Air rifle pellet killed mother.

[TX-RAT]

According to police, Elizabeth A White's son shot her after she threatened to kill her father with a pair of scissors.

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/local/13505718.htm



Not sure of the make, model, or caliber, but the power generated from some of the modern day air rifles is amazing.

[benburch]

1. Obviously not a simple BB gun!

"You'll shoot your eye out, Kid." is about the worst those can do.

[hlthe2b]

2. Wow... in this case, it may be a good thing it was so deadly...

BUt, I had no idea air rifles were so powerful.

[TX-RAT]

3. Some are far more powerful than that.

There are some on the market that will propel 9mm caliber pellets at over 1000 fps.

[BushOut06]

4. Not to mention you can get pointed pellets

That would penetrate a lot further than a simple BB.

[Cults4Bush]

10. You can also get darts, plastic backed or feathered.

If you had the inclination or know how you could make a mold and easily make plastic ones with steel tip designed to collapses on impact, being hollow you could fill the interior with the poison of your choice. Granted with a collapsible dart the weapon would have to be slightly underpowered compared to some of the FPS rates you get out of air weapons these days. The one I used was about 650 FPS, if I remember correctly (long time ago).

They have all kinds of pellets these days as well, I've seen at least 6 different designs though the accuracy usually suffers for penetrative effect.

[aikoaiko]

5. I feel bad for the boy for having to kill his mother...

...but she doesn't sound like she was much of a mother to him and she definately needed to be stopped before she killed the people who actually cared for him.

[-..__...]

6. Even antiquated air rifles were fairly powerful in their day.

http://klesinger.com/jbp/hairgun.html

"The pump pneumatic gun has been worked on by inventors since the early 1600's, with a number of mechanism designs that were so involved that the system developed slowly when compared to the other systems mentioned. The size ranged from .30 to .68 caliber bores - smooth and rifled, meaning that a large volume of compressed air was needed in a large reservoir to produce pressures from a few hundred pounds per square inch to several thousand pounds per square inch. Not only deadly at the muzzle but also at the reservoir area. This much pressure would fire a .40 caliber lead ball, 40 times without resupplying the reservoir and equal a 35 grains of FFG black powder per shot, able to penetrate 2 1/2" into a hardpine board. This was duplicated a few years ago with one of these early air rifles and found to produce each shot with 750 PSI, that's impressive, no wonder the L&C members wanted to have one of these along to show the Natives their "Spirit Gun".

There are a number of other manufacturers from other parts of the world that have had success with the airgun, for example an Austrian firm using a design by Bartolemeno Girandoni in 1779 made weapons that ranged from .40 to .52 caliber in bore and capable of firing 15 to 20 rounds within a minute by a gravity feed magazine. "When you figure that a group of armed men, 500 in number could fire approximately 100,000 rounds per hour, meaning they would have 5 times the firepower of many troops with flintlocks muskets, at 100 yards this is amazing," says author J.T.Haynes.

Now you can see why the airgun was condemned by Napoleon and other leaders being targeted by the Austrian Army in the late 1700's, even the Church of Rome condemned the Austrian rifle. "Poachers, assassins and other undesirables were portrayed", Mr. Haynes says, "as the likely users of these weapons, tools of the Devil."

For power of these guns, Louis VII Landgrave of Hesse (1691-1768) used a big bore air rifle to kill 500 lb. stag elk at ranges of 150 to 160 paces in 1746-1748. On our continent the journals of Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) show their big bore pneumatic rifle, made in Philadelphia by Jacob Kunz and Issaih Lukens, capable of 40 full power shots at 900 PSI with a 1,000 pump strokes for raised pressure. This .31 caliber rifle had a 34" octagon barrel of brass with 17 groove rifling and needed no patching as the ball to barrel rifling was so close with the shallow rifling, making a snug fit. They used it to show the Indians of their power in taking small game up to deer in size, this had to astonish the onlookers. As late as the 1890's we have seen in this country pneumatic weapons disguised as walking sticks and canes ranging from .40-.50 in caliber with 500-750 FPS velocities capable of killing a man at 40-50 yards".

[benburch]

8. Amazing.

I'll have to look into this further.

Are they considered firearms under the law?

[-..__...]

18. Nope...

"Are they considered firearms under the law?"

From the 1968 Gun Control Act.


TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 44 > § 921

§ 921. Definitions

(a) As used in this chapter—

(1) The term “person” and the term “whoever” include any individual, corporation, company, association, firm, partnership, society, or joint stock company.

