Tag Archives: weapon

Trump Backs Off Torture Because a Guy Named "Mad Dog" Doesn’t Like It

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump on torture, February 6:

I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.

Donald Trump on torture, yesterday:

So, I met with General Mattis, who is a very respected guy….I said, what do you think of waterboarding? He said — I was surprised — he said, “I’ve never found it to be useful.” He said, “I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.” And I was very impressed by that answer….It’s not going to make the kind of a difference that maybe a lot of people think. If it’s so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that. But General Mattis found it to be very less important, much less important than I thought he would say. I thought he would say — you know he’s known as Mad Dog Mattis, right? Mad Dog for a reason.1 I thought he’d say “It’s phenomenal, don’t lose it.” He actually said, “No, give me some cigarettes and some drinks, and we’ll do better.”

How about that? It turns out that someone just needed to tell Trump that torture doesn’t work very well. Who knew?

Of course, Trump also said about his conversation, “I’m not saying it changed my mind.” So torture is still on the table. In fact, it’s not really clear what the worst part of this monologue is. I have three candidates:

All it took was one guy with an anecdote to persuade Trump that torture isn’t all that great.
Nonetheless, he’s still willing to do it “if it’s so important to the American people.” WTF?
He just assumed a guy with the nickname “Mad Dog” would love torture. I wonder if this is literally the only reason Trump wanted to meet with him?

Really, state-sponsored torture is a pretty easy thing to figure out. In movies, you can pretty reliably tell who the bad guys are because they torture their prisoners. I think that’s true in real life too.

1Not really. He’s a plenty tough guy, but he doesn’t like his nickname. Mattis is a fan of Marcus Aurelius, owns a huge personal library, and is famous for telling his troops, “You are part of the world’s most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.” He has also called Israel’s occupation of the West Bank “apartheid” and added, “I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel.” I wonder what Trump thinks of that?

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Trump Backs Off Torture Because a Guy Named "Mad Dog" Doesn’t Like It

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Sheriff Says Pipeline Employee Who Pointed Rifle at Protesters Was "Victim"

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, the Morton County Sherriff’s Department released an employee of the Dakota Access Pipeline who was arrested last Thursday after entering the camp of activists protesting against the pipeline. Numerous witnesses recounted a car chase and tense standoff during which the man pointed an AR-15 rifle at protesters. “No charges will be filed against this man,” the sheriff’s department stated, “as he was using the weapon to protect himself.”

A statement from the Sheriff’s Department described the Dakota Access Pipeline employee as “the victim in the case.” It said that he was checking construction equipment near the site of protests and had “disguised himself so he would be able to gain access without being singled out as a construction worker.”

Last Friday, Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier confirmed that the man had been armed but disputed the account of the protesters who had confronted him. Kirchmeier said the man “was more or less acting in self-defense.” No shots were fired during the standoff, Kirchmeier said, contradicting an earlier press release. This video of the incident shows the man pointing his rifle at protesters as they approach him.

A woman talks with the armed Dakota Access Pipeline employee who entered the anti-pipeline protesters’ camp near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation last week. Ryan Vizziones

Inside the man’s truck, protesters found three documents identifying him as a security worker for Dakota Access, LLC, the company that is constructing the pipeline. Afterward, a flare was shot into the man’s truck, setting it on fire.

Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Donnell Hushka confirmed the man’s identity. His name has been published elsewhere but we have redacted his name here because he has not been charged with a crime.

On Monday, the Dakota Access Pipeline employee posted an account of the incident on his Facebook page. He writes that he was disguised so he could investigate the vandalism of pipeline equipment. (Photos of the man show him wearing sunglasses and a red bandanna.) He recounts that he “drew out my rifle,” but only “after my vehicle was disabled and over 300 protesters were rapidly approaching my location, a few had knives and were dead set on using those knives.” He also claims that a protester fired a flare at him.

Facebook

“I was in a situation in which myself and others were faced with the difficult decision to take another’s life or not,” he writes. “A decision in which most people are never faced with and I hope never will, a decision in which changes a person’s outlook on life forever.”

