QUICK! - Pass a bat control law!

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Baseball Bats Used in Euro Violence

By BETH GARDINER, Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) - Baseball hasn't conquered the world, but the bats turn up in riots from Amsterdam and Ankara to the tumultuous Group of Eight summit in Genoa.

The Irish Republican Army (news - web sites) uses bats. So have Kurdish militants in Europe, skinheads in Slovakia and teen-age gangsters in Portugal.

Patrizia Bonalumi, a spokeswoman for the Genoa police, said six baseball bats - and 30 hockey sticks - were found during a cleanup of the stadium where demonstrators camped out during the G-8 meeting.

The Italian protests were an international affair, but bats also turn up in strictly local disputes.

Athletic Stores in central Belfast, Northern Ireland, sells 10 to 15 bats a week.

``Funnily enough, I don't know of any baseball teams'' in the area, said John Miskimmon, a salesman at the store. He guessed that half the bat buyers wouldn't know a home run from a foul ball.

``They don't really ask you about nothing, they just take it off the rack, bring it over. They don't really ask you about the quality of the bats, what the differences are or anything,'' he said. ``Probably just the cheapest.''

Baseball bat assaults have cropped up in other non-baseball-playing countries too.

Human rights groups have reported them being used against inmates at prisons in Jamaica and Turkey.

In Slovakia, skinheads sometimes carry out attacks with them and a soldier used one to beat a 49-year-old Gypsy woman to death and club some of her eight children.

Kurdish militants enraged by the capture of rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 wielded bats to injure people in Germany and the Netherlands. One man toted a bat wrapped in newspaper at a Sarajevo rally against Serb violence in May.

And in Portugal, the government promised last year to crack down on juvenile delinquency after a string of attacks by gangs of youths, some of them involving baseball bats.

``A baseball bat obviously is a type of product that unfortunately has some uses that we would not approve of,'' said Bill Williams, a spokesman for Hillerich & Bradsby, which makes Louisville Slugger bats.

``There's really not much you can do about it,'' he said.

The Louisville, Ky.-based company makes about 3 million wood and aluminum bats a year, and exports them to more than 50 countries, including Britain.

In London, police say reports of assaults and even murders by baseball bat may be misleading.

``I think that people use a colloquialism for something that looks like a baseball bat,'' like a truncheon or a wooden ax handle, said Lisa Carroll, a spokeswoman for Scotland Yard.

Bats are available in Britain, but tend to be relegated to the far corners of sporting goods stores.

Lillywhites, one of the biggest sports shops in London, stocks only a few bats in its six floors of athletic merchandise - the wooden and aluminum bats from Rawlings, Easton Sports Inc. and Wilson Sporting Goods Co. sell for between $28 and $70. Manager Tom Bowkay said most buyers are members of corporate softball teams.

In the northern English town of Bradford, where white youths and people of South Asian descent clashed last month, police initially said baseball bats had been used against officers.

But Ann Clayton, a spokeswoman for the West Yorkshire police, said it was difficult to know for sure, since the weapons were not left at the scene. Police reports of baseball bats were based mostly on information from eyewitnesses, she said.

``It's a similar size piece of wood,'' she said. ``I can't say it isn't a baseball bat. ... That is the thing that's most triggered in their mind, a good description of it.''

-- Anonymous, August 17, 2001

Answers

I wonder if Elizabeth Brady would have pushed such legislation if her husband had been brain-damaged by a bat instead of a bullet.

Come to think of it, maybe that is the way to go. Not more legislation for guns, but for ammo. Hmmmm..

-- Anonymous, August 17, 2001


Somebody quick - hide OG's bat. Sorry but from the title I thought they were talking about OG :)

I'm running..................

-- Anonymous, August 17, 2001


I was waiting for someone to come up with that. Right, put Beckie on the spit list. Snort!

-- Anonymous, August 17, 2001

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