The guns of Boston
 

I've been watching the news and seeing what Boston PD and the other agencies brought out for the hunt.

This article showed a lot of more, mostly ARs

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/201...oston-bombers/

im wondering what te bad guys used

I was watching the local news and besides the ARs you mentioned I also remember at least one UMP.

This is one of the first times I've seen FBI HRT agents with their HK416s (painted the same way as SOF weapons). I also remember seeing one BPD SWAT officer with an MP5, and thinking, "Wow, can't remember the last time I saw one of those in action."

They took a handgun (Glock?) from the campus police officer that they killed. I saw a bunch of news reports claiming that they also had some type of assault rifle (which they used in the shootout that led to Tamerlan Tsarnaev's death), but haven't seen a confirmation so far.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/19/us/gal...nce/index.html

Here's the CNN gallery. What stuck out for me was the variety of camouflage used. Most of them are in the standard black, but you've also got OD, UCP, woodland MARPAT, urban MARPAT, and Multicam. It also looks like the Army gave some of its surplus armored Humvees to the police.

You sure it was a 416 in camo? Several other shots looked like an AR because of the front sight post.

So the latest CNN update says that they used a rifle (singular) and handguns (plural), as well as six bombs, during the big firefight. The handguns were both found at the scene, which is why the police reported that they thought Dzhokar Tsarnaev was still armed with the rifle. Again, nobody seems to know the make/model of any of the guns so far.

Also, like everyone else, I have followed the new developments on Twitter, and I'm subscribed to many military bloggers and gun-related channels. I'm waiting for one of them to hear something about the weapons and Tweet about it.

Looked like a 416 to me because of the hand guard. That, and the fact that HRT is a well-known user of the 416.

There's a few legit 416s in there; mostly from the guys in Woodland MARPAT.

Weren't those guys local SWAT? So they have 416s, too? The guys with the 416s that I've seen have all been FBI HRT, and they are recognizable because they all wear MultiCam pants and combat shirts, just like SOF.

There's a very good shot of a guy in Multicam, but he had a State Police patch on his shoulder and a camo M4A1. I wish I was able to link to individual pictures in the CNN gallery, but it's all Java.

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...01/Boston6.jpg

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...01/Boston5.jpg

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...01/Boston4.jpg

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...01/Boston3.jpg

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...01/Boston2.jpg

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...r01/Boston.jpg

Why?


Be thankful that the Media is not on a drumbeat to BAN whatever gun they may have used......

The media is already claiming they were using an "assault rifle" when a lot claimed they were just using the stolen handgun from the cop they killed.

But how did they kill that cop in the first place?

more to see if it was illegally aquired, who might of been supplying them, etc. If its street junk, or if its something hard to come by suggesting a larger operation

Remember:

http://i.imgur.com/0Y8xTk4.jpg

My guess is that it was something plain, compliant with Mass's gun laws, and not particularly dangerous looking.

It is probably a hand gun that doesn't fit the narrative of "assault weapons".

Furthermore, I reckon that since these guys had gone so long without attracting attention to themselves, and even getting interviewed by the FBI, they wouldn't attempt to purchase a weapon that would draw attention or run the risk of running afoul of Mass's firearms laws.

Unless you're Fienstein and in that case, you think EVERY gun is an assault weapon

I'm seeing a little too much wishful thinking here. The police chief already has said that there were two handguns and a rifle. The only question is what type of rifle, and as much as I know you guys are going to deny it, I think the odds are pretty high that the rifle used was, in fact, an AR-15 or some other type of black rifle. Also, while these guys used three weapons in the shooting, investigators have already said that they apparently had a big cache with more guns and bombs than they actually needed/used.

I know that you guys hate it when an AR-type weapon gets used in a mass shooting or terrorist attack, but you need to stop deluding yourselves. When you do stuff like that, you're acting just like the idiot liberals who wanted to believe that these guys were right-wing Tea Party types (i.e. that semi-retarded Salon columnist who wrote that he hoped the suspects turned out to be white guys).

