Rifle

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

WASHINGTON - Sen. Joe Manchin III owns two 12-gauge Beretta shotguns, a semiautomatic Remington 58 Sportsman and a deer rifle. Since he was elected to the Senate two years ago, he has easily maintained an A rating from the National Rifle Assn. That rating might be considered crucial to the survival of a Democrat from a conservative, rural state like West Virginia. So after news broke of the Newtown, Conn., school shootings on a Friday in December, his staff debated what he should do. The consensus was that Manchin should cancel a scheduled appearance the following Monday to talk about fiscal issues on MSNBC's "Morning Joe. " Surely the hosts would press the senator on gun control, and it seemed that almost anything he said could spell trouble so early in the aftermath of the tragedy.

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Adam Lanza, the suspect in the suburban Connecticut elementary school shooting rampage, tried to purchase a "long gun" rifle from a local shop but was turned away because he did not want to wait for the required 14-day background check, law enforcement sources said Saturday. As this western Connecticut town continued to seek a way of coping with the grief from Friday's shooting that left 28 people dead, including the gunman and his mother, officials pressed their search into how and why one of the worst massacres in U.S. history took place.

NEW YORK -- A 4-year-old boy picked up his father's loaded .22 caliber rifle, walked outside and shot a 6-year-old friend in the head, leaving the victim in serious condition and shattering a normally quiet New Jersey neighborhood.  The shooting occurred Monday evening in Toms River, N.J., about 70 miles south of New York City, one day after an incident in Tennessee involving a 4-year-old who got his hands on a loaded gun. In the Tennessee shooting...

NEW YORK -- A 4-year-old boy picked up his father's loaded .22 caliber rifle, walked outside and shot a 6-year-old friend in the head, leaving the victim in serious condition and shattering a normally quiet New Jersey neighborhood.  The shooting occurred Monday evening in Toms River, N.J., about 70 miles south of New York City, one day after an incident in Tennessee involving a 4-year-old who got his hands on a loaded gun. In the Tennessee shooting...

A 20-year-old man using a family hunting rifle shot and killed his parents, his sister and her boyfriend as they slept in their beds, police in this western Norwegian port said Friday. The unidentified man was found clutching the rifle near the bodies of his parents when his brother arrived home, police said. The motive for the killings was unknown.

A 21-year-old man was fatally shot in the Antelope Valley when a friend, who thought that the rifle he was playing with was empty, fired a shot at him, authorities said Saturday. The victim, Robert Gladysz of La Canada Flintridge, was taken by helicopter to Antelope Valley Hospital Medical Center in Lancaster, where he was pronounced dead, said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt. Ernie Roop. The incident occurred at 11:30 p.m. Friday, Roop said. Five friends from the La Canada Flintridge area had been drinking heavily and playing with a .22-caliber rifle at the Littlerock Dam Recreation Area, he said.

A judge in Nashville said the rifle believed used by James Earl Ray to assassinate civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. ought to be sent to a Memphis museum when the government is finished examining it. Davidson County Circuit Court Judge Frank Clement ruled previously that the rifle belongs to the state of Tennessee and not to Ray's brother, Jerry, who claims the rifle was not the murder weapon and that it belongs to him.

The hijackers of the Achille Lauro used a rifle to force the ship's hairdresser and a waiter to throw Leon Klinghoffer's body into the sea, an Italian newspaper reported today. The waiter, Joaquim Pineiro da Silva, was quoted as saying that two hijackers held an automatic rifle to his back and threatened to kill him and the hairdresser, Ferruccio Alberti, if they did not obey.

As a youngster, Frederic J. Gaynor was the rosy-cheeked boy in rolled-up jeans cradling the popular Daisy air rifle. His all-American image in advertisements on the back covers of Boys' Life magazine, comic books and other publications helped make the rifle a staple on the Christmas lists of countless baby boomers in the 1950s. Gaynor, who became a Foreign Service officer, died of cancer March 29 at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 74. Frederic John Gaynor was born in Chicago in 1935.

The news is that a semi-automatic rifle belonging to the head of Utah's biggest gun lobby was reported stolen. But that's not the whole story. First of all, there's delicious irony to the fact that a fellow who makes a living arguing that people need guns to protect themselves from bad guys has now provided a very powerful gun to a bad guy. This highlights one of the often-overlooked aspects of the gun control debate: Guns don't just magically appear in the hands of baddies.

