Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [112]
One Saturday in the summer of 1994 I paid a visit to Happy’s Flea Market in Roanoke, Virginia. Sellers of collectibles rent space inside the defunct Happy’s Recreation Center on a more or less permanent basis, but on weekends anyone with something to sell can pay a fee and set up shop in the field out back. At the end of the last row I found a jovial man selling rifles and several high-quality pistols, including a Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter and a Colt .45. At another table, this one erected in front of a large RV, I found a woman sitting before a table strewn with what at first appeared to be the usual flea-market fare. As I got closer, however, I saw that her merchandise included a few high-quality handguns and one cheap derringer. Two men at two other tables sold rifles. In still another row, a sullen man stood before a flame-red Ford Fairlane, idly flipping the cylinder of a small-caliber pistol. Both the pistol and the Fairlane were for sale.
That afternoon I drove north a hundred miles or so to Harrisonburg, Virginia, to visit a gun show under way at the fairgrounds just south of the city. Dozens of federally-licensed gun dealers had spread their guns atop folding tables. As federal licensees they were obligated to obey all federal and state regulations governing firearms sales, including Virginia laws requiring an instant background check on handgun purchases and limiting such purchases to one a month. The same laws, however, did not apply to a young man and his female companion, who walked the aisles with signs pinned to their backs advertising two German Lugers and an M-1 carbine for sale. Nor did these laws apply to a man who had settled in a chair at one end of an empty table, where he had opened his attache case to display four handguns offered for private sale. Outside, at an adjacent flea market, another six men were peddling their personal weapons. Anyone, with any kind of record, could have bought a handgun here. A three-hour drive would have brought the buyer to Washington or Baltimore, two cities where murder has eclipsed stickball as a pursuit of the young.
Accountability continued its traditional absence from America’s gun trade. Certain guns, most notably the inexpensive Raven, Jennings, Davis, and Lorcin pocket semi-automatics, are well known to police as weapons commonly used in crime. In the first quarter of 1994, the Lorcin L380, a .380 caliber pistol, was the most frequently traced weapon in America—traced more often than the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, produced and distributed over the years in numbers that dwarf the Lorcin’s production. Next in line came the Davis .380, Raven .25, Lorcin .25, Mossberg Model 500 shotgun—an emerging favorite among crooks—and the Jennings .22. The manufacturers clearly know the extent to which their products are implicated in the country’s serious crimes because they field the calls from ATF’s tracing center. Yet they continue to produce the weapons, distributors continue to buy them, and dealers—even some who work full time as police officers or police department armorers—continue to sell them. No public means exists for regulating the design of such guns, or their manufacture and distribution. We have outlawed the importation of such weapons from foreign manufacturers, but otherwise we leave such matters to the good conscience of our domestic producers, because they are, after all, red-blooded American companies.
Privately, the big manufacturers complain