"The young man talked freely about his exploits. He told classmates about police seizing weapons from his apartment on Northwest Flanders Street -- two Glock pistols and a 12-gauge pump shotgun -- when a buddy accidentally shot a hole through the ceiling. And he told friends about destroying a textbook with detonating cord -- and videotaping the episode -- after getting angry with a different professor."And possibly a bit unstable, as well.
One afternoon last November, a Portland State University economics student gave a class presentation on what he described as the U.S. military's flawed reliance on one of its key combat rifles.I didn't say he was an informant, but that behavior certainly sounds a little crazy and a little dangerous.
As a visual aid, Zachary Bucharest hauled out a duffel bag and withdrew the disassembled parts of a Colt AR-15, a semiautomatic version of the military M-16. For the next 15 or 20 minutes, he kept professor John Hall's class engrossed as he lectured about the weapon's inferiority to the foreign-made AK-47.
PSU policy forbids firearms on campus by anyone except police. But no one in the economics class -- not even Hall, a tenured professor -- reported the incident to campus security or administrators.
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Bucharest, a 30-year-old combat veteran with a permit to carry a concealed handgun, was so preoccupied by his past that he spoke often about guns, warfare, explosives, martial arts and the science of bullets penetrating flesh.
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Bucharest says he looked up to Hall, who made the study of economics fascinating. Like lots of Hall's students, he spent many hours in office sessions. It was during those sessions, Hall would later write, that Bucharest boasted of being a sniper who "killed more than a few people" and "showed me scars on his chest from bullet wounds, relics of his combat experience."
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He told classmates about police seizing weapons from his apartment on Northwest Flanders Street -- two Glock pistols and a 12-gauge pump shotgun -- when a buddy accidentally shot a hole through the ceiling. And he told friends about destroying a textbook with detonating cord -- and videotaping the episode -- after getting angry with a different professor.
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Fellow students say Bucharest's bravado ramped up after the AR-15 presentation, and he began to encourage classmates to buy guns and ammo.
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Economics student Daniel Dreier, 26, found himself drawn into what he would later characterize as Bucharest's "paramilitary culture." He suggested to Bucharest that they buy Hall an AK-47 as a gift, and students soon talked of pooling up to $400. But Dreier says he soured on the idea when Bucharest was hesitant to buy the weapon from a gun shop.
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On Dec. 4, during the economic department's annual holiday party, Bucharest talked with a classmate about how to make a firebomb using the explosive compound RDX.
The classmate, who declined to be named for this story because he fears retribution from PSU administrators, says he felt Bucharest was trying to get him to incriminate himself about radical activities.
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Dana Scheider, had driven downtown to pick him up and joined them for a round or two. She was behind the wheel, waiting for the alcohol to wear off before driving.
Scheider recalled that Bucharest rested a pistol on his lap and threatened to put a bullet in the car if she drove. She thought it was Bucharest's eccentric way of keeping her from driving impaired. Bucharest denies pulling out a pistol or making any such comment.
More recently, he has shifted quite obviously to a new and more threatening role: as an agent provocateur what now appears intended to systematically draw fine and innocent students into a criminal classification.He literally believes that the FBI actively tried to fabricate criminal evidence on all US citizens, and he's gotten used to this, himself, and just accepts that he has to deal with it since we live in a police state. However, he wants them to stop going after his students, because he knows that their intent is to attach fictitious criminal records to them, to reduce their earning potential, to make them more dependent on the welfare system, so that they can be more closely tracked.
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I could stomch his pressuring fairly well and also accept it as part of the price of living in an emergent police state -- sadly.
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...evidence that your office could then rely upon to reduce their professional opportunities and thereby also reduce their income earning-potential over the course of their careers?
Where the AK-47 has so far relied on huge Soviet-style, state-run factories(albeit with considerable illicit small-scale production existing), the M16 is considered ideal for market economy production, spread among many manufacturers around the country, this also ensures it would be nearly impossible to disrupt U.S. M16 production in the case of a major conflict.posted by pwnguin at 6:07 PM on March 7, 2010
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posted by delmoi at 9:07 AM on March 7, 2010