-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 18, 2007 6:03:05 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Moonies Selling God -- and Lethal Weapons (How Republican!)
September 18, 2007
http://www.gunguys.com/?p=2482
Money, Guns, and God:
The Story of a Korean Christian Cult Whose Business Empire
Makes Some of the Most Deadly Handguns in the World
We strongly urge you to read a truly phenomenal story in
Portfolio.com, http://www.portfolio.com/careers/features/2007/09/17/
Unification-Church "Money, Guns & God" about Justin Moon who
started and currently runs Kahr Arms, a gun manufacturer that makes
some of the most lethal handguns in the world and are often called
"pocket rockets."
If you don't have time to read this exceptional 13 page story --
and we hope you do -- we've excerpted some key parts and provide
more context below.
Background:
Reverend Sun Myung Moon is a billionaire businessman and "self-
proclaimed messiah who founded the Unification Church." He is the
father of Justin Moon, the head of Kahr Arms.
Rev. Moon owns the right-wing "Washington Times" daily newspaper in
D.C. The "Washington Times" is an influential paper that lies at
the nexus of the far right. Stories with a radically conservative
bent often first appear on the "Washington Times' which are then
fed into the right-wing echo chamber to be mass marketed through
FOX News, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, the Weekly Standard, and a
plethora of extremist pundits such as Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly,
Michelle Malkin among scores of others.
(For more info see the "Dark Side of Rev. Sun Myung Moon" by
Consortium News).
The gun empire of Justin Moon, the C.E.O. of Kahr Arms, may someday
lead his father's Unification Church. Here are some highlights from
the Portfolio article by Christopher Stewart who interviewed the
reclusive Justin Moon:
Kahr Arms is more than just the manufacturer of some of the
smallest and most lethal weapons on earth (including the tommy gun,
made famous by Al Capone).....
Not much is known about Moon’s 37-year-old son, Justin, or how Kahr
Arms fits into the church’s teachings and the reverend’s plans for
world domination....He is also vigorously business-minded and has
personally designed most of his company’s guns. He has grown Kahr
Arms into one of America’s top privately owned handgun
manufacturers, with sales of around $20 million a year and climbing
at an annual rate of 30 percent.....
[Justin Moon] was brought up to be a leader in his father’s
religious kingdom. The Unification Church blends Christianity with
Confucianism and anticommunism and divides the world into believers
and nonbelievers. The duty of the believers, according to the
church, is to conquer Satan and eradicate moral decay in the world,
even if it means war with the infidels. The idea is that Reverend
Moon, with God’s guidance, will one day take over the earth,
restoring it to peace and love.
When the Moon family moved to America from South Korea in the
1970s, critics were already calling their followers the Moonies.
They were portrayed by some as a brainwashing personality cult with
a thing for mass marriages and strange ideas (a highway around the
world or a modern Eden in a Brazilian swamp), whose leader had a
reputation for living off the work of his followers.....Among
believers, Justin’s mother and father are known as the True
Parents, an acknowledgment of the reverend’s distinctive
relationship with God; he claims to have spoken to Jesus.
Justin and his siblings are considered just as holy. They are
called the True Children, and they have lived their lives accordingly.
Sort of makes you rethink your assumptions about the gun industry
and gun lobby doesn't it? Portfolio continues to highlight how
Justin became more and more fascinated with guns:
By the age of 14, Justin had become interested in guns. “My
brothers introduced me to shooting,” he tells me. “We’d shoot
pistols and rifles, go target shooting and hunting.”....
At 18, Justin got a license to carry a handgun, co-signed by one of
his older brothers. He became obsessed with guns, especially the
compact Walther PPK, the brand James Bond carried. Justin pored
over trade magazines and sketched out his own designs. By his
junior year of college, he had decided that he wanted to make his
own weapons and that guns would be his future.
