When fighting crime in his hometown of Dallas, Texas, Walker, Texas Ranger rarely needed anything more than his feet, hands, and occasional spirit guide to stop crime. Whether it was girlfriend and later wife Alex's penchant for constantly being kidnapped, Dallas Cowboy turned sidekick Trivette being ambushed by narco-terrorists or what-not, or even irrascible bar owner C.D. being attacked by Big D hooligans, Chuck Norris' Cordell Walker could just as often be seen flying across the TV screen foot first as crouching behind his silver Dodge Ram pickup firing rounds off from his pistol.
Now even Walker's handgun is passe in the Lone Star State as a result of America's gun industry-fueled domestic arms race. According to the Dallas Morning News, this week the Dallas Police Department "received $50,000 worth of weapons and ammunition from the Dallas Arms Collectors Association. The gift includes 20 Rock River AR-15 assault weapons, to be distributed mostly among patrol officers, and two Barrett .50-caliber rifles with night-vision capabilities for the SWAT team."
Hal Copeland, described as a spokesman for the Arms group, told the paper without a hint of irony, "The criminals have access to state-of-the-art weaponry, and Dallas police need to also have it." Neither Copeland, nor the news outlets that have covered the story have noted that this state-of-the-art weaponry is the inevitable result of the lethality-at-any-cost mentality, often fueled by crossover military technology, that has gripped America's gun industry for the past 20 years. In just two decades, this is what we've seen in the product line of America's gunmakers and importers: a switch from six-shot revolvers to high-capacity semi-auto pistols; the introduction and popularization of military-style assault rifles and assault pistols; a wide range of increasingly lethal ammunition; a seemingly irreversible trend toward larger caliber weapons, often in smaller packages, such as "pocket rocket" pistols; and, the increasingly popularity of anti-materiel weapons such as 50 caliber anti-armor sniper rifles. As Tom Diaz writes in his 1999 book Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America, "lethality is the nicotine of the gun industry."
The Dallas Morning News article also notes that 50 Dallas patrol officers currently carry city-issued assault rifles and that "several hundred more throughout the department are certified, and many of those officers own personal assault rifles that they can carry on duty." The 50 caliber sniper rifles are to be given to SWAT officers to "disable large vehicles, among other things."
The threat to law enforcement by high-powered weapons is all too real. The 2003 Violence Policy Center study, "Officer Down"--Assault Weapons and the War on Law Enforcement, revealed that at least 41 of the 211 law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty between January 1, 1998, and December 31, 2001, were killed with assault weapons. In fact, the gift of military weaponry followed an incident in February in which four Dallas police officers were wounded by a suspect wielding a high-powered rifle, part of a growing trend of heavily-armed assailants who kill or wound several police officers at a time.
Some might ask, does it really make sense to have a domestic arms bazaar that allows virtually anyone the ability to wallow in their own well-armed fantasy world--complete with assault weapons, grenade launchers, and 50 caliber sniper rifles--and lie in wait for the hoped-for opportunity to water the tree of liberty with the blood of perceived tyrants? Or perhaps it might make more sense to limit the availability of these weapons of war in the first place.