(2) The term “interstate or foreign commerce” includes commerce between any place in a State and any place outside of that State, or within any possession of the United States (not including the Canal Zone) or the District of Columbia, but such term does not include commerce between places within the same State but through any place outside of that State. The term “State” includes the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the possessions of the United States (not including the Canal Zone).

(3) The term “firearm” means

A) any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive;


(B) the frame or receiver of any such weapon;

(C) any firearm muffler or firearm silencer; or

(D) any destructive device. Such term does not include an antique firearm.


http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00000921----000-.html

[Richard Steele]

13. Thanks for putting so much info into one post!

I was just gonna make a comment along those lines;
you gave a history lesson.

It's funny that Napoleon condemned the weapons,
when he once actually fielded a small "special ops" unit armed with them.

[don954]

7. I had a air rifle when i was a teen

that could shoot a pellet several inches into a phone book, no doubt it was not a toy but a weapon.

[newswolf56]

9. What's infuriating about this story is the cover-up and the anti-gun spin:

The real story -- the story that is covered up -- is a huge drug-related tragedy in which a very brave boy saved his grandfather from a demented, murderous felon who -- making the tragedy many times worse -- happened to be the boy's mother. But in their fanatical anti-gun hysteria -- itself (as we shall see below) most likely motivated by economic considerations -- the local media suppressed the real story and focused on the air rifle instead.

Not surprisingly, the medical lobby's figure's are themselves a classic Big Lie; about 90 percent of those injuries are due to deliberate shootings, not accidents: once again the doctors hypocritically redirecting the anger that should rightfully be aimed at themselves for their profit-motivated resistance to healthcare reform and their savage greed in general.

Doctors are the best paid people in the United States. If they (and other members of the ruling class) were not so greedy, there would far less hopelessness among the working class, far less drug addiction (given that hopelessness leads directly to drug addiction), and far fewer tragedies of the sort that -- perhaps specifically to distract from its economic, class-struggle implications -- can easily be spun by corporate media into an anti-gun rants.

Meanwhile -- based on the most modern applications of the very best Josef Goebbels principles -- when people ask themselves, "how could something like this happen?," the answer they are given is "guns," not the truth: "class struggle" and the fact the United States is the most economically savage nation in the industrial world.

Indeed this story is a classroom example of perhaps the most superbly effective ploy the American ruling class has ever schemingly developed, just as our tawdry electoral politics prove: (1)-agitate anti-gun hysteria to the maximum possibly intensity (thereby distracting from all-important economic issues like the ongoing betrayal of the U.S. working class by the Democratic Party in service to a Republican Fifth Column called the Democratic Leadership Council); (2)-agitate pro-gun fear and anger to the maximum possible intensity (thereby distracting from the all-important fact the Republican Party is now and always has been the prime vessel of American fascism); (3)-set each group at the other's throats and steal the government while no one is looking, safeguarding the ruling class, the corporate oligarchy, by imposing theocratic tyranny as soon as possible thereafter and then confiscating all guns save those in the hands of the government -- and of course the death squads however named.

Can you say D U P E D?

[Ravenseye]

12. I don't know if I'd go that far

I don't have an air rifle, but I didn't know they were that dangerous. Yes, many of the shootings they speak of are deliberate, but how many of those were deliberate shots that also had intent? Pellet guns were something many parents kept from their children because "you'll put your eye out" and not actually kill someone. These are dangerous weapons and people should be informed of this when they're buying them for their kids. They're not just cap guns.

Just because you make people aware of the dangers of something, doesn't mean you're saying they're evil. It's something that many people have a false perception of, and this is righting it. Would I still buy my child an air rifle? Honestly I wouldn't have bought one before, so it's moot.

To me the title is the appropriate part of the story because that's the most shocking aspect. Drugged up mother, in jail for 16 years, violence spilling outside on Christmas. All too common sadly. The fact that a boy killed his apparently drug addled crazy mother to protect his elderly grandfather who was defending himself with a can...that'd be a story, but the fact that he did it with an air rifle is what sets it apart. For many people that's like saying "boy kills mother with nerf bat, slaying takes 8 hours". They just don't see air rifles as being able to cause that kind of damage, so it's a story because of people's ignorance, not because of an anti-gun spin.

...but I could be wrong.

