Frederick’s sheriff has adolescent obsession
Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film, “Born on the Fourth of July,” about Vietnam veteranturned-war-protester Ron Kovic, appeared on Netflix last week. I hadn’t seen it since its release in 1989, when its star, Tom Cruise, was 27 years old, so I gave it another look.
It’s a hard film to watch, but opens innocently enough: The 10-year-old Kovic and his buddies playing soldiers, armed with toy machine guns, in a wooded area of small-town Long Island in 1956. It’s something thousands of boomers did, pretending they were men at war, wielding rat-atat replicas of the Thompson submachine gun, or Tommy gun, like the ones actors used in countless movies and TV shows.
The male fascination with guns, especially high-powered ones, emanates in part from their frequent appearance in the violent films and network dramas of the last 60 years. Some people think it’s nonsense, that violent movies, TV shows and video games contribute to an obsession with guns. But it strikes me as a logical progression.
I found some affirmation of that on the Facebook page of The Machine Gun Nest, the Maryland shooting range that figures in the federal indictment of Frederick County’s high-profile, hard-right sheriff, Chuck Jenkins.
“We create an entire experience unavailable elsewhere,” the shooting range declares. “So if you have ever wanted to shoot a firearm that you have seen on TV, the movies or a video game, you can now do that! Guns like: AK-47, MP5, M16, P90, and much more!”
Jenkins, well known for his hard line on undocumented immigrants, and Rob Krop, the owner of The Machine Gun Nest, have been charged in a scheme to use Jenkins’ law enforcement position to obtain two strictly-regulated machine guns for Krop’s business.
Timeout for a definition: As distinguished from the military-style, semi-automatic rifles commonly used in mass shootings, a machine gun is an automatic weapon. It is defined in federal law as a “device that, when activated by a single pull of the trigger, initiates an automatic firing cycle that continues until the finger is released or the ammunition supply is exhausted.”
In the 1980s, Congress decided that semi-automatic guns that fire once for each trigger squeeze were OK, but that the civilian purchase or sale of machine guns no longer would be.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (known as the ATF), it is unlawful for any person to sell or possess a machine gun manufactured or imported on or after May 19, 1986. But there’s an exception relevant to the Krop-Jenkins indictment: Machine guns can be used to demonstrate their firepower to a government agency, such as a police department with a SWAT team, that might want to purchase them. Gun dealers have asked the ATF for permission to do that.
In 2002, the ATF said it would grant the exception under certain conditions, including “letters from government entities expressing a need for a particular model or interest in seeing a demonstration of a particular weapon.”
The six-count indictment against Jenkins and Krop alleges that they conspired over a sevenyear period to falsify multiple documents, on the sheriff ’s official letterhead, to request machine guns for the sheriff ’s “evaluation and demonstration.”
Krop is alleged to have drafted the letters for Jenkins’ signature, knowing full well that the guns were actually intended for rental to Krop’s customers. In return for the profits made, Krop’s business supported Jenkins in his political campaigns, the indictment says.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore also alleges that Krop illegally possessed seven machine guns.
When the indictment came down last week, Jenkins did not appear in public to deny the charges. He instead sent a spokesman to a news conference to say that the sheriff had been “cooperating” with the feds for a year. Jenkins did not directly state his innocence.
On Wednesday in Baltimore, he did. Jenkins pleaded not guilty to the charges and said he would take a leave of absence from his post. A federal judge ordered him to surrender his firearms while he awaits trial.
Perusal of the Facebook page of The Machine Gun Nest turned up a video of Krop, the 36-yearold owner of the shooting range, complaining that federal “three-letter organizations,” an apparent reference to the ATF and FBI, have been on his back for the last year.
The federal agencies, Krop said, have been asking for information about customers of The Machine Gun Nest. “We lawyered up, and we refused” to provide that information, he said. (If he didn’t want ATF scrutiny, maybe Krop should not have named his business The Machine Gun Nest. Just sayin’.)
Krop also complains in the video that a Maryland bank canceled all of The Machine Gun Nest’s accounts “for no other reason than the nature of our business.”
Krop issues a warning to his customers that federal law enforcement agencies want customer information “for eventual removal of your guns.”
That’s the resentful rhetoric typical of the gun-obsessed, raising fears that regulation of deadly weapons — “devices” that facilitate murder and suicide every day in this country — presents some atrocious burden on those who want to own high-powered firearms because they’re fun to shoot.
There are many divisions in this perilously polarized country. One of the greatest and most tragic is between those who maintain their adolescent obsession with guns, despite the enormous problems they’ve created, and the rest of us, who grew up and out of it.