BUSH and his GOP Rubber Stamp Congress did so much harm to this country it's difficult to wrap our brains around it all. I do suspect, however, that former VP Dan Quayle and his hedge fund, Cerberus, (that bought Chrysler, btw) heard the cash registers clinking when the Assault Weapson Ban expired in 2004.
Quayle undoubtedly knew George Bush after serving as Herbert Walker Bush's VP.
Shortly thereafter, Cerberus Hedge Fund went on a buying spree and bought up lots of USA gun makers under its 2006 formed subsidiary, The Freedom Group (a world-wide gun dealer according to their website).
The irony of the names of both of these organizations .... good grief!
The NYTimes does a great job providing the details here:
How Freedom Group Became the Big Shot
After Bushmaster, the Freedom Group moved in on
Remington, which traces its history to the days of flintlocks and today is supplying M24 sniper rifles to the government of Afghanistan and making handguns for the first time in decades.
Remington Military
Remington LE
Remington PMPD
Marlin Firearms,
H&R
Tapco
Parker
Dakota Arms, a maker of high-end big-game rifles.
DPMS Firearms, another maker of semiautomatic, military-style rifles, as well as
S&K industries, which supplies wood and laminate for gun stocks, as well as the
Advanced Armament Corporation, which makes silencers. It acquired
Barnes Bullets, which makes copper-jacketed bullets popular with precision shooters and police departments.
Para USA
Mountain Khakis
“We believe our scale and product breadth are unmatched within the industry,” the Freedom Group said in a filing last year with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yes they do!
By its own count, the Freedom Group sold 1.2 million long guns and 2.6 billion rounds of ammunition in the 12 months ended March 2010, the most recent year for which figures are publicly available.
All well and good because Cerberus also purchased their own private army: Dyncorp, for $1.5 BILLION!
Looking at this list of rampage killers in the Americas, it is notable that automatic weapon mass murders in the US by nearly stopped from 1994 - 2004 and then picked up again.
Isn't this list enough evidence to make a case to reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban?
And what kind of parents let their little boys and girls target shoot with an assault weapon?
Here's a child practice shooting with a Bushmaster A1 M4 Carbine .223 caliber assault rifle. Really? Should this be legal? Teaching kids how to use assault rifles?
Again from the NYTimes article:
Unlike military counterparts like automatic M-16’s, rifles like those from Bushmaster don’t spray bullets with one trigger pull. But, with gas-powered mechanisms, semiautomatics can fire rapid follow-up shots as fast as the trigger can be squeezed.
Are kids asking Santa for these weapons?
For the record, Assault weapon (semi-automatic) refers primarily (but not exclusively) to firearms that possess the cosmetic features of an assault rifle (which are fully-automatic). However, Semi-automatic firearms, when fired, automatically extract the spent cartridge casing and load the next cartridge into the chamber, ready to fire again; they do not fire automatically like a machine gun; rather, only one round is fired with each trigger pull.
QUESTIONS:
1. Who put up all the money to launch Cerberus? Did the Bush family invest?
2. If Congress members were invested with Cerberus, a private hedge fund, would that be divulged in their financial reports? www.OpenSecrets might answer this question.
3. The SEC shows nearly 100 Cerberus entities. Who and how in hell can anyone make heads or tails out of this rats nest?
4. What prompted Dan Quayle and his cohorts to choose the name Cerberus, which is the name of the mythic three headed dog that guards Hell to make sure no one escapes?
Let's pretend that there are those who actually have a plan. Based on the trajectory we have been on since Reagan and the move by hedge funds (another hedge fund bought Blackwater/Xe*) to buy private armies, gun and bullet makers, and other tactical gear, what would that plan look like?
*Cerberus was going to buy Blackwater, but didn't. I guess owning two private armies, DynCorp & Blackwater, wouldn't look good on paper.
So, with the help of Michael Chertoff, former Director of Homeland Security under Bush, another smaller hedgefund bought Blackwater for $200,000,000. One has to wonder if there are any ties to Cerberus' The Freedom Group, located in North Carolina, the same location of Blackwater/Xe.
The Wall Street Journal did some digging:
A Dossier on Cerberus’s Freedom Group
What's our plan(s)?