Date: Fri Aug 6 15:25:52 1999 From: zonie@AZTEC.ASU.EDU (RICK DESTEPHENS) Subject: YOU! With the Gas Grill! Halt!! To: AZRKBA@asu.edu
First it was "Saturday Night Specials", then it was "junk guns", then "assault weapons" , then "sniper rifles." Now, they may be coming after your barbeque grill, nay, portable artillery piece. It will be for the children.
Dateline Bogota, Columbia--
The current weapon of choice fro Columbia's guerrillas (FARC) is cheap, abundant, easily transportable -- and terrifyingly effective. It is a homemade cannon. Dozens of times in the past year, guerrilla have surrounded towns and blasted the cannons at military or police outposts. Simple in design, the cannons are fashioned from cylinders containing cooking gas which are used commonly throughout the country. Guerillas hack off the tops of cylinders, place a charge inside, then nestle a smaller cylinder packed with explosives and metal fragmenst in the larger tube. The smaller cylinder is fired like a cvannon ball at targets within 100 yards. Accuracy is limited but when a samll building is hit, the impact and explosion can do great damage.
The cannons are devastatingly effective, flagrantly cruel to innocent bystanders and nearly impossible to halt given the pervasiveness of cooking gas cylinders.
"They are not playing fair," complained National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano. "They fire these cylinder indiscriminately, letting them fall where they may." Serrano claimed that the rebels sometimes pack the projectiles with sulfuric acid which has left soldiers with burned bodies. "They violate all knids of human rights with these, every aspect of international humanitarian law," Army commander, Gen Jorge Enrique Mora said. The army blamed the rebels for nearly all of the cooking gas cylinder thefts last year which totaled 10,975 units.
The army claimed that "according to data from state intelligence agencies, the FARC may have sent leaders to the Middle East and Europe to learn the making and employing of these lethal devices.
"We calculate that they lobbed more than 100 cylinders filled with exposives" in one battle, said an unidentified man. "It is a weapon of terror," said retired U.S. Marine Major Gil Macklin, a former adviser to the police and army.
"Sure we'll have fascism in America, but it'll come
disguised as Americanism."
-- Purportedly, Huey Long
Rick
-- "When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free, and was never free again." -- Edith Hamilton