Fully Automatic America

I just finished watching "Fully Automatic America" on Youtube. The film was produced by Vanguard, a cultural commentary group that has done a few other presentations on guns before. The film took a look at guns in America and their effect on our culture. The people who produced the film may have been trying to come across as impartial, but when they blatantly ignored the most obvious conclusions and made statements that are patently untrue, it seemed as if they approached the subject with a forgone conclusion. The main journalist, Kaj Larsen, visited a gun range in West Point Kentucky, said of the .50 caliber sniper rifle that "It's actually illegal in warfare to use that against people". The video was posted to Youtube on January 14, 2009. The Barrett M82A1 .50 caliber sniper rifle was first used by the U.S. military in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s. The .50 caliber has risen to immense popularity with American, British, and Canadian sniper teams as anti-personnel weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their potential to make instant one hit kills at ranges exceeding two thousand yards, ranges at which the lighter .300 Magnum has lost most of its accuracy and killing power. The statement that it is illegal to use the .50 caliber against personnel is flat out wrong and points to either a lack of honesty or the most basic research.
Larsen then went on to look at gun violence in Camden New Jersey, which has been listed annualy among the top ten most dangerous cities in America since 2002 by the FBI. Pointing to the large number of guns available on the streets and the ease of obtaining guns in nearby Pensylvannia, he identified the problem with Camden as being the availability of guns. When he asked prominent town citizens they said that the problem was caused by three factors: availability of guns, gangs, and drugs. Larsen did not even mention or consider this in a scientific manner. When you have a common component and you believe the component to be the cause of an effect, you must have the effect in both places where you have the cause. The guns in Camden are nothing like the guns in West Point, Kentucky, where a nine year old was shooting a .50 caliber machine gun. If guns are the problem, the greater availability and lethality of guns in West Point, Kentucky would make that city far more dangerous than Camden. West Point County has a crime rate 84% below the national average. Camden has a violent crime rate over five times the national average. The more obvious conclusion might be that it is not guns that cause crime, but drugs and gangs combined with easy illegal gun access and difficult legal gun access. Larsen also failed to point out that Camden has a history of massive political corruption all the way up to the U.S. Senate level. Gangs and drugs are and always have been causes of crime and instead of looking to find where the problem was, Larsen spent his time trying to prove that guns were the problem.
Continuing in the same vein, Larsen made the comment in another video, about less developed countries in Africa and South America claiming that the massive number of cheap guns has fueled the wars in those countries and that we should stop worrying about WMDs and stop the proliferation of small arms. Larsen completely ignored the fact that small arms are the only defence that millions of people around the world have against oppression and intimidation. He did mention that everyone has a gun to protect their home, but he seemed to forget the words as soon as they left his mouth.
Again, if guns were the problem, then when guns are absent we should expect to see peace. People in Africa and South America have been brutally killing each other since they found out how to sharpen bamboo and stone.

Mr. Larsen and Vanguard did not come to the discussion open minded, but with an ideological ax to grind, and he willingly ignored basic reasoning and research practices that should be employed in any kind of documentary that seeks to deal with important issues.