There's no doubt somebody helped them get the guns illegally, given the severity of MA's gun laws (and Boston's in particular). BATFE already has said that neither of the two brothers was licensed to own firearms and that they're looking for whoever purchased the guns for them.


Exactly. @Excalibur: Once again, this is why you need to read (and think) before you post.


There was a rifle, not just handguns. Investigators have already determined that much. Also, don't you think it's ironic that you're essentially making an argument which seriously contradicts the pro-RKBA community's "criminals don't care about gun laws" argument?

Also, I was following Tweeters who were posting police radio chatter on the night of the shooting. There were officers panicking and asking if anyone nearby had a rifle. I realize that there was a lot of confusion, but the radio chatter suggests that whatever the Tsarnaev brothers fired at BPD had a lot of range and allowed them to fire a lot of rounds pretty quickly, which means that it was (A.) a rifle, and (B.) something fitted with a high-capacity magazine.

Yes I know they most likely killed the cop with an illegal gun and then stole the officer's gun.

Why is the news constantly bringing up they don't have gun permits for their guns? It seems to be the headline for a lot of articles? I can see how this can be used to fuel the anti-gun control argument but I was more surprised the media hasn't thrown out more "they used assault weapons" quotes.

I also don't think it matters anymore what guns they used, the liberal media will always target the guns used and demonize them. It could have been a Ruger 10/22 and gun owners would still get it.

The media may be (disproportionately) liberal, but contrary to what you seem to believe, their hard-on for gun control isn't so huge that they're going to make up information like that. The types of weapons used have not been reported yet, so the media has not yet reported it. Simple.

That being said, when the investigators do announce that the Tsarnaev brothers fired an assault rifle during the gun battle, I will not be surprised to see the press (and the gun controllers) dwell on it pretty heavily. But even then, I don't imagine this incident serving as a rallying cry for more gun control. (Since, unlike Newtown and Aurora, the guns were secondary to the bombing, and because those cases are far more clear-cut examples of mentally ill shooters having questionable legal access to powerful weaponry.)

I read somewhere that niether of the two had a Massachuettes Permit to Purchase a Firearm.

Further more, Mass has a pretty strict AWB in place already, so I doubt there will be much in the way of anti-gun drum beating because of that.

However, I look for reloading supplies to be targeted.

And heck, that coincides nicely with the cry for more legislation in regards to fertilizer storage after the incident in West, Texas.

Here is another photo of the BPD weapons seen during the lockdown:

[http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enha...6599760-2.jpg]

I don't think it ironic at all. I believe that there is a big difference between these guys and your average thug with a Lorcin .25 stuck in his waistband.

Sidenote: I still wish that the surviving suspect would be charged as a simple common criminal though, I've always felt that the bringing of special terrorism charges when an obvious case of plain murder exsists gives these guys entirerly too much credit and fame. Also, I hope against all hope that he does NOT recieve the death penalty. No need to make a marter of him. Lock him up in Adminstrative Segregation at the Mass State Penitenary for life without parole and forget about him.

However, back to guns, I was merely surmising that if these guys planned to become American terrorists, that they wouldn't compromise thier mission by getting busted on something so mundane as a gun charge.

There is an element of racial profiling to that. An obvious American citizen with a mile long rap sheet gets busted for an illegal gun, he gets to face an overburdened criminal justice system, and unless the gun pocession was tacked on to a drug case or the like, in all likelihood, it won't be prosecuted as such.

However, a guy like the deceased suspect who had been to Russian, looks foreign, and has already been investigated by the FBI at the behest of a foreign government(my guess is the Russians) gets busted for a gun crime, red flags should go up.

Now all that being said, there is nothing to say that a straw purchase(already illegal) didn't take place, a theft(already illegal), or a person to person transfer happened, which according to my understanding of Mass law, is illegal.

And hell, going with Occam's Razor, there is nothing that would have stopped one of them form buying a rifle out of state.

Another aside, the 200 rounds exchanged, has that been confirmed as the numbers of rounds expended by the suspects?

