Tom Diaz Quotes

The industry has changed. In terms of what sells and what is marketed most successfully, we’re now talking about guns that are derived directly from military design.

The AR-15 is, essentially, a gun that was designed to inflict maximum casualties, death, and injury, in close to medium range. That's what it does. The real problem is that we allow that kind of firepower to come into a theater or into a first-grade class. The names you see now are 'modern sporting rifle,' 'tactical rifle.' Those are all just euphemisms for 'assault weapon.' They're being very rational as marketers and as businesses—and as industries. They're only doing what cellphone companies do to make cellphones look different and be more attractive. The difference is what they're selling is lethality.

It's an area of writing that is superbly uncritical. It's hypermarketing, and Guns & Ammo is the 500-pound canary.

The people we’re talking about, once they get into ‘I want to kill a lot of people,’ it’s not a leap for them to see that these guns are made and designed for war. And if you look at the industry advertising, that is a consistent theme.

The gun industry offloads tremendous costs onto people who don't use its products, like a polluter dumping on a city, so it's good to force people to realize what these costs are.

It's clear that the militarized stuff is the stuff that sells and is defining the industry.

They translate the industry's needs into less crass, less economically interested language -- into defending the home, into defending the country. The industry needs a veneer of respectability.

If you wanted to know how many Bushmasters have been used in what kinds of crime for the last five years, that information is in ATF’s files. But it can’t be released because of the Tiahrt Amendment.

It speaks to the fact that there are a lot of young men in the U.S. who will never be in the military but feel that male compulsion to warriorhood. Owning an assault weapon is a passport to that.

When the military switched over to this assault weapon, the whole context changed. The conversation became, ‘Is this the kind of gun you want in the civilian world?’ And we who advocate for regulation say, ‘No, you do not.’

We have spent more than $1 trillion on homeland security since Sept. 11, 2001, yet have withheld annual funding of less than $3 million for research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on gun violence.
Why are the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments subject to erosion in the name of homeland security, but the Second Amendment is beyond compromise in the name of saving innocent lives?...
Our perception of the relative dangers of terrorism and gun violence is distorted....
If we are to protect the homeland, we must also protect our children and all innocent citizens from the epidemic of violence inflicted by military-style guns.

The gun industry has deliberately enhanced its profits by increasing the lethality -- the killing power -- of its products...The industry might have chosen to develop safer firearms, but gun-industry executives deliberately chose to take exactly the opposite direction.

I was shocked at what I found. The sniper's motto is 'one shot, one kill.' There are schools that teach civilians how to do this.

Enhanced lethality, that's what we are talking about. Lethality increases when you have larger bullets, more ammunition and the guns are easier to operate. That's the contribution Glock and others have brought to America.

Okay, so you're an hour outside New York City in Danbury. What does that mean? Do you think an army of terrorists is going to come rampaging out of New York? There are some suburban and rural communities where fair-minded analysis would say this is ludicrous. The likelihood that these kinds of incidents are likely to occur is nil...Most rounds miss the target. That's an established fact. More bullets are going to fly where they weren't intended, and they're going to go farther and strike with a greater impact. S.W.A.T. and sniper teams are highly trained and selective enough to use these weapons. But if I were putting them in every patrol car in the jurisdiction, I would be very concerned about the amount of firepower.