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Sheriff Says Pipeline Employee Who Pointed Rifle at Protesters Was "Victim"

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Michael B. Jordan, Danny Glover, and Omar from “The Wire” Star in this Haunting Police Brutality Protest Video

Mother Jones

Big names including Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Fruitvale Station), Danny Glover, and Michael K. Williams (The Wire, Boardwalk Empire) are the stars of “Against the Wall,” a new video PSA from singer/social activist Harry Belafonte that highlights the issue of racial bias in police shootings of black men and women. We see each of the stars in turn, their hands pressed against a wall (or a rug made to look like one), looking into the camera with faces that reflect sadness and frustration. The audio consists of police radio and 911 calls—you’ll recognize snippets from the Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and Terence Crutcher cases—spliced with news reports and demands for justice (notably, from Anderson Cooper and the viral YouTube video of Nakia Jones, an Ohio cop). Also featured: former Obama adviser and CNN regular Van Jones, Sophia Dawson, Marc Lamont Hill, Sydney G. James, and rapper Mysonne.

The PSA opens with Jordan and an audio clip from 89-year-old Belafonte, whose social justice organization, Sankofa, partnered with directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz to create the video. “You cannot just go about, if it’s once or twice you can say it’s an accident or a coincidence, but when you have as large a population of murdered young men in the streets of America and they’re all black or of African American descent, I think there is somebody sending us a message,” Belafonte says. “And we should respond to that message.”

The PSA ends with a shot of Williams, best known for his portrayal of Omar on The Wire, lying on the ground, presumably injured. His eyes close, the screen fades to black, and the takeaway message appears: “BLACK IS NOT A WEAPON.”

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Michael B. Jordan, Danny Glover, and Omar from “The Wire” Star in this Haunting Police Brutality Protest Video

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California Just Required Registration for Untraceable Guns—Like the One I Made

Mother Jones

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Today, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 857 into law, requiring Californians who build their own firearms to apply for a state-issued serial number. Previously, guns assembled from parts kits officially flew under the radar. No background checks were required, and no serial number had to be stamped into the finished firearm, making them effectively untraceable.

In 2013, I attended a “gun build party” in southern California, in which I and a dozen others built AK-47s and other Kalashnikov variants from parts kits. My AK, according to the host of the build party, was an Egyptian “Maadi.” Its parts had traveled to the United States by way of Croatia, which most likely received the weapon some time during the Yugoslav wars. He told me that often parts kits come from former conflict zones, and that sometimes the wooden stocks have tally marks notched in them. From my Mother Jones story about the gun build party:

Although US customs laws ban importing the weapons, parts kits—which include most original components of a Kalashnikov variant—are legal. So is reassembling them, as long as no more than 10 foreign-made components are used and they are mounted on a new receiver, the box-shaped central frame that holds the gun’s key mechanics. There are no fussy irritations like, say, passing a background check to buy a kit. And because we’re assembling the guns for our own “personal use,” whatever that may entail, we’re not required to stamp in serial numbers. These rifles are totally untraceable, and even under California’s stringent assault weapons ban, that’s perfectly within the law.

Now that’s no longer the case in California. Homemade weapons have long been a pastime for gun enthusiasts, but some law enforcement agencies have become concerned as they’ve started showing up more frequently at crime scenes.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, today’s bill is part of a more sweeping package of gun safety proposals that California Democrats recently pushed through, including a ban on semiautomatic assault rifles with detachable magazines and requiring background checks for ammunition purchases. Brown signed several of these bills earlier this month, which has been met with an effort to overturn them.

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California Just Required Registration for Untraceable Guns—Like the One I Made

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This Is the Assault Rifle Used by the Orlando Mass Shooter

Mother Jones

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The MCX “innovative weapon system.” Sig Sauer

Since the Orlando massacre early Sunday morning, pro-gun pundits have come out in force to argue that the weapon used in the attack is not an assault rifle. The gun lobby prefers to call these weapons “modern sporting rifles,” euphemistic ammo it can fire in an ongoing semantic debate. But make no mistake: What the Orlando attacker used was a weapon of war. It was designed to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Witness this harrowing audio captured by a bystander outside the Pulse nightclub in which Omar Mateen fires 24 shots in 9 seconds.

