Montreal shooting weapon
The murderer in Canada apparently used a Beretta CX Storm (said rifle wasn’t banned under the now expired Assault Weapons Ban). The weapon is a pistol caliber (40S&W, 9MM or 45ACP) semi-automatic carbine that accepts the appropriate handgun magazines from Beretta handguns. Bruce notes that the Storm has, overnight, become:
a “huge”, “automatic”, “rapid-fire”, “sniper’s”, “assault weapon”.
The Canadian government’s Canada Firearms Center issued an alert about them two months ago:
* Some Beretta CX4 Storm rifles are being manufactured with prohibited magazines.
* The classification of a firearm magazine depends on the type of firearm the magazine was designed to be used in, not the type of firearm it is actually used in.
* The new 10-cartridge magazine designed for the Beretta CX4 Storm rifle is prohibited unless it has been permanently altered so that it cannot hold more than five cartridges .
* The 10-cartridge pistol magazine used on many Beretta CX4 Storm rifles is still legal, regardless of the type of firearm it is attached to.
Even though the magazines are the same. Guess it depended on which gun you put it in. Actually, it doesn’t. It depends on which gun the magazine was made for. If a magazine was made for a handgun, it’s OK. If it was made for a rifle, it is not. Of course, the magazines are the same. And I thought US gun laws were arbitrary.
The Beretta is also the gun used on the new Battlestar Galactica.
September 15th, 2006 at 10:55 am
Been there, done that, Canada sucks. At least the libs are out of power now, otherwise Canada would get another round of gun control that wouldn’t make any difference, ala the UK. It was worse last time when Marc Lepine killed those 14 women. And the funny thing with that was that the media totally ignored his Algerian background as part of his hatred of women, and they got away with it because of his name change. From the wiki page on the massacre:
“Born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim immigrant Liess Gharbi…”
He was flunking out of class and focused his unhappyness about that on the women who were doing well. He used a Ruger mini-14 in .223 with a “high-capacity banana clip magazine,” which explains the magazine restriction above. Also explains the higher death tole at that massacre compared to the attempt here with the CX-4, what with the higher power poodle shooter.
September 15th, 2006 at 11:50 am
Lepine (Gharbi) makes a good case for firearms familiarity in fact, IIRC he had attempted to modify his Mini-14 for full-auto and and had damaged it so that it needed to be manually cycled between shots. An action that any gun nut would recognize as rendering the firearm an expensive club after each and every shot until he cycled it himself.
A fantasy world however, instead we get “guns are evil, fear them, the state will be along shortly to protect you.”