Fires of hell fuel mass destruction of weapons: No tears as guns melt

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MicroBalrog

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Fires of hell fuel mass destruction of weapons: No tears as guns melt
By Laurel J. Sweet
Saturday, September 11, 2004

The early morning wake was sparsely attended by a handful of Boston cops willing to take turns intoning the names of the departed: Carl Walther, William Ruger, Smith and Wesson.
No one paid their respects.
``Some of them you remember,'' Sgt. Detective James O'Shea said with a dismissive shrug, ``but for the most part, it's adios.
``After a while, you get sick of looking at them.''
All of them tagged and some of them bagged, 200 firearms connected to every manner of mayhem save murder were damned to the fires of hell yesterday. In a little-known twist of fate, they will be resurrected and put back on the city's streets - as manhole covers.
``It's like a public service,'' said Walter Burt, cupola supervisor at the century-old LeBaron Foundry in Brockton, where the Boston Police Department cremates hundreds of illegal and surrendered handcannons, rifles, shotguns and toy pistols every month.
And nary a tear is shed beside the pyre.
``They end up violently,'' Burt said with a devilish grin. ``We figure every one of the guns that goes in is one less that's going to wind up in somebody's hand. And if we're getting them, then someone's using them to do something wrong.''
A requiem for the rods, held in the ballistics offices at Boston police headquarters and solemnly witnessed for legalities' sake by Lt. Detective Joseph Zinck of internal affairs and Lt. Detective John Fedorchuk of auditing, preceeded the 24-mile, police-escorted funeral procession to the guns' execution site.
The weapons, their coffins black buckets whose lids pallbearers, Detective Carl Washington and officers Kenneth Westhaver and Martin Lydon sealed shut with a mallet, were seized between 1999 and this year. Only murder weapons and guns so uniquely frightening police want them for reference purposes are stored indefinitely.
A .357 Smith and Wesson revolver, a flare gun and a .44-caliber Ruger with a 7-inch-long barrel were among those sentenced to destruction, stealthly loaded into the back of a crime scene van with curtains drawn across its rear windows.
The foundry melts down unwanted weapons from across New England. Yesterday's batch were tossed into a macabre barbecue with coke and limestone and percolated through a cupola heated to 3,900 degrees - from steely menace to molten slag in 45 minutes.
Foundry worker Jim Pizzi has the honor of firing up the coals. ``I've seen some strange stuff come through, including a rocket launcher,'' Pizzi said, ``but I'd rather see it here than on the streets.''


MB - How dumb can those people get?
 
I already responded to this sentiment...

Last night I was finishing a glass of wine after dinner. On my computer was my one extravigant purchase from the time I was confined to a wheelchair: a silver Roman Antoninianus minted in the rump empire of the upstart Caesar, Postumus. (While surfing, I stumbled across it: Thirty-something bucks for a real Roman coin? Sold!)

I know nothing about coin collecting, but I am a serious history buff, especially The Glory That Was Rome... Anyway, I derived an immense satisfaction, and no small amount of awe, from sipping my wine and holding this ancient coin in my hand and just pondering. This thing is almost one thousand, seven hundred and fifty years old! (Looks really big when you type it out, eh?) How many cups of wine has it bought? Was it part of a legionary's savings? Did he use it to bribe his Centurion to get out of sentry duty? Did the Centurion treat some friends to a night on the town with it? Heady thoughts; amazing how heavy with the weight of time a little disk of silver can be.

I feel the same way with many of the firearms I've been priviledged to hold, or even better, to own. The same feelings with my 1930's commercial production Broomhandle Mauser or an old WWI Mauser 98 I once owned. Who bought this pistol? Did a young boy of 17 or so clutch this rifle in trembling hands, mustering all the courage he could while awaiting the order to go "over the top"? The tales locked up in the Trapdoor Springfields and "U.S. Gov't Property" 1911's I've held seem to vibrate in the metal.

And yet, all this means nothing to those who cheer at the sight of guns crushed under bulldozers in the UK and Australia and fervently pray to inflict the same fate on our guns. They crow like a pack of book-burning philistines, as though destroying these precious chunks of history, these priceless links to the lessons of the past somehow exorcises demons from these mute chunks of wood and steel. These people probably have no clue at the outrage I felt at the defacing of the Pieta by a hammer-wielding loony. They accuse us of narrow-mindedness, but the glimmer in their eyes is the same dull animal joy that cheerfully hounded the witches to the gallows in Salem and the Jews to the ovens at Auschwitz. It is the spirit of the Mob, that fears that which does not conform, hates that which relies upon its own strength and not the strength of numbers.

In the battle between Good and Evil, people, this one counts...
Click to expand...

Since then, I've picked up some other historical tidbits, like a 1869/71 Vetterli (the first standard issue repeating breechloader) and a 1/12th Stater coin from Miletus, circa 515-480BC (maybe it wasn't in some guy's pocket at Thermopylae, but it could have been...)

These pieces of my heritage as a human are not available for burning, no matter what evil spirits some 21st Century primitive thinks may inhabit them.
 
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