According to a federal law enforcement official, the rifle Mateen used to murder and maim more than 100 people was a Sig Sauer MCX. Mateen legally purchased the weapon, similar to an AR-15, on June 4 in Port St. Lucie, Florida, near where he lived. (He legally purchased a Glock 17 handgun the following day, which he also carried during the attack.)

Sig Sauer bills the MCX as “an innovative weapon system built around a battle-proven core.” The company says it “stands as the first rifle to be silenced from the ground up. It also accepts a broad array of accessories, enabling you to build a complete weapon system for any scenario or environment.” It has a military-spec trigger and a magazine capacity of 30 rounds. According to the book Guns of Special Forces 2001-2015, the MCX is known in military circles as the “Black Mamba” and was developed at the request of the US Army’s special operations forces.

Although the legal civilian version of the gun fires on semi-automatic, it can be highly lethal. Indeed, like many of his recent predecessors, Mateen was able to unleash a devastating barrage of gunfire. The law enforcement official declined to comment on the total number of rounds fired in the attack. But, he said, it was “obviously a lot.”

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This Is the Assault Rifle Used by the Orlando Mass Shooter

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The Obama Administration Is Stopping Cluster Bomb Sales to Saudi Arabia

Mother Jones

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In a rare display of wariness over civilian casualties in Yemen, the United States is halting the sale of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, according to Foreign Policy. Last week, an unnamed American official said that the move comes amid rising concerns that Riyadh’s US-backed air campaign in Yemen has been dropping cluster bombs “in areas in which civilians are alleged to have been present or in the vicinity.”

Saudi Arabia has been repeatedly accused of indiscriminately bombing civilian areas and civilian infrastructure in its conflict with Houthi rebels in Yemen, resulting in the death of hundreds of noncombatants, many of them children. Remnants of American-made cluster bombs have been found near civilian areas. Since the war in Yemen began in March 2015, the United States has sold weapons and provided intelligence, support, and aerial refueling to the Saudi-led coalition backing the government.

Cluster bombs contain submunitions, or “bomblets”, that spread over large areas before detonating. Bomblets that do not explode or self-destruct when they’re deployed become de facto land mines. They remain on the ground until, as Megan Burke, director of the Cluster Munition Coalition, told Mother Jones last year, “someone or something comes along and triggers that explosion.” In 2008, an international treaty banned the weapons. The United States and other major arms exporting countries refused to sign it.

A 2008 Pentagon policy directive states that the weapons can only be used against “clearly defined military targets.” But, Burke said, “Once you give a weapon to another country, you lose control over how they’re going to use it.”

The suspension of cluster munition transfers applies specifically to the CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon, manufactured by the Rhode Island-based Textron Systems. In 2013, Textron landed a $641 million contract to supply Saudi Arabia with 1,300 of the controversial weapons. In production tests, the CBU-105 cluster bombs met the Pentagon’s requirement that 99 percent of bomblets explode, but Human Rights Watch has documented unexploded CBU-105 submunitions, also called “skeets” in their case, in multiple areas in Yemen. “We have a photo with one of the canisters sitting on the ground with four skeets just sitting there. They never deployed,” Steve Goose, the director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch, told Mother Jones. “According to Textron, that could never happen.”

It is unclear whether the export hold will affect ongoing shipments from the 2013 arms deal or if it will only affect future requests from Saudi Arabia. Matthew Colpitts, a spokesman for Textron Systems, told Foreign Policy that the company “does not comment on delivery dates with our customers.” Neither does the United States government.