Over the next two years, he worked on the design and often traveled
to Saeilo, the family’s precision-machine company in Queens, New
York, where he began to build a prototype. He wasn’t an engineer,
but that didn’t matter. In 1992, he graduated from Harvard magna
cum laude, and soon after, the perfect pistol—the one that would
get the tight-knit gun world talking—was complete....
In 1993, Justin founded Kahr [Arms], taking for the name a made-up
word that combined his affection for German engineering and fast
cars. It is unclear what role his father had in the formation of
the company, but many people familiar with Kahr believe the True
Father was at the very least consulted....What is known is that in
his early twenties, the son of the True Father morphed from Kook
Jin into Justin Moon, and right away his objective was clear. “I
wanted to create the ultimate line of concealable pistols,” he
tells me.
Justin’s prototype became Kahr’s first gun, a double-action steel 9
millimeter he called the K9. It weighed 25 ounces and was six
inches long, about as big as a wallet. Although the world had seen
small guns before, it had not seen small guns that fired large-
caliber bullets and fit snugly, almost invisibly, in the pocket of
a pair of beach shorts. Gun folks called it a pocket rocket...."
(See the Violence Policy Center study: "Pocket Rockets: The Gun
Industry's Sale of Increased Killing Power).
Kahr’s break was partly due to timing. In the late 1980s, America
had entered a new age of hidden firepower, thanks to a movement led
by the National Rifle Association championing self-reliance,
freedom, and Second Amendment rights. It began in 1987, when
Florida enacted laws allowing people to carry concealed weapons.
Forty-one states followed suit, driving up the demand for smaller
weapons....
“People suddenly wanted to carry portable killing machines,” says
Tom Diaz, author of Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in
America, “and Kahr cornered that market.”.....
So how do Justin’s guns fit into Reverend Moon’s plans? One theory
is simple and innocuous: The reverend is just a rich father
indulging his kid....[Steven Hassan, a former member who says he
now counsels ex-cultists] notes that another Moon company, Tongil
Group, produces M16s and antiaircraft guns.
Justin is now the chairman of Tongil Group. Among other things, the
South Korea-based Tongil is in the business of making cars in North
Korea, once the ideological enemy of the True Father. Reverend Moon
years ago “told us he was making air rifles,” Hassan says. “He’s a
liar. Kahr Arms is a part of Moon’s plan for taking over the
world.” Of Tongil, Larry Zilliox adds, “Can you imagine what the
conservative guys buying Kahr guns would think if they knew that
the owner of Kahr is doing business with a communist country in the
axis of evil?”......
Later in the article, we read about the tragic "consequences" when
gun manufacturers operate without any responsibility. Kahr Arms
hired a crack addict as a gunsmith, who started stealing gun parts
from the gun plant, reassembling them at home and selling the
handguns for a huge profit. One of those handguns would later be
used to kill Danny Guzman.
[Mark Cronin] had a well-documented crack habit and a history of
violence. Not long after he landed a job on the factory floor, he
noticed that Kahr had no metal detectors and no visible security
cameras. That’s when he started stealing guns and selling them for
cocaine.
Cronin smuggled the guns out in pieces. Typically, he said in
documents filed in Massachusetts Superior Court, it took him about
a week to sneak out enough components for a complete gun. He
started with the smallest parts, such as the trigger and springs,
which were stored in a plastic 10-drawer cabinet at his workbench.
He stuffed the pieces into a ziplock bag, slipped the bag into his
pants pocket, and walked out with it at the end of the day. The
bigger parts, including the frame and the slide, were snuck out of
the factory one at a time. “I just took them home,” he testified,
“and built them.”
