Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [2]
Why, then, is it so easy for the bad guys to get guns?
As I followed Nicholas Elliot’s gun, I quickly found that a journey along its path was a journey also through America’s larger gun culture. In the course of one year I injected myself as deeply as possible into that culture. I acquired a federal gun-dealer’s license, not to buy and sell guns but rather to see how easily the license could be acquired and, as a side benefit, to gain access to places and publications that might otherwise be off-limits. Along the way I learned to appreciate the pure hell-raising fun of shooting, and how the fun can obscure the monumental dangers inherent in possessing a gun of any kind. I learned too that the world of guns is marked by peculiar ironies and juxtapositions, and odd little mysteries: people who aren’t quite what they seem, secret agendas, unconscionable gaps in firearms laws. I discovered, for example, a little-known federal program that allows convicted felons, explicitly forbidden by federal law from buying guns, to petition the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to win back permission to do so. I learned too that no federal agency is empowered to oversee the design and manufacture of firearms and investigate safety defects. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall of toy guns, just not real ones.
I visited dozens of gun shows, always a novel experience, given the number of private citizens one encounters walking around with guns slung over their backs and FOR SALE signs stuck in the barrels of weapons they hope to sell. I wanted at first merely to find dealers who were selling the Cobray and its predecessor guns, but I quickly found that gun shows opened a clear window into the gun culture. They demonstrate in a vivid way the sheer volume of guns available for sale in America, and how readily those guns change hands. I interviewed scores of shooting enthusiasts; I spoke too with many individuals who had been shot, either in the course of a crime or by accident. One evening I found myself a guest at a dinner in Smyrna, Georgia, thrown by the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association, where the door prizes were ammo boxes full of .38 Special ammunition and the raffle prizes were guns.
Time and again I encountered a none-of-my-business attitude that permeates the firearms distribution chain from production to end sale, and that allows gunmakers and marketers to promote the killing power of their weapons while disavowing any responsibility for their use in crime.
Mostly, I discovered that the story of Nicholas Elliot’s gun was the story also of the forces that infuse the gun culture. It describes a de facto conspiracy of gun dealers, manufacturers, marketers, gun writers, and federal regulators that makes guns—ever more powerful guns, and laser sights, silencer-ready barrels, folding stocks, exploding bullets, and flame-thrower shotgun rounds—all too easy to come by and virtually assures their eventual use in the bedrooms, alleys, and schoolyards of America.
Reach out, the culture cries, and kill someone.
CHAPTER TWO
NICHOLAS
THE NAME VIRGINIA BEACH MAY CONJURE weathered cottages set among rippled dunes, but the city has far more in common with places like Ocean City, Maryland, and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Rental houses, motels, and seasonal apartments jam the Atlantic coastline. Tract developments stretch westward, spaced by mini-malls and shopping plazas of the kind anchored by discount hardware stores. The sprawl of concrete and plywood has erased the city’s borders, leaving a tightly entwined ganglion of six cities, the others being Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Norfolk, Newport News, and Hampton. Together they occupy a swath of metropolitan terrain larger in geographic expanse than Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore combined and