Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [110]
America’s gun crisis cannot be solved just by limiting the proliferation of guns and mandating responsibility on the part of gun owners. Solving the problem requires far more fundamental change. Where now our cities consider it an accomplishment simply to keep school-kids from getting killed, we must have excellent schools that cause hope to blossom. A true, full-scale National Service program might be a good start, offering interesting and creative jobs in far-flung portions of the country. Safe, clean housing for America’s poor would be nice too, in place of the somber, stinking temples of despair that ring most of our biggest cities. Vital too is federal recognition that times have indeed changed, that women do raise families all by themselves, that many couples need two incomes just to survive, and thus that access to good, safe, nurturing day care ought to be near the top of the nation’s domestic agenda, rather than at the bottom. All these are, or should be, obvious requirements. And these are just the minimum. We will have to fix much more in America if we are to slow the rise and expansion of gun violence.
The place to start is with guns themselves, and the time is now. There will be no better time. There will be far worse times.
Unfortunately, as the history of federal gun legislation so clearly demonstrates, a dramatic worsening may be necessary. The tommy-gun massacres brought the first federal controls; the riots and assassinations of the sixties brought the second. What will bring the third, in a country so stunned by violence that we now expect and accept armed rampages as if they were natural phenomena like hurricanes and tornadoes? “Maybe that’s the answer,” said David Troy, the special agent responsible for ATF law-enforcement in Virginia. “Right now you have people who are involved in violent crime and firearms violence who were never touched by it before. Maybe there is a watershed coming in the United States. We haven’t gotten there yet.”
More firearms atrocities will occur. In America today, this is a given. The greater atrocity, however, is to stand back and allow the gunslingers of America free play while the rest of us cower under the new tyranny of the gun.
CODA
AT THE TIME OF NICHOLAS ELLIOT’S rampage, business was brisk for James Dick and Guns Unlimited. This was before the Gulf War exodus of his customer base and the general slackening of firearms sales that later forced Dick to file for bankruptcy. Business was so brisk that within a year of the shootings Dick decided to expand the Guns Unlimited empire and open his third store.
One must be cool indeed to be a gun dealer. The site Dick chose was a small shopping plaza on Kempsville Road in Virginia Beach.
The Atlantic Shores Christian School was across the street.
AFTERWORD TO THE
VINTAGE EDITION
IN SEPTEMBER 1993, when I completed the original manuscript for this book, I was certain significant reform of America’s firearms regulations was a long way off and that a package like my Life and Liberty Preservation Act had little chance—to be more precise, “no chance in hell”—of being enacted. But much has changed, and I have since come to believe that progress toward rational regulation may in fact be inexorable now that America seems at last to have awakened to the obvious and mounting social costs of allowing the unimpeded flow of arms to kids, crack addicts, felons, and fugitives.
In August 1994 President Bill Clinton helped his Congressional allies muscle through a new crime bill containing a long-overdue ban on nineteen specific models of assault weapons and related guns. Among the specific models banned were the Intratec pistol used by Gian Luigi Ferri in his attack on a law firm in San Francisco; the semi-automatic