Because I could certainly understand that a justifiably jumpy police force would expend a heap ton of lead in the general direction of the muzzle flash of a known cop killer/suspected terrorist. Especially at night.

I've been there, it just feels good when your weapon goes BANG and kicks back into your shoulder.

Also, didn't mean to brush this aside with my previous response, I overlooked your quote of mine. :o

Remember these guys?

A reasonable point, but these guys (and especially the older brother) strike me as way too hot-headed to have thought things through that carefully. And even if they weren't, it's not as though it's THAT hard to have a friend in another state (i.e. Maine, which has pretty lax gun laws compared to the rest of the northeastern U.S.) buy an AR-15 or two and drive over to pick it up. A straw purchases is a crime that is extremely easy to get away with, and one which criminals across the U.S. have gotten away with repeatedly for many years. I can't imagine that the Tsarnaev brothers were so risk-averse that they calculated that breaking Massachusetts gun laws was going to attract much attention and foil their plot. We already know that these guys built and tested explosives; that's a risk that carries the possibility of death (and, therefore, mission failure). Breaking MA's gun laws probably seemed far less risky in comparison to building the bombs that they used in their main attack.

Also, to use an (admittedly flawed) parallel: The Columbine shooters both had long rap sheets for B&E and were already known to local law enforcement. That hardly deterred them from having friends buy them weapons that they were not legally old enough to buy themselves (and then sawing off the barrels on their two shotguns).

Agreed. I would rather not treat these guys as "enemy combatants". In practical terms, there isn't much difference between guys like the Tsarnaev brothers and guys like the Columbine shooters.

Yeah, I believe the 200 rounds figure is accurate. The impression I had from reading the Tweets is that the BPD officers came up against a lot more firepower than they were expecting.

That is sort of my point. The dumb bimbo who bought the Tec-9 and something else, can't remember, for the two at Columbine was never prosecuted for her part in the straw sale, nor accessory to murder. Instead she got drug in front of Congress to speak about lax gun laws. I guess straw sales should be made even more illegal.

Further more, I think the reason that gun laws have no effect currently is because they aren't used. Atlanta has a provision, in which a prosecutor can tac on another five years to any criminal's sentence for the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime. It has been used exactly forty times since enacment in 2007.

Something like 10 convictions resulted from false 4473s in 2012, out of like 7,000 rejected NICS checks.

Straw sales are a problem. They are already illegal. Making them more illegal isn't going to stop to them, but effective prosecutions with stiff sentences will.

There isn't anything to seperate the Tsarnaev brothers from the Columbine shooters. Or the North Hollywood shooters. Or Lanza. Or Holmes. Or Whitman. Or Boothe.

A terrorist is nothing more than a common criminal adhereing to a political philosophy instead of personal betterment.

I think that the Taliban guys we capture in Afghanistan should be turned over to the Afghan National Police and tried for whatever crimes could be pinned on them. And left to rot in Mazeri-Shariff.

These guys were American citizens and should stand before a jury of thier peers, preferably from Boston.

The problem is they are calling it terrorism solely because these guys used bombs for their targets and in a post 9/11 US, that's different from the Oklahoma City bomber. These other guys used guns and those were the subject of debate and motive.

Also the North Hollywood guys were bank robbers. They are a completely different class of crazies than the mass shooters.

I forgot, who's Boothe?

John Wilkes Boothe.

Different class of crazy, yes. But they are still violent criminals and should be treated as such.

Labeling them terrorists and gives them entirerly too much publicity and ego inflation.

That's the best thing the French ever did was charging Carlos the Jackal with murder, like an average criminal, instead of various terrorism chargers.

It destroyes the romanticism of any terrorist movement if would be terrorists knew that instead of being lauded as oppressed freedom fighters and martryed at the hands of a totalitarian regime, they are left to rot in a prison with average felons.

And I agree. There are only criminals regardless of what they did. They don't deserve a title of any kind. There are people who obey the law and people who break them.