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The Obama Administration Is Stopping Cluster Bomb Sales to Saudi Arabia

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Police Just Released Dashcam Footage of the Laquan McDonald Shooting

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Chicago officials released the dashcam footage from the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. The video’s release came hours after state prosecutors charged Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder in McDonald’s shooting last October, reportedly becoming the first cop in the city to face such charges in nearly 35 years.

The video, posted below, is disturbing. (WARNING: Seriously, watch at your own discretion.)

In April, the city of Chicago paid McDonald’s family $5 million, before any lawsuit was formally filed.

The footage and a bond hearing early Tuesday revealed details that differed from the initial police narrative of events. Police previously said they had found McDonald in the street slashing a car’s tires, and that when ordered to drop his knife, he walked away. After a second police car arrived and police tried to block McDonald’s path, police said, McDonald punctured a police car’s tires. When officers got out of the car, police officials alleged McDonald lunged at them with the knife and Van Dyke, who feared for his life, shot him.

Instead, the footage shows McDonald, who was carrying a knife, ambling away from police as Van Dyke and his partner get out of their car. Van Dyke then unloads a barrage of bullets on the teen about six seconds after then. The Chicago Tribune reported that according to prosecutors, Van Dyke fired 16 rounds at McDonald in 14 or 15 seconds and was told to hold his fire when he began to reload his weapon. For about 13 of those seconds, McDonald is on the ground.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez described the video as “deeply disturbing” and told reporters that Van Dyke’s actions “were not justified and were not a proper use of deadly force.”

A judge had ordered the video’s release by Wednesday, but Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy announced that the city would release the video a day early. “The officer in this case took a young man’s life and he’s going to have to account for his actions,” McCarthy told reporters. Van Dyke could face between 20 years and life in prison if convicted.

“With these charges, we are bringing a full measure of justice that this demands,” Alvarez said.

Van Dyke’s attorney Daniel Herbert questioned whether the case amounted to a murder case and believed the shooting was justified. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for calm after the video’s release. “Jason Van Dyke will be judged in the court of law,” Emanuel told reporters. “That’s exactly how it should be.” In a statement through attorneys, McDonald’s family reiterated a call for peace and said they would have preferred for the video not to be released.

“No one understands the anger more than us, but if you choose to speak out, we urge you to be peaceful,” the family said. “Don’t resort to violence in Laquan’s name. Let his legacy be better than that.”

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Police Just Released Dashcam Footage of the Laquan McDonald Shooting

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A Campus Cop Killed An Unarmed Black Man In Ohio. It Was Caught On Video. Where’s the Video?

Mother Jones

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Authorities are still withholding crucial video evidence from the public three days after a deadly confrontation between a campus cop and an unarmed black person in Cincinnati, Ohio. On Sunday night, Ray Tensing, a white University of Cincinnati police officer, stopped 43-year-old Samuel Dubose for driving without a license plate. Police say Tensing asked Dubose for his driver’s license multiple times, before Dubose handed over a bottle of alcohol.

When Tensing asked Dubose to step out of the car, a struggle reportedly ensued. Tensing, who has since been placed on administrative leave, allegedly fired his weapon, shooting Dubose in the head. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that authorities have so far withheld video footage taken from a body camera and a nearby building while the Hamilton County prosecutor’s office investigates the incident. That video has been turned over to the prosecutor’s office for the probe, which is expected to be completed by the end of the week.

Dubose’s death comes after months of national scrutiny, and widespread protests, over police shootings. More than 500 people have been killed by police so far in 2015, according to a Washington Post analysis. It’s worth noting that the arming of campus police officers has also been on the rise: Seventy-five percent of four-year private and public colleges had armed officers during the 2011-2012 school year, up from 68 percent in 2004-2005, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

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A Campus Cop Killed An Unarmed Black Man In Ohio. It Was Caught On Video. Where’s the Video?

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Quote of the Day: If We Don’t Like Your Gun, You Should Not Be Allowed to Sell It to Anyone

Mother Jones

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From Lawrence Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for gun manufacturers:

They tried to put the product on the market, and the market reacted.

