Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [1]
Nicholas carried a gun—the Cobray M-11/9—that by any reasonable standard should never have become a mass-consumer product. He acquired the gun from a federally licensed dealer using a means that puts thousands of guns into the hands of illegal users each year, yet that existing federal gun-trade regulations do much to encourage. This dealer was a “good” dealer, yet sold numerous weapons to traffickers and killers, raising a fundamental question of whether the costs imposed on the rest of us even by supposedly honest dealers are simply too high for society to bear. Moreover, Nicholas carried with him a cultural bloodlust fed by marketers and their close allies in the gun press who routinely play to America’s homicide fantasy and stoke our widespread belief in the gun as problem-solver.
None of this, of course, absolves Nicholas of his own responsibility for what occurred at Atlantic Shores, nor does it absolve society at large of its responsibility for the mass disenfranchisement of America’s underclass, in particular young black men. Clearly, individual responsibility and socioeconomic tension are the tectonic plates that shape crime. As one gun buff proposed to me, half in jest, the way to reduce crime is to buy back guns not with cash, as many cities have tried, but with jobs.
What follows, however, is not so much the story of Nicholas Elliot, but rather of his gun and its travels. I set out to trace his weapon from the moment its design was conceived to its use at Atlantic Shores as a way to explore how guns migrate from the so-called legitimate gun-distribution network to the hands of killers, robbers, and inner-city gangsters. Every gun used in crime starts out in that network, but somewhere along the way gets diverted. But where and how? These questions get lost amid the daily reports of shootings and the numbing tallies of lives lost each year. Pick up a copy of a major newspaper and you see story after story about gunshot death and injury, but you rarely read where the gun came from or how it was acquired. The absence is understandable. Although television cop shows would have us believe otherwise, it takes a lot of effort for the police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to trace the origins of a gun, largely because of obstacles deliberately inserted into the process by federal law. When a crime has just occurred—that is, when the news is fresh and most marketable—no one can know for sure exactly how the gun reached the shooter. The shooter himself may not know how many others handled the gun before it came into his possession. Some guns simply cannot be traced. By the time the police do learn where and how a gun originated, the shooting is already old news. Yet by tracing the migration of guns, one comes readily and vividly to understand where the nation’s current patchwork of gun controls have gone astray, and how easily they could be fixed to the increased satisfaction of gun owners and gun opponents alike.
I chose a single gun, used in a single homicide—not even a terribly lurid homicide—primarily as a means of cutting through the rhetoric of extremists on both sides of the gun debate. Guns are a subject that too often divides America into warring camps, even though the beliefs of the great, moderate mass of Americans, whom we too readily classify in combat taxonomy as pro-gun and antigun, gun nut and gun hater, simply aren’t that deeply opposed. Somewhere along the line, extremists on both sides succeeded in shaping the debate so that no one has a choice but to leap into a trench and start firing away with whatever ammunition has been piled near at hand, be