By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday , April 24, 2000 ; C01

It is one of the most disturbing images of the year: a burly federal officer, helmeted, goggled, wearing a flak jacket, battle
fatigues and shooter's gloves designed to protect the hand but permit the prehensility of the trigger finger, confronting a
screaming child and the man who protects him.

And, of course, he has a gun.

The officer, wearing a Border Patrol patch on his vest, is holding it one-handed by the pistol grip, his naked shooting finger
indexed over the trigger guard, the butt stock unanchored in the cup of his shoulder. The gun looks terrifying, as it is designed to
look: a black, plastic-shrouded apparition with a bleak little snout, a curved ammunition magazine containing 32 rounds of what
are almost certainly hollow-points, a strange bulge forward under the muzzle, which is but 15 inches from Elian Gonzalez and
Donato Dalrymple.

What gun is this? Where are we now?

The gun is a German-manufactured submachine gun that goes under the designation MP-5, a short-barreled 9mm weapon that
has been famous in action and movies since May 1980, when British SAS troopers armed with it successfully assaulted the
Iranian embassy in London, killing all but one of the terrorists who had commandeered the building and murdered a
policewoman.

It is currently issued to almost all Western elite military units, civilian SWAT and hostage rescue teams, and movie stars
heroically fighting international evil. Bruce Willis used it in the "Die Hard" movies; James Bond has used it. The Baltimore
County SWAT team used it against Joseph Palczynski, hitting him 27 times in 42 attempts in about three seconds. It was seen
in the hands of a bearded FBI agent guarding Tim McVeigh during his trial.

As the M-16 became the symbol of the Vietnam era, the MP-5, manufactured by Heckler & Koch, of Oberndorf, Germany,
has become the symbol of our nervous postwar environment. It represents the condition our condition is in, where highly trained
units may have to act with surgical precision against heavily armed opponents in highly volatile circumstances.

"Operators," as SWAT officers and commandos style themselves, love it because it is light, easy to manipulate in tight spaces,
rugged and reliable. It can fire thousands of rounds without so much as a burp. It is easy to maintain once its few secrets have
been mastered. It is also flexible.

It can be fitted with suppressors (the movies call them silencers), shortened, lightened, mounted with a telescopic sight or an
infrared one for night operations, given a folding or collapsing stock, chambered in more powerful calibers, hidden in a
briefcase, hung invisibly in a harness under a suit coat, configured to fire single shots, shoot two or three-round bursts, or rip off
an entire magazine in three seconds.

One of the more popular stylings is apparent on the gun in the photograph. That bulge at the end of the muzzle is actually a
flashlight housing, in which nestles the state-of-the-art device in tactical illumination, the Sure-Fire flashlight. Fashion dominates
the tactical world as it dominates any world, and in the past few years illumination technology has become all the rage, under
the principle that most lethal-force encounters take place in low light, and so the operator who can see his target--and know
that if his target is illuminated, his weapon is correctly aimed--has the advantage.

For the record, the gun is 26 inches long, with an 8.85-inch barrel. It weighs 5.5 pounds and fires at a cyclic rate of 600 rounds
per minute, which means not that you could shoot it 600 times in a minute but that if you had a magazine that contained 600
rounds, it would take a minute to fire it.

MP-5s are not issued to troops or police officers routinely; they have specific tactical uses. They are frequently used as
statements of intimidation to ensure crowd control or to dissuade aggressive action. In this way, they represent the principle that
the weapon brandished is the weapon used, even if an actual act of firing is never consummated.

But more often MP-5s are used in killing situations, in high-risk raids, where commandos or law enforcement officers are likely
to encounter armed opposition that must be stopped quickly and powerfully. Unlike their movie counterparts, the authentic
operators are trained to fire short, aimed two- to three-round bursts, never to sweep a room or to fire randomly. Indeed, much
of submachine gun training is taken up with the issue of trigger control, as shooters learn not merely to shoot accurately but also
to prevent that potentially fatal fusillade of fire.

It so happens that this writer, doing research for a novel, has taken a course in tactical submachine gun techniques at a local
range, during which time he fired close to 2,000 rounds through an MP-5 and practiced some of the deployment techniques of
a "dynamic entry" scenario of the type that the federal officers used Saturday morning in Miami.

Thus, what struck me most about the photograph isn't the gun itself, but the way in which it's held. It's very close to being out of
control. These are not one-handed weapons, and except for emergency circumstances, they are not even two-handed
weapons. They recoil so persuasively they must be secured at three points: They must be moored against the shoulder or the
center of the chest; the firing hand grips the pistol grip and controls the trigger; and, finally, the other hand must secure the
muzzle via the foregrip or a front vertical grip. The officer doesn't even have the weapon secured against his shoulder, as police
are taught to do. In fairness it's possible the photograph freezes one moment when the gun was loosened from his control
(photographs will do that) and in the next second, he reclamped it into his shoulder, lowered the muzzle and backed off.

Still, his use of the weapon certainly belies the claim that none of the entry team ever "threatened to shoot." Whether that
statement was made verbally is immaterial. If the gun is deployed, it threatens by its very presence, and no verbal exchange
matters.

And it is also true from the photograph that the safety is off; that means the gun is primed to fire and no mechanical device
stands between the gun and the consequences of firing except trigger pressure. But it's equally clear from the photograph that
the federal officer has been well trained; his trigger finger is set properly above the trigger guard, so that if he falls or trips, an
involuntary spasm won't cause his finger to tighten and the weapon to fire.

However, most self-defense experts counsel students to approach all potentially lethal situations that way, reasoning that it is
just as quick to fire from that position as it is from a finger on the trigger. Whether the officer had any intentions of firing cannot
be concluded from the picture. Regardless of his intentions, that's where his finger would be. Moreover, he has trained
thousands of times to move his finger from that position to the trigger and fire; by this time, it's second nature to him--or he has
no business being on the raid.

It is also said that the gun was not "pointed" at the boy and his guardian. However, if the officer hasn't got the gun under
control, then the issue of where it's pointed is moot. These guns recoil powerfully when fired; they move this way and that. That
is exactly why H&K now manufactures them with burst-control devices, which limit the gun to two or three fully automatic
shots. It is impossible to see if the officer's MP-5 had that device. The reality is that at that moment an accidental discharge or a
mistake in judgment, and the gun fires an uncontrollable shower of bullets.

I mean no disrespect to this currently anonymous officer. In the moment of highest intensity, things don't go according to plan,
minds don't work clearly and nobody can really control events. The discipline of keeping his finger where it belonged may have
saved lives.

But the point is larger than that: It's that these guns, which represent the state's most extreme control over its citizens, are
immensely powerful and, in the hands of the untrained or even the poorly trained, extremely dangerous. They are not toys and
they should be used only in dire circumstances, when it is certain that lives are at stake.

                                 © 2000 The Washington Post Company