We strongly urge you to read a truly phenomenal story in Portfolio.com, "Money, Guns & God" about Justin Moon who started and currently runs Kahr Arms, a gun manufacturer that makes some of the most lethal handguns in the world and are often called "pocket rockets." If you don't have time to read this exceptional 13 page story -- and we hope you do -- we've excerpted some key parts and provide more context below. Background: Reverend Sun Myung Moon is a billionaire businessman and "self-proclaimed messiah who founded the Unification Church." He is the father of Justin Moon, the head of Kahr Arms.Rev. Moon owns the right-wing "Washington Times" daily newspaper in D.C. The "Washington Times" is an influential paper that lies at the nexus of the far right. Stories with a radically conservative bent often first appear on the "Washington Times' which are then fed into the right-wing echo chamber to be mass marketed through FOX News, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, the Weekly Standard, and a plethora of extremist pundits such as Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Malkin among scores of others.(For more info see the "Dark Side of Rev. Sun Myung Moon" by Consortium News). The gun empire of Justin Moon, the C.E.O. of Kahr Arms, may someday lead his father's Unification Church. Here are some highlights from the Portfolio article by Christopher Stewart who interviewed the reclusive Justin Moon: Kahr Arms is more than just the manufacturer of some of the smallest and most lethal weapons on earth (including the tommy gun, made famous by Al Capone).....Not much is known about Moon’s 37-year-old son, Justin, or how Kahr Arms fits into the church’s teachings and the reverend’s plans for world domination....He is also vigorously business-minded and has personally designed most of his company’s guns. He has grown Kahr Arms into one of America’s top privately owned handgun manufacturers, with sales of around $20 million a year and climbing at an annual rate of 30 percent.....[Justin Moon] was brought up to be a leader in his father’s religious kingdom. The Unification Church blends Christianity with Confucianism and anticommunism and divides the world into believers and nonbelievers. The duty of the believers, according to the church, is to conquer Satan and eradicate moral decay in the world, even if it means war with the infidels. The idea is that Reverend Moon, with God’s guidance, will one day take over the earth, restoring it to peace and love. When the Moon family moved to America from South Korea in the 1970s, critics were already calling their followers the Moonies. They were portrayed by some as a brainwashing personality cult with a thing for mass marriages and strange ideas (a highway around the world or a modern Eden in a Brazilian swamp), whose leader had a reputation for living off the work of his followers.....Among believers, Justin’s mother and father are known as the True Parents, an acknowledgment of the reverend’s distinctive relationship with God; he claims to have spoken to Jesus. Justin and his siblings are considered just as holy. They are called the True Children, and they have lived their lives accordingly. Sort of makes you rethink your assumptions about the gun industry and gun lobby doesn't it? Portfolio continues to highlight how Justin became more and more fascinated with guns: By the age of 14, Justin had become interested in guns. “My brothers introduced me to shooting,” he tells me. “We’d shoot pistols and rifles, go target shooting and hunting.”.... At 18, Justin got a license to carry a handgun, co-signed by one of his older brothers. He became obsessed with guns, especially the compact Walther PPK, the brand James Bond carried. Justin pored over trade magazines and sketched out his own designs. By his junior year of college, he had decided that he wanted to make his own weapons and that guns would be his future. Over the next two years, he worked on the design and often traveled to Saeilo, the family’s precision-machine company in Queens, New York, where he began to build a prototype. He wasn’t an engineer, but that didn’t matter.
In 1992, he graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, and soon after, the perfect pistol—the one that would get the tight-knit gun world talking—was complete.... In 1993, Justin founded Kahr [Arms], taking for the name a made-up word that combined his affection for German engineering and fast cars. It is unclear what role his father had in the formation of the company, but many people familiar with Kahr believe the True Father was at the very least consulted.... What is known is that in his early twenties, the son of the True Father morphed from Kook Jin into Justin Moon, and right away his objective was clear. “I wanted to create the ultimate line of concealable pistols,” he tells me. Justin’s prototype became Kahr’s first gun, a double-action steel 9 millimeter he called the K9. It weighed 25 ounces and was six inches long, about as big as a wallet. Although the world had seen small guns before, it had not seen small guns that fired large-caliber bullets and fit snugly, almost invisibly, in the pocket of a pair of beach shorts. Gun folks called it a pocket rocket...."(See the Violence Policy Center study: "Pocket Rockets: The Gun Industry's Sale of Increased Killing Power). Kahr’s break was partly due to timing. In the late 1980s, America had entered a new age of hidden firepower, thanks to a movement led by the National Rifle Association championing self-reliance, freedom, and Second Amendment rights. It began in 1987, when Florida enacted laws allowing people to carry concealed weapons. Forty-one states followed suit, driving up the demand for smaller weapons.... “People suddenly wanted to carry portable killing machines,” says Tom Diaz, author of Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America, “and Kahr cornered that market.”.....So how do Justin’s guns fit into Reverend Moon’s plans? One theory is simple and innocuous: The reverend is just a rich father indulging his kid.... [Steven Hassan, a former member who says he now counsels ex-cultists] notes that another Moon company, Tongil Group, produces M16s and antiaircraft guns. Justin is now the chairman of Tongil Group. Among other things, the South Korea-based Tongil is in the business of making cars in North Korea, once the ideological enemy of the True Father. Reverend Moon years ago “told us he was making air rifles,” Hassan says. “He’s a liar.