More photos of the guns of the LEO in Boston. Finally saw a guy's AR that doesn't look like the others. It's got a Magpul stock and is an SBR. Some 700s, a couple UMPs and an 870

http://www.guns.com/2013/04/17/the-h...ton-25-photos/

Man, I didn't going gallavanting the mountains of Afghanistan, give up a year of my life, a portion of my hearing, a chunk of knee, and see a guy a grew up playing baseball with buy it just to see this in America.

Jesus, I'm sorry, but I will never get use to seeing cops dressed like D-Boys.

Damn it, in a way, when even your local beat cop has a UMP-45, the terrorists have already won.

Bastards.

I don't understand. You don't like the idea of cops being adequately armed or geared up for all possibilities?

No, not saying that at all. But, what I'm saying is that maybe the full on ACUs and Mutli-Cams aren't necessary.

Well prepared and well armned police=fine.
Militarized police=bad.

Yeah, Multi-cam seemed a bit much. Whatever happened to good old fashioned navy blue?

At least the armored Humvees they had didn't have machine guns mounted.

I see no problem with police wearing camouflage, as there are instances where they will be operating in wide open rural areas (in the case of non metro police departments anyway) where it is beneficial not to be seen by the bad guys. A couple of years ago in England there was a big man hunt for a guy who had shot three people including a police officer, and armed officers were called in from a load of different police forces to help with the search, including me. I didn't feel particularly stealthy creeping along in green woodland wearing all black with a black/white chequered band around my baseball cap. I would have given anything to be allowed to wear my old DPMs that day.

To be fair though, I don't know what advantage anyone is getting out of wearing UCP, that seems a bit show-off-ish. Part of it might be the fact that by and large tactical equipment is more readily available in military patterns though. Also about the UMPs, it's not like they carry those around every day is it? This was an exceptional situation that led to them being more heavily armed than they would normally be, which is fair enough.

As for the charges, "one count of using and conspiring to use an improvised explosive device against persons and property within the United States resulting in death and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death." These are federal charges, so he could be facing the needle.

If I were his lawyer, I'd try to pin most of the blame on the older brother, saying that he was just an accomplice, and try to get the death penalty off the table.

I was really surprised when I heard that the older brother had a wife and kid. Who does this sort of thing with a family to support? That poor kid will have to live with the fact that her father was a terrorist.

Ask the suicide bombers. A lot of them most likely had wives and kids as well.

Just because a criminal had raised a family doesn't excuse or change the effect of what was done, a crime. You know who else had family? The people that died in the explosion, the people who were maimed by the bomb.

So a bunch of sources are now reporting that one of the weapons used was an "M4 carbine", and that the police recovered it from the boat where Dhozkar was holed up. I can almost guarantee that this is a mistake and that he wasn't using a mil-spec weapon, but it is starting to sound as though they had an AR-15 of some type.

It's also been reported that they had a "BB gun" of some kind. I'm guessing that it was probably an airsoft version of some tacticool weapon (like an FN SCAR) that would have been too expensive for them to afford. They probably carried it to give the impression that they were better-armed than they actually were.

But, again, we will have to wait and see.

I don't think he's saying it excuses what was done; only that it makes the guy's motives more esoteric. Seriously, why would you ever think Funkychinaman wanted to excuse these guys?


I dunno, the assortment of camo patterns I am seeing don't really seem appropriate for the terrain. When I lived in NC, our local SERT tactical team wore woodland camo BDUs, but only while serving warrants outside of town (i.e. when busting weed and meth dealers operating in houses deep within the woods). What we have in the case of Boston are guys wearing camo patterns appropriate for woodland terrain even though they are chasing suspects in an urban area. It seems unnecessary, and comes across as an attempt to look more badass than they are.

Not sure it demonstrates that our police forces are becoming "militarized", though. SWAT teams have always shared equipment and weapons with SOF (since that's what most of them were before they re-joined the civilian world). Until SWAT teams start using integrated network ops to gather intel on suspects (infringing on electronic privacy), and then start raiding said suspects' homes with shoot-to-kill orders, I don't see any reason to be concerned about their (slightly gratuitous) use of military camouflage uniforms. "Militarization" is just not a word I use so lightly.