4 Policemen Murdered: Cheap Assault Weapons Trade Enables The Killer

Four policemen were killed in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Oakland this last weekend.  (One of them, 35 year old Officer Dan Sakai, is pictured above.) The killer was a parolee named Lovelle Mixon and he first shot two policemen with a handgun who stopped him for a routine traffic offense.  He then took off to a relative's house and barracaded himself in a bedroom closet.  He managed to kill two more policemen with shots with a AK-47 assault rifle, shooting the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) officers in the head before other SWAT members killed him.  Three of the policeman died at the scene of the crimes; another died in the hospital  the next day.

Four policemen dead in one afternoon is a tragedy for any department and a teribble loss for the families of the men who gave up their lives.  Although I don't have any relatives in that line of work, I feel a strong need to do something to promote a change in the ease by which anyone--even a parolled  felon--can obtain an assault weapon.   But the article below from Phil Matier and Andrew Ross of The San Francisco Chronicle a couple days back cites information and statistics that  point to this being a heck of a task 

"The kind of AK-47 that Mixon used to kill Oakland police officers Saturday can be had on the street for as little as $400.Often they come from Nevada, where selling assault rifles is perfectly legal, unlike in California. Then they are brought to the Bay Area and resold.If the buyer has a criminal past, "they have a friend - usually a girlfriend with no record - buy three or four," said one San Francisco narcotics cop who didn't want his name used because the department has not cleared him to speak publicly.

"Sometimes they all pitch in to buy them. Other times someone will go up, buy four guns, then come back and sell three of them to cover the cost of the one they keep."

"It's a right-to-your-door deal," the cop said.

 

As the story alludes to, California  already has an Assault Weapons ban.  Surrounding states which are more rural and more in the political grip of the conservative National Rifle Association  are les likely to support a tightening or restriction of gun laws.  In the minds of gun advocates, banning one type of firearm is tauntamount to banning all, using their "camel's nose in the tent" theory of fighting all legislation to stop gun crimes, even with weapons that are designed for military use and have nothing to do with hunting or home defense.

There is no way to guarantee that guns can be kept out of the hands of felons--and, yes,  all the laws in the world will not prevent someone from getting a AK-47 necessarily.  BUT not trying to stop the flow of these weapons from state to state is as reckless as not checking people at the borders to seee if  they might be terrorists.  The Congress and President Obama need to restore the nation-wide assault weapons ban that was allowed to expire by 1999 under pressure from the gun lobby.  Everyone in the USA has the right to a firearm; its in the Constitution and that's how the Supreme Court interpets it.  But sanity and reason calls out that these weapons be contained and those who sell them sent to prison for a long, long time to prevent situations as occured in Oakland.  

Some California politicans, such as Senator Dianne Feinstein,  are reportedly poised to reintroduce such a assault-weapons  bill.  But for now, it is time to mourn the public servants who gave their lives in one of the toughest jobs in one of the toughest cities in  America.