in a robbery; 4) Richard Speck strangled and
stabbed eight student nurses in a Chicago apartment in 1966; 5) Charles Whitman killed his
wife and mother, then climbed a campus tower at the University of Texas in
Austin and shot 14 others dead also in 1966 using a common bolt action
hunting rifle; 6) Juan Corona raped and
murdered 25 men and buried their machete-hacked bodies in the orchards owned
by local farmers over a six week period in April-May 1971; 7) David Burke killed 43 people
on board Pacific Southwest Airline Flight 1771 on December 7, 1987 by
shooting the pilots of the aircraft to death with a revolver whereupon the
aircraft crashed; 8) Richard Farley killed seven
people and injured three others using handguns, a .22 rifle, two shotguns and
explosives in 1988; 9) Ramon Salcido killed seven
using a handgun for two and knife for 5 more in April 1989; 10) Julio Gonzales set fire to
the New York City's Happyland Club killing eighty-seven people in the blaze
on March 25, 1990 using $1's worth of gas and a match; 11) Physics PhD Lu Lang shot
three faculty members, the graduate student, Shan Linhua, a university
associate v-p and, finally, himself using two handguns in 1991; 12) Timothy McVeigh blew up the
Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City killing 167 men, women and
children and injuring 850 more in the explosion on 4/19/1995; 13) Male nurse Charles Cullen
confessed to murdering 35 patients circa 2003 using poison from common
medications at hospitals where he was employed in Pennsylvania and NJ; More
examples of mass murder exist, but these suffice to show it is not as rare a
crime as we might all wish. However,
mass murder using semi-automatic rifles is relatively rare compared to mass
murder using other weapons. 1 Phil Lee has a PhD in Mathematics. |