[A-List] The Accomplices: Sundance George and Butch Reid and the Virginia Tech Massacre

["tony black" <tal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg Palast" <palast@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <tal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 9:20 PM
Subject: The Accomplices: Sundance George and Butch Reid and the Virginia 
Tech Massacre


The Accomplices: Sundance George and Butch Reid and the Virginia Tech 
Massacre

by Greg Palast
Tuesday, April 17, 2007

He had accomplices. Don't kid yourself: 23-year-old Cho Seung-hui didn't 
forge his two little pistols in his smithy shop.

He had a dealer, a guns-and-bullets pusher-man who put the heat in his hand, 
took the kid's money and pocketed it with a grin.

"Whether you are looking for a pistol for affordable training or simply the 
excitement of shooting, the P22 is the pistol for you!"

That's the ad on the Walther website for the student-reaper, a Walther .22.

Not that Walther, or its fellow murder-maker, Glock, which crafted the other 
Weapon of Student Mass Destruction, the Glock 7mm, kept all of the killer 
kid's money. The gun makers religiously tithe a portion of their grim 
reapings to their friends in Washington.

This report isn't about gun control legislation or the right to bear arms or 
any of that sideways crap. This is about a group of co-conspirators who 
dropped two killing devices into the hands of someone who shouldn't have had 
access to a plastic spoon.

But before we bring in the suspects for questioning, let's pull back the 
camera lens for the bigger picture. Because what we saw at Virginia Tech was 
just a concentrated node of a larger, nationwide killing spree that goes on 
day after day in the USA. Eighty-thousand Americans take a bullet from a 
hand gun in any year. Thirty-thousand die. That's one thousand shooting 
deaths off-camera for each victim at Virginia Tech.

Sundance Bush is right now at the school for his photo op. The President is, 
"saddened and angered by these senseless acts of violence." But will our 
senseless and violent President do anything about it? He already has: On 
July 29, 2005, the US Senate passed, then Bush signed, a grant of immunity 
from lawsuits for Walther, Glock and other gun manufacturers.

Now, corporations that make hand-guns can't be sued for knowingly selling 
firearms to killers. Like that? No other industry has such wide lawsuit 
immunity -- not teachers, not doctors, not cops -- only gun makers.

Here's how Cho got his guns. It's a story you won't hear on CNN. It begins 
with something known as, The Iron Pipeline. At one end of the Pipeline are 
states like Alabama where gun laws are loosey-goosey. Gun makers including 
Glock stuff the 'Bama end of the pipe with far more guns than can ever be 
bought legally in that state, knowing full well that the guns will be 
illegally shipped up the pipeline into states where gun laws are tougher. 
Virginia law prevents "gun-trafficking"; in Alabama, they could care less.

In every state in America, a bar owner is liable to lawsuit if a bartender 
serves too many drinks and a customer dies in an auto accident. Hand a 
chainsaw to a child, you're in legal trouble. Until Bush signed the 2005 
protect-the-gun-makers law, the same common law against negligent 
distribution applied to firearms.

Bush was aiming at Stephen Fox. Steven can describe feeling pieces of his 
brain fly from his skull after a mugger shot him. He's permanently 
paralyzed. A jury charged the makers of .25-caliber hand guns with negligent 
distribution -- and Bush went wild.

He was especially worked up because the City of New Orleans sued the gun 
makers for the cost of hospitalizing cops shot by armaments pooping out the 
end of the Iron Pipeline. The NAACP joined in the suit with the effrontery 
to demand the gun-pushers alter their marketing programs to keep their 
products out of the hands of maniacs and murderers.

Do the gun manufacturers know their .22's are being used for something other 
than hunting long-horned elk? Every year, the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and 
Firearms agency sends 800,000 requests to the gun companies to trace weapons 
found at crime scenes. As Fox's attorney told me, criminals are a 
much-valued, if unpublicized, market segment sought out and provisioned by 
these manufacturers.

But they're safe, the gun-makers, even if we aren't, because of Bush's 
immunity law. But Sundance Bush didn't act alone. There was Harry 'Butch' 
Reid, leader of the Senate Democrats, riding shotgun on the immunity 
bandwagon.

The Walther .22 comes from Austria. Hitler came from Austria, too. The Glock 
7mm student-slayer comes from Germany. With the legal protection handed them 
by Bush and Reid, the two Teutonic weapons profiteers can skip free of legal 
judgment with that line well-practiced by their countrymen: "We were only 
taking orders -- for our product."

**********

This report is adapted from, "Just Put Down that Lawsuit, Pardner, and No 
One Gets Hurt" in the Class War section of the new edition of Greg Palast's 
bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of A White 
House Gone Wild." Order it now at www.GregPalast.com before its official 
release next week.








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