Machine Guns

"Why not legalize bazookas? Tanks? Shoulder fired low yield nuclear rockets?" And why not, as an Aug. 31 editorial asked? At the time the Bill of Rights was written the intent of the Second Amendment was that there be a balance of power between the citizens and their government. Cannons, then the highest firepower available, could also be owned by private citizens or militia. In terms of relative absolute firepower the citizenry has already been disarmed by general consensus, since along with not wanting machine guns in the hands of homicidal maniacs we also don't want nuclear weapons in the hands of industrial security personnel or the Rockefellers, etc. There has been no replacement for the balance of power lost to the government, and this as much as anything is why you will find the National Rifle Association advocating what appears to you an implausible proposition.

There they go again. The news media, that is. Completely distorting another facet of the "gun control" issue. This time, it's machine guns and the National Rifle Association's (NRA) effort to repeal the Hughes amendment to the Volkmer-McClure bill. To hear the news media, one would think that the NRA wants every American sportsman to have a machine gun. "The right to keep and bear machine guns" seem to be the refrain of the media, suggesting that the NRA might also like for everyone to have a missile or even an atomic bomb.

A Camden County Park Police sergeant who was suspended in June 1996 after he was charged with illegally possessing a machine gun was sentenced to one year probation and fined $155 yesterday. Richard D. Frisch, 45, of Erial, who resigned from the park police in February, declined to comment as he left Camden County Superior Court with his attorney, Saul J. Steinberg. Frisch pleaded guilty last February to having a prohibited fully automatic weapon. Assistant Camden County Prosecutor Joel H. Aronow said that investigators with the New Jersey State Police linked Frisch to two MAC-10 Avenger machine guns, manufactured by Hatten Arms.

When detectives from the Camden City Police Violent Crimes Task Force raided a house Friday night, they expected to find drugs. But they found much more. Along with drugs, cash and drug paraphernalia, investigators said they recovered two stolen machine guns and a handgun that is also believed stolen. Police arrested Scott Holloway, 24, of the 2800 block of Benson Street, and charged him with multiple drug and weapons violations. Holloway was being held in the Camden County Jail after he failed to post $107,000 bail.

Things are tough all over, and now, it's getting harder and harder to find a place willing to hold a good machine-gun shoot. Scratch the City of Reading's watershed, for instance, which by all accounts has been the site of several well-attended outings by sportsmen armed with Uzis and Thompsons and even antiaircraft guns. But Reading's mayor, who admits he doesn't understand why in the world anyone would want to fire a machine gun for fun, has just banned machine-gun shoots on city property.

Residents of the Norristown area unloaded their guns on police in borough hall over the weekend. Sawed-off shotguns, pearl- and brass-handled revolvers, and fully automatic machine guns were turned over to area police for cash during the last leg of the countywide gun buy-back program in Norristown on Saturday and yesterday. They came wrapped in sandwich bags, dainty yellow shopping bags, and worn army-surplus duffel bags, hundreds of them. Lower Providence resident Hank Rhoads turned over a Radom 9 mm his late brother had bought in Germany.

Two men with militia ties from Montgomery and Burlington Counties were jailed after searches of their homes yielded more than 60 weapons, including machine guns, silencers, grenade launchers and a flamethrower, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms announced yesterday. William Kay, 59, of Skippack, a member of the Unorganized Militia of Pennsylvania, was indicted last week on charges he sold five 9mm Sten machine guns to an undercover ATF agent between September and November.

Special Agent Robert Wall (center), in charge of the Philadelphia Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, displays one of the machine guns seized in the arrest of William Kay, 59, of Collegeville, for gun selling and Russell Gary Fauver, 45, for being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition. Included among the weapons seized was a flame thrower.

