Norway Shooter Purchased Ammo From USA Suppliers

I have long been an advocate of rational gun control in this country. While gun control would not guarantee that guns did not get into the wrong hands, it would certainly reduce the insanely high number of guns in circulation and would hopefully make it difficult to secure automatic weapons. Those who want to hunt for sport - if one can describe killing living things sport - surely have no need for automatic weaponry. Now, it turns out that Norway's mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik purchased his ammo for his automatic weapons from suppliers in the USA. Why? Because Norway very wisely limits automatic clips for rifles to three bullets. Not so her in the land of God and gun nuts. Politico has coverage that shows that the lax laws of the USA helped Breivik commit his deadly carnage. What's really frightening is that all the would be Breiviks have the same easy access to weapons they should not be able to possess. Here are highlights from Politico:
*
The Norwegian man who allegedly killed dozens at a kids summer camp claims he legally bought high-capacity ammunition clips by mail from the United States, prompting Capitol Hill’s leading gun-control advocate to say on Thursday that America should be ashamed such purchases aren’t against the law.
*
Anders Behring Breivik wrote in a 1,500-page manifesto that he bought 10 30-round ammunition clips for his .223 caliber rifle from an undisclosed, small U.S. supplier, which had acquired the clips from other suppliers. Norway forbids the sale of clips for hunting rifles that hold more than three bullets, according to Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.
*
The Norwegian press has written extensively about how Breivik legally acquired his weapons and ammunition, but the mail-order purchase of his ammo from the United States has received little attention in the English-language press.
*
The sale or transfer of high-capacity gun clips containing more than 10 bullets were illegal in the United States under the 1994 assault weapons ban, but the legislation expired in 2004. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was critically shot and six others killed during the January shootings outside a Tucson supermarket, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation to restrict magazines to their pre-2004 level. She said the legislation now has 109 Democratic co-sponsors. It is highly unlikely to come to a vote, let alone pass, in the GOP-controlled House.
*
McCarthy said eliminating high-capacity clips like those used in the Norway and Arizona shootings should be a matter of moral outrage. “I don’t understand why people can’t have common sense,” she said. “Large magazines do not need to be part of it. The large manufacturers, they should even take a moral point of view in not selling them to ordinary citizens through the gun stores. The police and military can still use them.But I just morally think they should not look to sell them to the average citizen.”
*
And Dennis Henigan, the acting president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said the world is endangered by American gun laws. “It now appears that not even Norwegian children at a youth camp are safe from the battlefield firepower so easily available in America,” he said. “Large-capacity assault clips are instruments of mass killing, yet federal law leaves them completely unregulated.”