[MT2008]

Originally Posted by SPEMack618

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.

Remember these guys?

Originally Posted by SPEMack618

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.

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.

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).

Originally Posted by SPEMack618

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.

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.

Originally Posted by SPEMack618

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.

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.