An Open Letter
AN OPEN LETTER
I am writing this as an open letter to various federal Department of Justice officials in the hope of making the case for initiating investigations of those entities and persons supplying military grade weaponry which are commonly being used in mass shootings throughout the U.S.
My name is Thomas Coffin and my background includes 21 years as an AUSA serving in the Southern District of California (10 years) and the District of Oregon (11 years). While in San Diego, I was honored to be appointed to the position of Chief of the Criminal Division and received the Director’s Award for my prosecution of a Federal Protective Officer who raped and murdered a 19-year old migrant he encountered at the border. In Oregon, I was appointed to serve as the Supervisor of the Eugene Division and was recognized as a Senior Litigation Counsel by the DOJ. I then was appointed a U.S. Magistrate Judge and served in that capacity for 30 years prior to retiring.
With this background, I wish to respectfully suggest that our nation’s many serial mass shooting murders warrant a coordinated and thorough criminal investigation in all the Districts in which they have or will occur. I do not suggest this lightly and will briefly summarize my reasoning.
Most of the mass shootings plaguing our nation are committed by killers wielding semi-automatic firearms developed for our military forces which are specially designed to kill the most enemy soldiers in the shortest amount of time. Selling these weapons to the private sector simply substitutes civilians for enemy soldiers as the intended targets. In this letter, I won’t delve into Second Amendment rhetoric because that is irrelevant to the point I wish to emphasize: if I know or have reason to know an acquaintance who intends to rob a bank, and I sell him my gun regardless, I can be prosecuted for conspiring to aid and abet an armed bank robbery. Of course, I will claim ignorance of the plot, and that will be a critical issue. This is a very simplistic example, so allow me to elaborate.
The key ingredients to criminal liability are knowledge and intent. Liability, however, cannot be avoided by deliberately remaining ignorant of the details.
An actual and sophisticated version of the deliberate ignorance ploy occurred during Congressional hearings when a legislator asked a gun industry representative if his corporation kept statistics regarding the usage of its AR-15s in mass shootings. His flippant answer was, “No, why should we?” This is a classic deliberate ignorance avoidance of facts easily ascertainable in order to evade accountability for the corporation’s role in arming the criminals with the means to carry out the intended illegal acts.
But beyond just a contrived pretext of lack of awareness of intent on the part of the purchasers, there is also often direct proof of such in the manner in which the weaponry is promoted. A few examples are listed below:
1) Illinois manufacturer Wee 1 Tactical has promoted a light weight AR-15 specifically for children and teens, touting its possession of the same “punch” or lethality as the adult version. With school shootings a national scourge commanding headlines with every episode, the connection is barely if at all disguised. (For images and further information, see These 5 gun ads are alarming critics, changing laws.)
2) Another manufacturer, Combat, features an “Urban Super Sniper” which is so precise it will hit its target within an inch over a distance of 100 yards. There isn’t even a pretext of the “self-defense” justification for urban sniping firearms. There is no conceivable lawful purpose for providing urban snipers with the means to murder pedestrians on New York sidewalks from atop a tall building.
3) Bushmaster ads for semi-automatic firearms had slogans like “Consider your Man Card issued” and “Forces of Opposition, Bow Down.”
4) Sig Sauer marketed its MCX-SPEAR version of the AR-15 by promoting its dramatic increase in lethality with ammunition which has twice the kinetic energy of the previous model and is thus capable piercing body armor to kill targets protected by armor. It also comes equipped with a suppressor, aka, silencer. Again, hardly even lip service to the self-defense canard. And why is the “lethality” of the weapon a selling point other than, as pointed out above, the purpose of the firearm is to kill as many people as possible in the shortest period of time?
5) Other evidence can be found in the attempt by Mexico to hold certain manufacturers accountable for marketing military weaponry to Mexican cartels, which use them to murder Mexican citizens and attack even the Mexican military with modern firearms developed for our armed forces.
There are numerous other leads which federal agencies have the ability to follow up on. I write only to urge your consideration to do so, because this epidemic of mass murders is taking the lives of so many innocent people and even schoolchildren who are being murdered in the very schools where they have a fundamental right to learn and grow. Instead, today they exist in constant fear of being killed. A cruel distortion of the Second Amendment has become a death sentence for our children, and law enforcement must employ all of its tools to protect them from what has become a serial ritual of genocide with no end in sight.
Finally, I wish to draw your attention to the precedents of Rice v. Paladin Enterprises, Inc. 128 F.3d 233 (4th Cir.1997) and United States v Barnett, 667 F2d 835 (9th Cir. 1982) which involved comparable issues raised regarding First Amendment defenses to liability based on speech (Paladin marketed a Hit Man handbook containing instructions on how to assassinate people without leaving incriminating evidence at the scene.) These defenses were rejected, with the Rice v. Paladin case noting that “aiding and abetting of an illegal act may be carried out through speech is no bar to its illegality.” Likewise, the existence of the Second Amendment is not a bar to aiding and abetting an illegal act simply because it is carried out through firearms commerce that may otherwise be within the contours of the Amendment.
Thomas M. Coffin
Retired after a 51-year career in the federal justice system
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Thomas Coffin was the keynote speaker at the Blackberry Pie Society’s Political Party in February, 2020 and at Politics and Pie in October, 2022. He is a retired federal magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and a former professor at the UO Law School. Thomas retired in 2016 after 24 years on the bench, prior to which he had a career as a federal prosecutor spanning 21 years. He is married with 7 children. The Blackberry Pie Society is pleased to include a collection of his essays on our website. We will post them as they become available.
posted 6.16. 2023