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Tom Diaz Quotes
United States
Tom Diaz is an American writer, lawyer, and public speaker on the gun industry and gun control issues. He was formerly senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center and is one of the more prominent advocates for gun control in the United States of America.
Random Tom Diaz quote
18 quotes
Enhanced lethality, that's what we are talking about. Lethality increases when you have larger bullets, more ammunition and the guns are easier to operate. That's the contribution Glock and others have brought to America.
It's clear that the militarized stuff is the stuff that sells and is defining the industry.
These are ideal weapons of terrorist attack.
There is not a middle ground with the NRA.
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.
They translate the industry's needs into less crass, less economically interested language -- into defending the home, into defending the country. The industry needs a veneer of respectability.
It's an area of writing that is superbly uncritical. It's hypermarketing, and Guns & Ammo is the 500-pound canary.
This is not just a gun control issue. It's a national security issue.
If you wanted to create a system that is basically legal but designed to facilitate gun trafficking, you couldn't have a better system than you have here.
I was shocked at what I found. The sniper's motto is 'one shot, one kill.' There are schools that teach civilians how to do this.
The gun industry offloads tremendous costs onto people who don't use its products, like a polluter dumping on a city, so it's good to force people to realize what these costs are.
It speaks to the fact that there are a lot of young men in the U.S. who will never be in the military but feel that male compulsion to warriorhood. Owning an assault weapon is a passport to that.
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.
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.
It's just a fact that hunting has been in serious decline, so those kinds of guns just don't sell as well. Well, you're in business, you got to sell something. These assault rifles — these military-style rifles — appeal to a broader range of people.
It's an assault pistol. It was designed and basically advertised and used for exactly the kind of thing that was done in Littleton: It's to spray a lot of bullets over a wide area very quickly.
I think that in the long term, the nation is going to reject this unbridled kind of gun culture. But I think it's going to take a long time. Colorado is a true test for those actually in the trenches, but it might also be a wake-up call -- nothing is easy, and pouring money in from Bloomberg is not a magic solution.
When the military switched over to this assault weapon, the whole context changed. The conversation became, ‘Is this the kind of gun you want in the civilian world?’ And we who advocate for regulation say, ‘No, you do not.’
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