Tom Diaz

"You have drastically increased the ability to inflict death and injury. That means you can shoot more rounds faster and easier, what they call spray and pray."

"Given the development of a whole sniper culture over the past 10 years, it was almost inevitable that some deranged person or a terrorist was going to be drawn in to acting out the sniper mentality. The snipers motto is, One shot, one kill. Thats what this guy has been doing right here around our nations capital...In order to rejuvenate its sales, the gun industry has gone out and marketed sniper rifles."

"The gun industry offloads tremendous costs onto people who dont use its products, like a polluter dumping on a city, so its good to force people to realize what these costs are."

"I was shocked at what I found. The snipers motto is one shot, one kill. There are schools that teach civilians how to do this."

"These are ideal weapons of terrorist attack."

"This gun is designed and built to smash things up and to set things on fire. It`s a battlefield weapon, and yet it is sold as freely on the American civilian market as a .22 bolt action rifle...I think it`s a great thing on the battlefield. I just think that there are certain occasions when we say in our society, this product is such a threat to our health and safety, and in this case, our national security, we will not allow it...it is a gun that is unparalleled by any other small arm available to civilians. We control every other kind of weapon of war you can think of -- machine guns, plastic explosives, rockets. This thing has flown under the radar for about 20 years...If you go through virtually any industrial state, you`ll see right off the highways all kinds of highly-toxic and/or flammable materials stored in big tanks. These are ideal targets...The point is that you can plan your attack from a longer distance. It`s the combination of range and power."

"Its clear that the militarized stuff is the stuff that sells and is defining the industry."

"If you wanted to create a system that is basically legal but designed to facilitate gun trafficking, you couldnt have a better system than you have here."

"The industry has changed. In terms of what sells and what is marketed most successfully, we’re now talking about guns that are derived directly from military design."

"The people we’re talking about, once they get into ‘I want to kill a lot of people,’ it’s not a leap for them to see that these guns are made and designed for war. And if you look at the industry advertising, that is a consistent theme."

"If you wanted to know how many Bushmasters have been used in what kinds of crime for the last five years, that information is in ATF’s files. But it can’t be released because of the Tiahrt Amendment."

"The smart gun is a hoax. Its a very seductive hoax, but nevertheless its a hoax. At bottom, this is a ploy, a very clever ploy, by the gun industry to use your tax dollars and my tax dollars to expand its markets. Youll never be able to come up with a system thats going to make handguns safe, to make handguns go away, until we say, Weve got an industry that pours onto our markets millions of deadly, lethal killing instruments. And weve got to stop that. I feel that the smart gun ultimately will take more lives…than it will save."