Glock 19s for Everybody?

Here’s a less-than-pleasant quiz.

What type of weapon did mass killer Seung-Choi use to slay 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007? What type of weapon did Jared Loughner use to kill a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl, four others and to wound 14 more people, including U.S. Rep Gabrielle Giffords, in Tuscon on Saturday?

The answer? A Glock 19.

Glock, of course, is the Austrian arms company that mass produces semi-automatic pistols for police and military services worldwide. The 9 mm. pistol was seen as a much-needed replacement for the old-fashioned six-bullet revolver that had been standard fare for cops. When they confronted criminals using Kalashnikovs, Uzis or MAC-10s with big magazines handling dozens of rounds, they need to up-gun.

And that is the problem. The usual Glock has a 15-round magazine. Loughner, according to media reports, used a 30 round magazine designed to spew out a maximum amount of bullets in a minimum of time. He had at least two of these 30-round magazines and a couple of 15-round back-ups when he went to Giffords political event.

When Cho went on his Tech rampage, he used exactly the same type of Glock with multiple magazines in addition to a Walther P22 handgun. He was able to buy the weapons easily even though a number of Tech professors and other personnel were intensely worried about his sanity and the possibility that he might hurt himself and others.

Congress considered banning the Glocks some years back from public consumption but backed down under pressure from the National Rifle Association and other right wing groups.

Yet the time has come once again to consider keeping these weapons out of public hands. I’d like to challenge the many conservatives who read this blog to give me a reason why automatic assault rifles or machine guns should be freely available. They are needed by police and military to kill an enemy. They have no purpose for hunting (I have been a hunter but I used a single-shot, bolt-action.22 cal. rifle). And, when it comes to personal defense, why does one need a weapon that can spit out from 500 to 700 rounds a minute?

Ditto Glocks. If you are being threatened, do you need a 30-round clip? Do you need to fire 91 bullets as police claim Loughner did?

I remember commenting on the need for better gun control at the time of the VT killings. I was told to “shut up” by a former blogger, a retired and highly-conservative retired Army colonel. Other attempts to pose the need for controls likewise have been shouted down by right-wingers
thumping the Second Amendment.

Unfortunately, the conservative culture is filled with the imagery and pageantry of weapons. Sarah Palin brags of her prowess in slaying Alaska’s wild animals and says we need to “reload” when it comes to politics.

When I attended the Virginia Tea Party convention in Richmond this October, there were plenty of gun nuts strutting about openly holstering Glocks or .45 cal., 1911-style ACP pistols. I remember getting into a discussion with one fanatic wearing a “Guns Save Lives” sticker. He told me that the good old .45 has more stopping power than a 9 mm. Hard right media gurus such has Bill O’Reilly regularly talk about shooting down their opponents and beheading Washington Post reporters. I blog on the Post and I wonder if I am included.

Even more moderate conservatives, like Jim Bacon, buy in to the gun culture indirectly. After attending the Tea Party extravaganza, Bacon praised it to high heaven, apparently ignoring the gun culture it generated.

It’s time to stop ignoring the gun culture. How many more Techs or Tuscons are we going to need before we wake up?

Peter Galuszka