I know that “Orwellian” is overused, but what else can you call this? The product in question is a “smart gun,” which can only be fired by its registered owner. A company called Armatix put one on the market—you know, the market, a place where people can voluntarily buy or decline to buy products depending on whether they want them—and the gun lobby went ballistic:

Belinda Padilla does not pick up unknown calls anymore, not since someone posted her cellphone number on an online forum for gun enthusiasts. A few fuming-mad voice mail messages and heavy breathers were all it took. Then someone snapped pictures of the address where she has a P.O. box and put those online, too. In a crude, cartoonish scrawl, this person drew an arrow to the blurred image of a woman passing through the photo frame. “Belinda?” the person wrote. “Is that you?”

Her offense? Trying to market and sell a new .22-caliber handgun that uses a radio frequency-enabled stopwatch to identify the authorized user so no one else can fire it. Ms. Padilla and the manufacturer she works for, Armatix, intended to make the weapon the first “smart gun” for sale in the United States.

….The National Rifle Association, in an article published on the blog of its political arm, wrote that “smart guns,” a term it mocks as a misnomer, have the potential “to mesh with the anti-gunner’s agenda, opening the door to a ban on all guns that do not possess the government-required technology.”

According to Keane, this is the market “reacting.” It’s certainly heartwarming to see such dedication to free enterprise.

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Quote of the Day: If We Don’t Like Your Gun, You Should Not Be Allowed to Sell It to Anyone

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Fort Hood Shooter Ivan Lopez: A Familiar Profile

Mother Jones

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Details are still emerging as to exactly how and why Army Specialist Ivan Lopez shot 3 people to death and injured 16 others in a rampage on Wednesday, but we already know enough to be certain about one thing: We’ve seen this grim story before, and not just literally at Fort Hood, the site of a previous bloodbath in 2009. As the data from our in-depth investigation of mass shootings in America shows, Lopez fits a familiar profile for perpetrators of this type of crime. Here’s how his background and actions echo those of many mass shooters we analyzed from 67 cases over the past three decades:

Mental health problems
Lopez had serious mental health issues: He served in Iraq in 2011 and was being treated for anxiety and depression, and he was under evaluation for post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of the attack. The majority of the mass shooters we studied had mental health problems—and at least 38 of them displayed signs of it prior to the killings. (Mental health problems among Iraq and Afghanistan vets are a major problem in and of itself.)

Guns obtained legally
Lopez reportedly purchased the gun he used, passing a background check, in nearby Killeen, Texas. The overwhelming majority of mass shooters in the scores of cases through 2012 obtained their weapons legally—nearly 80 percent of them. And the mass shooters in all five of the additional cases last year, from Santa Monica to the Washington Navy Yard, also got their guns legally.

Semi-automatic handguns
Lopez used a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson in the attack. Semi-automatic handguns are the weapon of choice for most mass shooters. It remains unclear how many shots Lopez fired or what type of ammunition device he used, but given his military background and the casualty count, it’s more likely than not that he used a high-capacity magazine.

Age and gender of killers
As our study showed, the vast majority of mass shooters were men, ranging from young adult to middle-aged. Their average age was 35. Lopez was 34.

Murder-suicide cases
Just as Lopez did on Wednesday at Fort Hood, killers in 36 past cases ended their attacks by shooting themselves to death. Seven others died in police shootouts they had little hope of surviving, a.k.a. “suicide by cop.” Lopez’s case appears to be at the intersection of these factors: He shot himself in the head when confronted by a military police officer. (All five of the mass shooters in 2013 were shot and killed by law enforcement officers responding to the attacks.)

the haunting repeat of such gun violence at Fort Hood means that in the days ahead there will be intense scrutiny on security protocols at the sprawling military site, including what has or hasn’t changed since 2009. But in terms of getting a handle on the perpetrator and the crime, investigators already have a lot to go on from scores of cases all over the country.

For much more of our reporting on mass shootings, gun violence and gun laws, see our full special reports: America Under the Gun and Newtown: One Year After.

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Fort Hood Shooter Ivan Lopez: A Familiar Profile

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