WASHINGTON - The fate of gun control proposals in Congress this year may depend on who is more potent: Michael R. Bloomberg the billionaire or Michael R. Bloomberg the boogeyman. With signs that momentum for stiffer gun laws has begun to flag on Capitol Hill, the White House and gun control proponents are increasingly turning to the mogul mayor of New York to carry the fight into key congressional districts. He has bankrolled a high-profile campaign to counter the political might of the National Rifle Assn.

TUCSON - As the Dodgers prepared to play a charity game Thursday in remembrance of a young shooting victim, Manager Don Mattingly said he favored a ban on assault rifles. Mattingly was initially reluctant to talk about gun control. “Politics now?” Mattingly asked. “I don't know if I really want to get into it. I'm just not a gun guy. I never hunted as a kid. So I'm not much for the topic. I know we have coaches who love them; they think it'd be crazy if they weren't allowed to have them.” But Mattingly soon found himself talking about assault weapons.

To hear Utah authorities tell it, Andrew Marlin Curtis wanted to crash a wedding. Instead, he crashed a pilfered truck in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City-area church. And now he's behind bars. Police in Midvale, a suburb of Salt Lake City, say the 30-year-old Curtis stole a truck last week while trying to stop a former girlfriend's wedding. He was charged on Thursday with unauthorized control of a vehicle for an extended time, a third-degree felony. “Stealing a car to stop a wedding?

When a St. Paul, Minn., man was annoyed that his teenage daughter had failed to get straight A's in school, he made his displeasure known by threatening her with an AK-47, officials said Friday. Kirill Bartashevitch, 51, was arraigned in Ramsey County District Court on two felony counts of terroristic threats, a court spokeswoman said  Friday. He is being held pending the posting of a $20,000 bail-bond. According to St. Paul police spokesman Sgt. Paul Paulos, Bartashevitch threatened the 15-year-old girl because she received two B's on her report card rather than straight A's. It was not known which subjects were the problem, Paulos said.

It would be wrong to base one's judgments about politicians too heavily on their gaffes. Public speakers are exposed to microphones so often that it would be shocking if the occasional boneheaded remark didn't slip out. But in the case of National Rifle Assn. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, the achingly incongruous statements tend not to come from off-the-cuff remarks but carefully vetted prepared statements. Which leaves us to wonder: How can anybody possibly attract such a large and financially powerful following by uttering statements that defy third-grade logic?

Los Angeles was host to the Summer Olympics 25 years ago. This third part of a 16-day series looks back at Day 3, Monday, July 30, 1984: The big news The U.S. boxing team was out to match the 1952 and 1976 U.S. teams that had each won five Olympic gold medals. Paul Gonzales, a light-flyweight from East L.A., got it off to an impressive start by routing his toughest competition, Korea's Kwang Sun Kim, at the Sports Arena. Though Kim was ranked No. 2 in the world and Gonzales No.

At the end of a St. Patrick Day's gathering, Brian Russell Kaplon and David Andrew Armstrong went into the garage of Armstrong's home in a gated community in Porter Ranch. Armstrong kept a collection of guns in the garage. What happened next is unclear because Kaplon, an executive at NBCUniversal, and Armstrong, a marketing executive, were the only ones there. But just after midnight March 18, Kaplon suffered a fatal gunshot wound from one of Armstrong's military-style rifles. At first, Los Angeles Police Department detectives thought the shooting might be an accident.

Greg Griego's wife, a son and two daughters were already dead. One of his other sons, Nehemiah, 15, was waiting for him in a bathroom with a high-velocity AR-15 rifle, police say. Greg Griego, who'd turned around a troubled life and involvement with gangs to become a chaplain, apparently had spent his last hours helping the homeless in Albuquerque, according to the Albuquerque Journal. He was returning home from an overnight shift at the Albuquerque Rescue Mission when he was killed early Saturday morning, the newspaper reported.

Police officers in the Fontana Unified School District were armed recently with semiautomatic rifles, drawing sharp criticism and sparking an effort to ban such weapons on school campuses. The Colt military-style rifles, which cost about $1,000 each, are kept in safes when officers are on campus and will be used only in "extreme emergency cases" like the massacre in Newtown, Conn., Supt. Cali Olsen-Binks said. The district purchased the rifles in October and received them in December, before the tragedy in Newtown, where a gunman killed 26 people - 20 of them children - at an elementary school.