Cronin’s stolen guns were exceptionally valuable. Having bypassed
the serial-number-stamp stage at the factory, they were
untraceable, perfect for criminals. Although it’s not clear when
Cronin began unloading his wares on the streets, he sold the gun
that would kill Danny Guzman sometime in November 1999. It was a 9
millimeter, and the buyer was an old friend named Robert
Jachimczyk, a former high-school tennis star who’d recently dropped
out of community college. Cronin traded the gun for two half-grams
of cocaine, valued at about $80 at the time. Jachimczyk turned
around and sold the gun to Edwin Novas, the alleged shooter, for
$200 worth of cocaine. Feeling that the relationship had potential,
Cronin told Jachimczyk that he stole guns “all the time” and that
he “can just walk out with them,” according to the court documents.
The next deal didn’t go down as planned. Several weeks later,
Cronin traded Jachimczyk another gun for cocaine—a Kahr .40 caliber
without a serial number. As Jachimczyk was on his way to sell it to
Novas, police pulled him over, found the gun, and arrested him.
Police didn’t make the connection until later.
By the time of the shooting, Kahr was already in the spotlight. Not
only did police learn about Cronin’s activities; they discovered
that another employee had walked out of the factory with a 9
millimeter and an extra pistol slide and that there were dozens
more lost guns. Captain Paul Campbell, a detective for the
Worcester police, said that going back more than a year, “as many
as 50 weapons manufactured at the plant may be missing.” Campbell
also condemned Kahr’s “shoddy” bookkeeping and questioned its
security measures. The implication seemed to be that Kahr might as
well have been handing out guns to anyone.
After Daniel Guzman was shot and killed with one of Kahr's
handguns, Guzman's mother hired a lawyer who joined forces with the
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and filed a class-action
suit for wrongful death against Kahr, accusing the company of
negligence.
At the outset, it seemed like an open-and-shut case: If a gun
manufacturer can’t keep track of its wares and has a drug-addict
employee stealing and selling its products, shouldn’t that company
be held liable? But it’s not that straightforward. While it is
illegal for a known drug user to handle guns, no federal law
requires gun companies to secure their facilities or track their
inventory, except when shipping a completed firearm. “Most gun
companies have security set up,” says Daniel Vice, a lawyer for the
Brady Campaign. “You can’t really check this, because all but two—
Smith & Wesson and Ruger—are private. But I think most believe that
it’s not profitable to let guns leave the factory.
Vice argues that Kahr’s is an exceptional case. It was not simply a
question of the company’s bad hiring policies and slipshod
security. The argument is that its lax practices created an
atmosphere that endangered the Worcester community and resulted in
the death of Guzman. The plaintiffs aimed for a settlement in the
millions and hoped to make an example out of Kahr. “We have 32 gun
homicides every day in this country,” Vice says. “Certainly it is
not too much to ask a gunmaker not to hire drug addicts with
criminal records to work in its unsecured manufacturing plant.”.....
For a stretch, things looked bad for Kahr, until Congress, with
help from the lobbying power of the N.R.A., intervened. In October
2005, President Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in
Arms Act.
A coup for the gun industry, the act protected manufacturers and
dealers from liability for crimes committed with their products,
saving them from what they described as frivolous lawsuits that
threatened to bankrupt them. Kahr filed to dismiss again, citing
the new law, but Piñeiro and Vice argued that the law didn’t apply.
Most prominently, Vice pointed out that the law only applied to
guns “shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce” and
the murder weapon in this case was manufactured in Worcester and
used in Worcester, thus never crossing Massachusetts state lines.
In one small, galling detail, the writer of the Portfolio.com
article, Christopher Stewart, interviewed Justin Moon at "Shot
Show", a major gun convention in Orlando, Florida. While there:
"Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and his wife, who was dressed in
a leopard-print top, glad-hand the gun vote."
Stewart ends his article with this:
I have one last question before I leave. “Are you armed?” I ask
Justin. He doesn’t respond at first. Then he smiles. Not now, he
says. That’s prohibited in the convention center. Otherwise, he’d
have his PM9 on him. “I always carry my gun locked and loaded in a
holster. Quick access,” he declares, pointing to where he keeps it
on his belt. “If you need it, you gotta be ready.”
As if the "gun nut" world could get any nuttier.
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