Murfreesboro firm takes heat over its armor-piercing rifle

[Thom Little]

When U.S. soldiers need to penetrate a tank's armor from a mile away, they count on a weapon that evolved from the garage tinkering of a former wedding photographer.

The .50-caliber rifle created by Ronnie Barrett and sold by his company, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing Inc., is the most powerful firearm civilians can buy. It weighs about 30 pounds and can hit targets up to 2,000 yards away with armor-piercing bullets.

That kind of power has drawn a customer base of gun enthusiasts, Hollywood actors and Barrett's most loyal buyer, the U.S. military, which has been buying Barrett's rifles since the 1980s and using them in combat from the 1991 Gulf War to the present.

But the powerful gun has drawn plenty of critics, who say the rifle could be used by terrorists to bring down commercial airliners or penetrate rail cars and storage plants holding hazardous materials.


http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051126/COUNTY07/511260345/1350

[michreject]

1. She was not quite honest

http://www.saysuncle.com/archives/2005/12/01/the_ap_lied_to_barrett/

...........Dan has informed me in comments that the AP would issue a correction. They did and it is here (the AP beat me by one hour because I actually, you know, fact checked and verified my sources):

In a Nov. 25 story about Barrett Firearms Manufacturing Inc., The Associated Press reported erroneously that .50-caliber rifles were used to penetrate the armor of Iraqi tanks from a mile away during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Such rifles were used against Iraqi armored personnel carriers, but military experts say they could not penetrate tank armor from that distance.

The story also said company founder Ronnie Barrett started tinkering with the .50-caliber Browning Machine Gun in the early 1980s. A company spokesman said Barrett took photos of one such gun, but then built his own rifle.

The story also quoted a criminal justice scholar who said the rifle wasn’t useful for hunting because it would destroy game meat - a claim Barrett Firearms disputes. Bryce Towsley, a Vermont-based gun writer, said that when the .50-caliber rifle is used with the proper bullet, it would not destroy the meat. ..........


Kind of a shallow retraction, though.