WASHINGTON - The semi-automatic rifle seized by sniper-hunting police near Washington DC yesterday had been sold to a distributor in Washington state, on the other side of the country, in June, the gun's manufacturer said.
Richard Dyke, chairman of Bushmaster Firearms, Inc., said the US Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms had faxed a serial number to his company early on Thursday morning to trace the weapon.
"We looked at our records," he said in a telephone interview with Reuters from his headquarters in Windham, Maine. "It was sold to a distributor in the state of Washington in June this year."
Dyke said the gun was the Bushmaster XM-15 Rifle A-3 -- a matte-black semi-automatic featuring a flat top and firing .223 caliber rounds through a chrome-lined stainless steel barrel.
A semi-automatic fires a round each time its trigger is squeezed. The rifle is the semi-automatic civilian equivalent of the standard-issue M-16 automatic rifle on which US armed forces are trained. The XM-15 is a clone of the AR-15 design, sometimes referred to as the Swiss Army knife of rifles because of its vast customization potential.
The sniper terrorizing the Washington area since Oct. 2 fired a single .223 round in each of 13 attacks, 10 which were fatal. Early Thursday police arrested two suspects in the case.
The gun's flat top can accommodate a variety of sight, scope or night-vision and laser-targeting devices, Dyke said, adding that the barrel could have been 16 inches or 20 inches long.
The Washington state gun distributor, whom Dyke declined to identify, could have sold the weapon directly to a consumer, perhaps for US$700 to US$800, or to a dealer who would have sold it in turn, the manufacturer said.
"It's a gun that is bought by a lot of people who go out and do competitive shooting," he said. It was also popular with those doing "varmint hunting on a weekend with their friends and people shooting on ranges," Dyke said.
Bushmaster is a major supplier of weapons to the FBI, the US military and other government agencies. It supplies the Energy Department with the guns used to protect US nuclear power plants, he said.
The company manufactures two basic rifles -- the XM-15 semi-automatic and a range of fully automatic M-16 designs sold only to law enforcement and the military, Dyke said.
