About the Coalition to Prevent Assault Weapon Violence

The Coalition To Prevent Assault Weapon Violence was hastily organized in the wake of the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban expiration on September 13, 2004. We organized when one of our founding members read a press release by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence that AK-47s and Uzis were “coming to [our] neighborhood this summer.”

We investigated and determined that all scientific research to date shows that these weapons are rarely used in crimes. We trust that John Kerry, the Brady Campaign, and independent experts like Tim Robbins would never mislead us, so we set out to prove what the experts cannot – that assault weapons do cause crime.

To that end, we obtained the above “Colt AR-15” assault rifle from a local death merchant and configured a web-cam and lighting to monitor it 24 hours a day.

Much to our embarrassment, some astute volunteers pointed out that we needed to “load” the rifle with assault ammunition. A few days later, thanks to some generous paypal donations from our volunteers, we have the rifle loaded with a “magazine” and we again wait for spontaneous acts of violence.

You can make a difference

One of the first things we realized when we started this was that fellow anti-gun organizations have made mistakes in their claims that these weapons are inexpensive and readily available. Quite to the contrary, we ended up paying over $1,500 for the “Colt AR-15” we are currently monitoring! At least this is one assault weapon that is off of the streets!

Your spare funds could help us purchase additional weapons for testing. As little as $5 can buy ammunition that could be the missing catalyst that causes these weapons to rain destruction on our streets, allowing us to document this once and for all.

Put your money to work. So far we have yet to see violence from our assault weapons. However, we realize that the weapons we obtained for our testing is but a small subset of these extremely expensive, underpowered, inaccurate weapons apparently preferred by gang members, drug dealers and other dangerous criminals.