Tom Diaz Quotes

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.

If you wanted to create a system that is basically legal but designed to facilitate gun trafficking, you couldn't have a better system than you have here.

This gun is designed and built to smash things up and to set things on fire. It`s a battlefield weapon, and yet it is sold as freely on the American civilian market as a .22 bolt action rifle...I think it`s a great thing on the battlefield. I just think that there are certain occasions when we say in our society, this product is such a threat to our health and safety, and in this case, our national security, we will not allow it...it is a gun that is unparalleled by any other small arm available to civilians. We control every other kind of weapon of war you can think of -- machine guns, plastic explosives, rockets. This thing has flown under the radar for about 20 years...If you go through virtually any industrial state, you`ll see right off the highways all kinds of highly-toxic and/or flammable materials stored in big tanks. These are ideal targets...The point is that you can plan your attack from a longer distance. It`s the combination of range and power.

These are ideal weapons of terrorist attack.

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.

This is not just a gun control issue. It's a national security issue.

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.

Given the development of a whole sniper culture over the past 10 years, it was almost inevitable that some deranged person or a terrorist was going to be drawn in to acting out the sniper mentality. The sniper's motto is, 'One shot, one kill.' That's what this guy has been doing right here around our nation's capital...In order to rejuvenate its sales, the gun industry has gone out and marketed sniper rifles.

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.

You have drastically increased the ability to inflict death and injury. That means you can shoot more rounds faster and easier, what they call spray and pray.

My book argues that the gun industry is purposely making guns sexier in terms of their killing power in order to rejuvenate the market. What I'm saying now is that in terms of our country, and in our times, there are guns out there whose harm far outweighs their utility. And I want somebody in government to say: 'Don't make them. Don't have them.'

It's an assault pistol. It was designed and basically advertised and used for exactly the kind of thing that was done in Littleton: It's to spray a lot of bullets over a wide area very quickly.

The smart gun is a hoax. It's a very seductive hoax, but nevertheless it's a hoax. At bottom, this is a ploy, a very clever ploy, by the gun industry to use your tax dollars and my tax dollars to expand its markets. You'll never be able to come up with a system that's going to make handguns safe, to make handguns go away, until we say, 'We've got an industry that pours onto our markets millions of deadly, lethal killing instruments. And we've got to stop that.' I feel that the smart gun ultimately will take more lives…than it will save.

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

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.