Here's a little item from the believe-it-or-not file: The National Rifle Association announces its latest "highest priority" - to persuade Congress to repeal the ban on sale of new machine guns. Now there's a burning injustice all right. How can a red-blooded American act like Rambo if the feds won't let you buy a machine gun? The NRA claims three million members. Many are hunters. But we're not talking rifles or shotguns. These aren't things you take into the duck blind or stalking deer.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Syrian troops armed with heavy machine guns killed dozens in the central city of Hama on Monday, activists said, just a day after chanting protesters welcomed a visit by a U.N. team sent to observe a shaky cease-fire. The day's violence, the city's worst in months, added a dangerous new aspect to the U.N. team's work: that the Syrian regime might exact deadly revenge against opponents who feel empowered by the observers' presence to spill into the streets. Observance of the truce, which was supposed to begin April 12, has been spotty at best.

Gunfight The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America By Adam Winkler W.W. Norton. 361 pp $27.95 Adam Winkler's Gunfight is a potboiler of constitutional interpretation and is both a vital history and an intellectually satisfying, emotionally rewarding tale of a great case. The backbone of his book is District of Columbia v. Heller , a landmark gun-control case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008. As a contest of constitutional principles, Heller tested the question of whether the famously ambiguous Second Amendment ("A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed")

PUEBLO, COLO. - A woman caught with her two brothers after a nationwide manhunt told Colorado authorities that she "deserved to get shot," according to an arrest affidavit. Lee Grace Dougherty, 29; Dylan Dougherty Stanley, 26, and Ryan Edward Dougherty, 21, were being held in Pueblo County jail, on bonds of $1.25 million each. The three had a court hearing yesterday, appearing by video from jail. None made any statement during the brief hearing. They face charges of attempted murder of a peace officer and assault on a peace officer.

Police say a Pottstown man has confessed to the robbery of a Montgomery County frozen yogurt store at the point of an apparent machine gun and another gun point robbery of a Radnor pizzeria. Adam Robert David, 18, was captured by Radnor detectives at a mall near Pottstown. Officials would not go into detail about how David became the suspect. "There was a video from the Kiwi store robbery that was widely disseminated," said Risa Vetri Ferman, the Montgomery County District Attorney.

Police in Upper Providence are looking for a bandit captured on surveillance video robbing a yogurt store armed with what appears to be a submachine gun. The armed robbery of the Kiwi Yogurt at Providence Town Center occurred in the township's Collegeville section shortly after the store opened at noon on Saturday. A white male dressed in a hoodie entered and pulled "a weapon resembling" a Heckler and Koch MP5 9mm submachine gun from a dark bag. He then ordered two patrons - a man and a little girl - and employees to the ground, police said.

In John Sandford's latest novel, "Bad Blood," there's a scene involving a siege at a farmhouse that's so violent, so intense, one suspects the author has either been involved in a shootout or witnessed bullets flying over his head. Fortunately, neither scenario is true. Sandford has only witnessed the aftermath of violence. "I did a lot of cop work, and I saw a lot of dead people," says Sandford. "I went to Iraq for awhile . . . and I talked to people who have been in these situations, who have fired machine guns at people and have had machine guns fired back at them.

Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on military upgrades, anticipates an additional $10 million investment that would improve military training and create dozens of jobs. The money, contained in the National Defense Authorization Act, would fund a state-of-the-art machine-gun range for Army, Army Reserve, and National Guard soldiers as well as Navy and Air Force personnel. About 10,000 servicemen and servicewomen train at the joint base each year and need practice to qualify on light and heavy machine guns.

Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on military upgrades, anticipates an additional $10 million investment that would improve military training and create dozens of jobs. The money, contained in the National Defense Authorization Act, would fund a state-of-the-art machine-gun range for Army, Army Reserve, and National Guard soldiers as well as Navy and Air Force personnel. About 10,000 servicemen and servicewomen train at the joint base each year and need practice to qualify on light and heavy machine guns.

Like a floating shopping mall, the alien mother ship has been hovering, broken and immobile, over the smog-shrouded skies of Johannesburg for 20 years. The ominous spaceship just hangs there, blocking out the sun, while its passengers have long since been disgorged - human-sized, bug-like ETs living in what was originally a temporary holding zone but has grown into a militarized shantytown, a sprawling, barbed-wire-enclosed slum. The premise for District 9 - filmmaker Neill Blomkamp's doc-style sci-fi yarn - is intriguing.