Kahr Arms is a part of Moon’s plan for taking over the world.” Of Tongil, Larry Zilliox adds, “Can you imagine what the conservative guys buying Kahr guns would think if they knew that the owner of Kahr is doing business with a communist country in the axis of evil?”......Later in the article, we read about the tragic "consequences" when gun manufacturers operate without any responsibility. Kahr Arms hired a crack addict as a gunsmith, who started stealing gun parts from the gun plant, reassembling them at home and selling the handguns for a huge profit. One of those handguns would later be used to kill Danny Guzman.[Mark Cronin] had a well-documented crack habit and a history of violence. Not long after he landed a job on the factory floor, he noticed that Kahr had no metal detectors and no visible security cameras. That’s when he started stealing guns and selling them for cocaine. Cronin smuggled the guns out in pieces. Typically, he said in documents filed in Massachusetts Superior Court, it took him about a week to sneak out enough components for a complete gun. He started with the smallest parts, such as the trigger and springs, which were stored in a plastic 10-drawer cabinet at his workbench. He stuffed the pieces into a ziplock bag, slipped the bag into his pants pocket, and walked out with it at the end of the day. The bigger parts, including the frame and the slide, were snuck out of the factory one at a time. “I just took them home,” he testified, “and built them.” Cronin’s stolen guns were exceptionally valuable.
Having bypassed the serial-number-stamp stage at the factory, they were untraceable, perfect for criminals. Although it’s not clear when Cronin began unloading his wares on the streets, he sold the gun that would kill Danny Guzman sometime in November 1999. It was a 9 millimeter, and the buyer was an old friend named Robert Jachimczyk, a former high-school tennis star who’d recently dropped out of community college. Cronin traded the gun for two half-grams of cocaine, valued at about $80 at the time. Jachimczyk turned around and sold the gun to Edwin Novas, the alleged shooter, for $200 worth of cocaine. Feeling that the relationship had potential, Cronin told Jachimczyk that he stole guns “all the time” and that he “can just walk out with them,” according to the court documents. The next deal didn’t go down as planned. Several weeks later, Cronin traded Jachimczyk another gun for cocaine—a Kahr .40 caliber without a serial number. As Jachimczyk was on his way to sell it to Novas, police pulled him over, found the gun, and arrested him. Police didn’t make the connection until later. By the time of the shooting, Kahr was already in the spotlight. Not only did police learn about Cronin’s activities; they discovered that another employee had walked out of the factory with a 9 millimeter and an extra pistol slide and that there were dozens more lost guns. Captain Paul Campbell, a detective for the Worcester police, said that going back more than a year, “as many as 50 weapons manufactured at the plant may be missing.” Campbell also condemned Kahr’s “shoddy” bookkeeping and questioned its security measures. The implication seemed to be that Kahr might as well have been handing out guns to anyone. After Daniel Guzman was shot and killed with one of Kahr's handguns, Guzman's mother hired a lawyer who joined forces with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and filed a class-action suit for wrongful death against Kahr, accusing the company of negligence. At the outset, it seemed like an open-and-shut case: If a gun manufacturer can’t keep track of its wares and has a drug-addict employee stealing and selling its products, shouldn’t that company be held liable? But it’s not that straightforward. While it is illegal for a known drug user to handle guns, no federal law requires gun companies to secure their facilities or track their inventory, except when shipping a completed firearm. “Most gun companies have security set up,” says Daniel Vice, a lawyer for the Brady Campaign. “You can’t really check this, because all but two—Smith & Wesson and Ruger—are private. But I think most believe that it’s not profitable to let guns leave the factory. Vice argues that Kahr’s is an exceptional case. It was not simply a question of the company’s bad hiring policies and slipshod security. The argument is that its lax practices created an atmosphere that endangered the Worcester community and resulted in the death of Guzman. The plaintiffs aimed for a settlement in the millions and hoped to make an example out of Kahr. “We have 32 gun homicides every day in this country,” Vice says. “Certainly it is not too much to ask a gunmaker not to hire drug addicts with criminal records to work in its unsecured manufacturing plant.”.....For a stretch, things looked bad for Kahr, until Congress, with help from the lobbying power of the N.R.A., intervened. In October 2005, President Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. A coup for the gun industry, the act protected manufacturers and dealers from liability for crimes committed with their products, saving them from what they described as frivolous lawsuits that threatened to bankrupt them. Kahr filed to dismiss again, citing the new law, but Piñeiro and Vice argued that the law didn’t apply. Most prominently, Vice pointed out that the law only applied to guns “shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce” and the murder weapon in this case was manufactured in Worcester and used in Worcester, thus never crossing Massachusetts state lines. In one small, galling detail, the writer of the Portfolio.com article, Christopher Stewart, interviewed Justin Moon at "Shot Show", a major gun convention in Orlando, Florida. While there: "Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and his wife, who was dressed in a leopard-print top, glad-hand the gun vote." Stewart ends his article with this: I have one last question before I leave. “Are you armed?” I ask Justin. He doesn’t respond at first. Then he smiles. Not now, he says. That’s prohibited in the convention center. Otherwise, he’d have his PM9 on him. “I always carry my gun locked and loaded in a holster. Quick access,” he declares, pointing to where he keeps it on his belt. “If you need it, you gotta be ready.”
As if the "gun nut" world could get any nuttier.
http://www.gunguys.com/?p=2482
What an article! Damn we got some psychopath freaks in this world.
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