Posted on 01/03/2006 11:03:06 PM PST by neverdem
SOUTH PORTLAND, Me. - Kelly DeCambra made her way through a seven-inches-an-hour snowstorm to a dingy Maine State Police garage where, among the brake parts, transmissions and a flat-bed tow truck, she hoped to find a fragment of solace.
It would come in the form of a Ruger .44 Magnum Super Blackhawk revolver, caked with blood and the memory of Ms. DeCambra's son, 21-year-old Lionel St. Hilaire, who was shot to death with it last year.
The mother had come to watch the gun that was used to kill her son be sawed into pieces in an acrid plume of white-hot sparks.
Ms. DeCambra's act of witness was made possible by a law Maine enacted in 2001 that requires handguns used in homicides to be destroyed when they are no longer needed for evidence. Before that, guns were often sold or auctioned by police departments to raise money for other equipment.
Gun control advocates, gun rights supporters, and law enforcement officials say they believe that Maine is the only state where the police allow victims' relatives to watch a gun's destruction, and the acts of witness are arranged informally by the police, not spelled out in the law.
Supporters of the law, including the Maine Chiefs of Police Association, acknowledge that in a state like Maine, which in the last decade averaged about 20 homicides a year, destroying such weapons takes only a few guns out of circulation. But the requirement that crime guns be destroyed reflects a trend among police departments nationwide.
A few states, including New York and Wisconsin, require at least some guns to be destroyed, and others, like Washington, have rescinded bans on destroying guns used in crimes.
Several municipalities have passed ordinances to prevent crime guns from being sold, and the International Association of Chiefs...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
They should give those guilty guns a lethal injection.
Anything more would be inhumane.
Wow, is that stupid.
Silly. Equally silly are "victim impact statements" in what are supposed to be the places where we objectively and without emotion decide court cases.
Agreed.
There are poor families in our inner cities that need guns to defend themselves against their thuggish neighbors.
Why don't liberals support gun vouchers, or maybe gun stamps? Seems like the type of redistribution scheme that they love if it involves food, housing, cash :)
Stupid is right.
Now on the other side, if my daughter were raped, I'd like to see the rapist, aka, Clinton gelded; then I'd empty the magazine.
You made that up out of thin air. No mention was made of the serial numbers being filed off in the article.
END CAPITAL PUNISHMENT FOR GUNS!!
GUNS CAN BE REHABILITATED!!
This gun should be given life without parole. Anything more is dreadfully uncivilized. Few people know this, but I've heard of guns that wrote childrens' books while they were awaiting rehabilitation. As a society, we need to build gun prisons where those guns that have been engaged in henious crimes can spend the rest of their years repenting for the damage they have done.
This is sick.
~Sigmund Freud, "General Introduction to Psychoanalysis"
This encouragement by the police departments, to crime victim relatives, that they should place blame on an inanimate chunk of metal (or plastic) for a violent criminal act committed by a live person, seems a bit perverted and sick to me. Should we now have ceremonies to watch cars crushed, if they were involved in DWI deaths?
But it's rich in symbolism!
And really. Isn't that the most important thing? < /derision >
Why are the authorities cutting up RUGERS in disproportionate numbers?
Are Rugers made in a unenriched urban environments?
If we subsidized the working function of their lathes, would guns made at Ruger, Inc. prove less apt to cause crimes than if they were fabricated with other means?
Do people HATE Rugers? Why is there so much intolerance of Ruger handguns?
Let's say the federal gov't subsidized midnight cowboy action shooting games --mighn't we see a much higher level of Ruger handguns go on to become Gatling guns and Vulcan canons?
I cannot believe you people haven't given this more thought...
I am quite certain that seeing the sob's executed would give more solace and perhaps even some closure.
As paperweights, for example. Or doorknockers.
We need to think about the WHOLE environment surrounding Ruger handguns, and not the narrow circumstances in which they are handled in the manner cited above.
The authorities do not need to resort to torching them and cutting them up --that's a sign of an unforgiving society.
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