The gun seized from two suspects in the sniper shootings is a Bushmaster XM-15 M4 A3, a civilian version of the standard American military rifle, the M-16, according to officials of its manufacturer, Bushmaster Firearms.
Bushmaster Firearms is a small privately owned company in Windham, Maine, that specializes in making copies of the M-16. Last year it made 50,000 rifles, said the company's vice president, Allen Faraday, with the XM-15 selling for about $800. On its Web site, Bushmaster advertises its rifles as "the best, by a long shot."
Michael Bouchard, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said at a news conference Thursday that tests have linked the seized gun to the killings.
Faraday said that the gun had first been sold to a distributor in Washington state last June. He declined to identify the wholesaler, and he said he did not know how or where one of the suspects, John Allen Muhammad, had acquired the rifle.
The XM-15 is shorter than the M-16 and lacks the usual carrying handle on top, to allow the mounting of a telescopic sight.
The sniper's choice of the XM-15 was a little unusual, Faraday said, because it has a 16-inch barrel and is therefore less accurate than the conventional 20-inch barrel of the M-16 or a 26-inch barrel in many sniper rifles. But the shorter barrel does make the XM-15 easier to conceal.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Faraday said, "Naturally, we feel terrible and horrified" by the sniper's killings in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. "We are very sad this deranged and crazy man picked up one of our guns." Bushmaster first learned the identity of the gun seized in Muhammad's car when agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms called the company a few hours later with the weapon's serial number, Faraday said.
Legally, Muhammad apparently should not have been able to buy a gun because he was under a domestic protective order taken out in March 2000 by Mildred Denice Muhammad, then his wife, in state superior court in Tacoma, Wash., court records show. The couple, who lived in Tacoma, were divorced in October 2000, and the restraining order was made permanent, the court documents also show.
The 1994 Crime Control law made it illegal for a person under a restraining order to purchase or possess a gun, and a mandatory background check should have revealed Muhammad's disqualification. It was Muhammad's possession of the gun despite his disqualification that led law enforcement authorities to charge him Wednesday night with a firearms violation, according to an ATF official.
Faraday was careful to say that its copies of the M-16 were not assault weapons, since they do not have collapsible stocks, flash suppressors or a mounting to install a bayonet, some features that were ruled out by the 1994 ban. The magazine of the XM-15 also holds only 10 rounds, the permissible limit set by the 1994 ban.
In addition, the rifle is only a semiautomatic, requiring a trigger pull for each shot, not fully automatic as a military rifle, which allows multiple rounds to be fired with a single pull of the trigger.
But Kristen Rand, the legislative director for the Violence Policy Center in Washington, a gun control group, said that the XM-15 seized in Muhammad's car still had features that mimic an assault weapon, including a pistol grip that makes it easy to fire from the hip and a detachable magazine that holds 10 rounds.
"It complies with the letter of the law, but it is still an assault rifle," Rand said. The assault-weapons ban expires in 2004 and is considered likely to be the subject of a major fight in Congress. The National Rifle Association strongly opposed the ban and has made not renewing it a priority. The association has also opposed the prohibition on people under a restraining order from buying a gun.
A spokesman for the association, Andrew Arulanandam, did not return phone calls Thursday seeking comment.
Bushmaster's principal owner and chairman, Richard Dyke, was the finance chairman of George W. Bush's campaign for the presidency in Maine in 1999. Dyke resigned as Bush's chief fund-raiser in Maine in July 1999 after a Los Angeles police officer sued Bushmaster as the maker of a gun that wounded him during a shootout with bank robbers.