[billbuckhead]

16. How come no free nation has copied our gun policy?

Because it's a monumental failure and humans rights abuse is why. The USA lead all industrial nations in murder, gun crime and children killed by guns. <http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/cri_mur_wit_fir_cap>

[newswolf56]

19. Thank you for proving my point:

If you were a genuine humanitarian -- that is, if you truly cared about the people you say you care about -- you would be expressing outrage over the fact the United States is the most economically savage (and savagely racist) nation in the industrial world. Quoth Paul Krugman:

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/091905.html

Reasoning from the hideous and infinitely damning truth of Krugman's analysis, racism (manipulated by the corporate oligarchy toward its own greedy ends) is also why our public transport, public education, healthcare and heating-fuel distribution systems are the most genocidally savage in the industrial world.

Yet all you seem to focus on is guns -- ironically, the one and only element in the political equation that (just as the founders intended) may yet prove vital to reinforce the collapsing levees of the Constitution and stop the rising flood of tyranny.

Or as Justice Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 2003, the right to bear arms:

...is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

"Those exceptionally rare circumstances" are also the dread possibilities that underly the slogan, Real Leftists Own Guns.

As to the policies of other nations -- in 1775, no other nation was copying our policy either.

If I were a plutocrat -- a member of the ruling corporate oligarchy -- I would be profoundly grateful to you for the all services you are rendering. Perhaps someday you will receive the commendation you so richly deserve.

[billbuckhead]

20. The first time "people" rebelled against our goverment in 1786

The first time "people" rebelled against our goverment in 1786 because of debtor's prison's, bankers militiaized mercenaries to put down the rebllion. The 2nd amendment always has been about protecting the status quo especially rich people and their property(including slaves).
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays_Rebellion>

If guns made people free, Afghanistan would be paradise and the Netherlands would be a gulag.

[newswolf56]

21. You conveniently overlook the vital role of firearms...

in the struggle for labor rights. Here are but three examples:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~wvcoal/red.html

http://www.spunk.org/library/places/us/sp000937.txt

http://www.coalcreekaml.com/Legacy.htm

The death list of miners grew, but they hung on, drove back an armored train in a gun battle, fought to keep out strikebreakers. (From the Ludlow Massacre link.)

[billbuckhead]

23. National guard has crushed unions over and over again

It was political action and not guns that has won what little labor in the US has gained. The descendents of the 2nd amendment being the National Guard has been used over and over again to to win the day for corporations. The few times that politicians haven't authorized the use of the National Guard militas, the corporations and big money have used Pinkertons to great effect. You need to read history over again without looking at it through a gun sight. Here's an example of guns destroying public support for unions.

"When the private armies of business arrived, the crowd warned the Pinkertons not to step off the barge. But they did. No one knows which side shot first, but under a barrage of fire, the Pinkertons retreated back to their barges. For 14 hours, gunfire was exchanged. Strikers rolled a flaming freight train car at the barges. They tossed dynamite to sink the boats and pumped oil into the river and tried to set it on fire. By the time the Pinkertons surrendered in the afternoon three detectives and nine workers were dead or dying. The workers declared victory in the bloody battle, but it was a short-lived celebration.

The governor of Pennsylvania ordered state militia into Homestead. Armed with the latest in rifles and Gatling guns, they took over the plant. Strikebreakers who arrived on locked trains, often unaware of their destination or the presence of a strike, took over the steel mills. Four months after the strike was declared, the men's resources were gone and they returned to work. Authorities charged the strike leaders with murder and 160 other strikers with lesser crimes. The workers' entire Strike Committee also was arrested for treason. However, sympathetic juries would convict none of the men.

All the strikers leaders were blacklisted. The Carnegie Company successfully swept unions out of Homestead and reduced it to a negligible factor in the steel mills throughout the Pittsburgh area."
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/peopleevents/pande04.html>

[newswolf56]

24. Your elitist (and quite possibly pacifist) revision of history...

would be laughed off the proverbial porch by every resident of Appalachia I met in my many years living and working in the South, also by the Deacons for Defense, a group whose story is mostly untold, but to whose effectiveness I can attest from my own time as a Civil Rights activist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice

Which does not even address the ruinous contradiction at the core of your premise: the notion that people who are by definition excluded from the political process can somehow magically participate in "political action" -- much less gain anything from it.

The legacy of the miners' struggle (like the parallel struggle of the textile workers in New England) is that the working class was finally given access to the political process. Had this not happened we would all -- those of us who are not part of the oligarchy -- still be working 12-hour days and six-day weeks for pennies per hour. Far too many Americans, brainwashed by corporate-run public schools, have no clue either of what we the people owe unions or of the bloodshed and armed resistance by which concessions we now take for granted were gained.

