0.5-Caliber Rifle For Snipers Finds Itself Under Assault

Twisted into a rage by his crumbling marriage, 35-year-old Albert Petrosky walked into a Colorado grocery four years ago and gunned down his wife. Then he stationed himself on a slope outside, waiting for police. When Jefferson County Sheriff's Sgt. Timothy Mossbrucker pulled up in his cruiser, Petrosky killed him in a blast of gunfire.

Investigators were stunned when they saw one of Petrosky's weapons: a .50-caliber sniper rifle. When the gun was test-fired, a bullet bore through a manhole cover "like a hot knife through butter," said Jefferson County Chief Deputy District Attorney Peter Weir. "It's probably the most powerful weapon I've seen in 20 years of prosecuting cases."

That power horrifies gun-control advocates but enthralls gun lovers, who have elevated the .50-caliber weapon - the largest sniper rifle available to civilians - to iconic status within the growing subculture of firepower enthusiasts. Exalted in gun magazines, sold on the Internet and adored by competitive marksmen, sniper rifles are creating their own niche in the firearms market - and a backlash.

Gun for shooting helicopters

"How is it this could be available in the civilian market?" asked Rep. Rod Blagojevich, D-Ill., who has proposed banning the gun. "It is designed to take out armored personnel carriers, fortified bunkers, helicopters."

Indeed, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing markets its popular semiautomatic M82A1 by boasting that it is the most widely used .50-caliber rifle among armies around the world. Ads cite its "battle-proven performance" and success in detonating land mines from a distance.

The .50-caliber rifle's long-distance capacity makes it ideal for an assassination attempt. When it was introduced to the civilian market in the early 1980s, the Secret Service argued unsuccessfully that it should be outlawed, according to Joe Vince, a former official at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Blagojevich and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., are preparing legislation that would ban the rifles for all civilians except for competitive marksmen who belong to .50-caliber shooting clubs. In those cases, the guns would be kept under the control of the club itself.

Gun alluring to shooters

The proposed ban, however, faces serious opposition from an unusual contingent of shooters. Begun in the 1980s by a group of engineers, the .50-Caliber Shooters Association has seen its membership expand to 1,600. And those members have upscale demographics: their average age is 45, nearly half are college-educated and 60 percent earn more than $50,000 annually, according to club files.

The gun's size and power are part of the allure, said James Schmidt, an ammunition manufacturer who is on the board of the .50-Caliber Shooters Association.

"There is a fascination with the long range, the larger caliber," he said.

"To a lot of these shooters, it's the next level up. It's not any different than if you drove a Cadillac for years, and now you're going to a Mercedes."

Tom Diaz, who authored a study on the sale of sniper rifles for the Violence Policy Center, argues the gun's allure is manufactured to make more sales in a saturated market.

"The gun industry, by necessity, looks to innovation, which is increased lethality," Diaz said.

Diaz contends that the glorified image draws a young, impressionable and sometimes unstable audience. But .50-caliber fans argue that the guns are too expensive and heavy to be much of a crime threat.

"This is not a rifle you run down to the gun store and buy," Schmidt said.

Still, the weapons are turning up regularly in criminal conspiracies. The Irish Republican Army used them to snipe at British soldiers. Seven Cuban Americans were indicted in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro after two of the rifles were found hidden on a boat off the coast of Puerto Rico in 1997.

The .50-caliber evolved from the fearsome Browning machine gun of World War II fame. More modern and accurate than its machine-gun ancestor, the first .50-caliber civilian sniper rifle was designed in the early 1980s by Ronnie Barrett, owner of Barrett Firearms Manufacturing.

While six companies manufacture .50-caliber rifles, Barrett's M82A1 has drawn the most attention. It was featured in the 1987 movie "Robocop" and used by the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf War to fire armor-piercing shells at tanks, armored personnel carriers and land mines.

The assault on the gun, he argued, is misdirected because his .50-caliber rifle is only slightly more powerful than a standard elk rifle.