For Release: Sunday, May 15, 2022
Washington, DC — Following the mass shooting yesterday at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York reportedly committed with a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle equipped with a high-capacity ammunition magazine that left 10 dead, including the store’s armed security guard, and three injured, Violence Policy Center (VPC) Executive Director Josh Sugarmann issued the following statement:
“Once again, a military-bred assault rifle equipped with a high-capacity ammunition magazine was used for the exact purpose for which it was designed: to kill and injure as many people as quickly and efficiently as possible. This latest mass shooting, fueled by racial hate, is the direct result of the gun industry’s embrace of militarization and heightened lethality in the products it markets to civilians. In a nation where anyone with a fairly clean record, a credit card, and a self-defined ‘mission’ can outfit themselves for war, including body armor and other tactical gear, these horrific attacks will continue. Our nation is being held hostage by the gun industry, and until the industry is held fully accountable for the direct role it plays in these massacres, communities across the nation will continue to live in fear of the next horrendous attack.”
VPC Resources
For background information on Bushmaster’s militarized marketing, please see http://vpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bushmaster2018.pdf.
For a listing of examples of mass shootings in the United States since 1980 involving large-capacity ammunition magazines, please see https://vpc.org/fact_sht/VPCshootinglist.pdf.
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The Violence Policy Center is a national educational organization working to stop gun death and injury. Follow the VPC on Twitter and Facebook.