That said -- and please forgive me if I misunderstand -- but it seems you genuinely relish posting such passages as this: The Carnegie Company successfully swept unions out of Homestead and reduced it to a negligible factor in the steel mills throughout the Pittsburgh area. Which in any case is untrue: the U.S. steel industry was unionized before the end of World War II.

[billbuckhead]

25. I grew up reading Walter Reuther and he would puke reading your BS

As a child I grew up in a UAW family and we got Solidarity once a month in the mail and I would read it religiuosly. Violence is the most cowardly way out of any bad situation and never solves anything in the long run. Unions won in the middle run by converting most of the people through reason and nonviolence, even many of the the bourgeoise came over to our side. BTW, when was the last successful revolution built around violence? Even our 1776 revolution had far more to do with colonists taking advantage on a worldwide power struggle between France and England. Many of the problems we have today come from our baptism in violence. The bitterness between the north and south in this country has much to do with the fighting between English and Scots-Irish back in the home country. The term "lynching" lives on today in infamy. The ex Soviet bloc, the apartheid government, the Franco regime, British control of India and American segregation fell without very much bloodshed because large groups of people stood together non violently.

How can I relish something I didn't write? I just quoted a typical historical account of one of the most seminal labor fights. Sorry, you didn't like reality.

[newswolf56]

26. As I said above, thank you for proving my point:

Reuther was an avowed socialist during the 1930s but -- seeing the coming purges and wanting to ride the corporate tide -- he savagely turned against the entire Left after World War II, and inside the labor movement did much the same sort of reactionary work Sen. Joe McCarthy did in the nation at large: mercilessly hunting down not only Communists and "fellow travelers" but all real leftists of any stripe -- thereby helping facilitate America's first giant step (back) toward fascism, so much so he was granted lavish post-morten praise by Time, the same publication that had featured Adolf Hitler as its "Man of the Year."

But even with Reuther's subsequent treachery there is no detracting from his great contribution to the labor movement in the late '30s, when he helped organize the Ford Motor Company, nor to his huge role before and during World War II, when he fostered FDR's concept of America as "the Arsenal of Democracy" and thereby laid the groundwork for allied victory.

In any case Reuther was clearly not someone who espoused the pacifist core belief that "(v)iolence is the most cowardly way out of any bad situation and never solves anything in the long run."

I make it a point not to debate pacifists because we have no common ground whatsoever: suffice it to say -- because this is not the venue in which to tell war stories -- that for me the right to self defense became rather more than theoretical a very long time ago.

But for you to dare speak for Reuther (even given his sharp postwar turn to the Right) is a display of arrogance I cannot ignore. Indeed it approaches Hillary Clinton's even more outrageous arrogance in daring to speak for Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the finest First Lady in U.S. history. Thank you again; after reflecting still more on such arrogance, it is now my turn to regurgitate.

[billbuckhead]

27. I'm arrogant cause I'm not a violence monger?

That's all you're selling is bloodshed and hate. I'm not a pacifist but I see very very few times that violence has an upside. The labor movement had a golden age for awhile in spite of violence and not because of it.

I've been shot at and had guns aimed at me. I've been attacked with baseball bats, broken bottles and motor vehicles, dodging idiots is part of life. I always wonder why the scared want to arm the evil and broken.

I have a brother who is a state cop and he has to deal with wackos with guns all the time. I have a sister who put herself through grad school working in a womans shelter and dealing with deranged men who love their guns more than their families. They are real heros and not a fake labor guy.

[newswolf56]

29. As I said...

But thank you for the frank admissions of perspective -- useful to keep in mind in any future encounter.

As to the mongering of violence, it is statistically demonstrable that those who impose forcible disarmament (and thereby reduce all civilians to groveling in the lowest common denominator of victimhood) are the true violence mongers.

And as to fakery, might I respectfully point out that your show is slipping?

[billbuckhead]

30. If you're what today's labor movement has to offer, no wonder we're losing

BTW, when was the last successful violent revolution? You never answered that. The European Union is the fastest growing political entity in the history of mankind without a shot being fired. Sorry, you're way on the wrong side of history. If you long for fighting for poor people, become a cop or a social worker. God knows they need help. The days of shooting guns for labor rights are so far in the past as dueling. Neither worked well and are effectively dead. Where's your much ballyhooed 2nd amend now when we have a government that uses the other 9 amendments to wipe their asses? Where's the RBKA movement in this time of tribulation? They're having banquets for fascist evildoers Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney. They're NRAstroturfing America from cyberspace to classrooms to churches to shopping malls, not taking on the Bush regime in any way.

Making people carry a gun at all times as if in war is a far more likely slavery than whatever victim fantasies you have. I have a friend who left Venezuela because he didn't want to carry a pistol everywhere, he said it was oppressive. Maybe there's more to that story but most people I know don't have guns because they're a moral burden. If I don't trust myself, my family or my neighbors with a gun, why would I trust you with a gun?

[newswolf56]

31. Apparently you didn't read -- or comprehend -- my first post (#9):

Not only is your show slipping, but now you are dissolving in your own venom.

Nevertheless I wish you a Happy New Year.

[billbuckhead]

32. I thought she was killed by an air rifle and not by class struggle

I guess the newspaper should have mentioned the class struggle element.

[newswolf56]

33. As a matter of principle -- and specifically because of the

unprovoked, fanatical, even hysterical get-personal hatefulness I have repeatedly found to be THE identifying characteristic of anti-gun zealots everywhere -- I am loathe to let you have the last word. Particularly since the (frustratingly typical) venomousness of your onslaught distracted me from what started out to be a critique of the extent to which the Josef Goebbels ethos has become the dominant methodology of U.S. corporate journalism -- the ruling-class media's deliberate demonization of firearms and firearms owners merely another expression of the same class-warfare agenda that, for example, reported as truth Bush's lies about Iraq or deliberately demonized the abandoned residents of New Orleans as murderous savages (and thereby once again inflamed the never-even-slightly diminished racism of White America).

Indeed I am always profoundly sorry you and your ideological kindred cannot see this obvious connection, and I tend therefore to keep responding -- never mind malicious misrepresentations and spiteful accusations of being a "violence monger" -- merely in the hope of achieving the same sort of intellectual breakthrough I often achieved with my students when, as a part-time college instructor, I was teaching an unrelated subject of equal Constitutional relevance.

But instead I am once again bitterly reminded of how anti-gun fanatics literally drove once-lifelong Democrats like myself out of the Democratic Party, repeatedly shrieking, with genuine spit-in-our-faces malice, that our mere ownership of firearms was not only an "act of violence," but one that damned us forever as fascists of the worst sort. Thus I realize again not only that this particular cause is utterly hopeless, an ideological abyss, but that you and your kind will probably -- once again (as just as you did in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004) -- deny us the very victories we so desperately need to save our nation from the real fascism represented by the corporate oligarchy, its Republican servants, and their fundamentalist Christian stormtroopers.

And since one of us must be adult enough to stop squandering bandwidth to no effect, this will be my last response to your antagonistic baiting.

[Cults4Bush]

11. I hope that family has a strong hearted support network.

That poor boy... killing your own mom no matter how violent and crazy she is will play tricks on your mind for years, I imagine.

Much empathy to them all.

[LisaL]

14. Somehow, I doubt it. Poor child, he is going to be screwed for a long

time.

[ohio_liberal]

15. I got hit with a pellet fired from a CO2 gun when I was around 10

It's still embedded deep into the tissue of my leg. They can do some damage for sure.

[benburch]

17. OUCH. nt

[proud2BlibKansan]

22. There was a 2 year old killed with an air rifle here about 5 years ago

Yes, they can kill.

[billbuckhead]

28. Lewis and Clark took air rifles with them on their expedition

The Lewis and Clark
Air Rifle
...we showed them many curiosities and the air gun which they were much astonished at.

William Clark, August, 1804

Clock and gun maker Isaiah Lukens of Philadelphia, PA, provided Meriwether Lewis and William Clark one of his air rifles for their 1803-1806 expedition to explore the northwest. Unlike most rifles which used black powder, the air rifle used compressed air to shoot its .31 cal. bullet.

Unlike black powder rifles, an air rifle made little noise when fired. It did not make smoke and had very slight "kick." And, you didn't have to "keep your powder dry!"

The butt of the rifle is actually a metal canister designed with a needle valve to hold compressed air. The air was stored under pressure --between700 and 900 pounds per square inch! (A modern car tire carries a pressure of 35 pounds per square inch.) When the trigger is pulled, just the right amount of air is carried from the butt to the bullet chamber and the round leaves the barrel with a whish.
--- -------------------snip-----------------------------------
<http://www4.vmi.edu/museum/air_rifle.html>

These guns have always been dangerous.