Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [28]
His is a pragmatic stance. He worries that irresponsible behavior by gun dealers, manufacturers, and the National Rifle Association may soon lead to truly restrictive controls well beyond the simple, yet crucial, regulations sought by moderate gun-control proponents, such as the 1993 Brady law’s mandatory waiting period and background checks. “My concern as a person who enjoys the shooting sports is that unless some reason comes in, things will get worse, and when that happens, those three million people in the NRA are going to find out what the fifteen million in the AARP [American Association of Retired Persons] are all about. Right now the other side hasn’t been mobilized.”
He considers the Cobray pistol made by S.W. Daniel Inc., and the means by which Nicholas Elliot came to own it, a study in irresponsibility in the gun marketplace, and he testified to that effect. The gun, he argues, serves no useful purpose—certainly none of the purposes traditionally cited by the gun camp when opposing new controls. It’s not useful for hunting, Supenski said. “First of all, you couldn’t use it to hunt. Most states have a limit on magazine capacity for hunting, three to five rounds. [The Cobray has a thirty-two-round magazine.] Second, most states have a minimum-caliber rule—clearly nine millimeter is not something you would use. It’s too big a cartridge to be used to hunt small game, it’s too small to hunt big game.”
Nor is the Cobray a target gun. Its two-inch barrel sharply reduces accuracy. It is a clumsy, heavy weapon, prone to rock up and down when fired. “It’s almost impossible to shoot one-handed, except at point-blank distances,” Supenski said. “It is a hands gun, plural, because you need both hands to employ it effectively. About the only thing you can do with it is hold it someplace in front of you, pull the trigger as fast as you can, put as many bullets out as you can, and hope like hell they’ll hit something. Now that may be nice on a battlefield. It isn’t so nice in an urban environment where that bullet may go through your bedroom into your child’s bedroom or into your neighbor’s bedroom, or may go outside and kill a passerby.”
Supenski opened his attaché case. Inside, against a thick layer of foam, was a Cobray pistol and a magazine packed with gleaming nine-millimeter cartridges. His department had confiscated the gun during an arrest; it was the same gun he had brought with him to Virginia Beach to show the jury in a civil trial against the dealer who sold a Cobray to Nicholas. He passed it to me.
Black, functional, it had none of the gleaming machined beauty of more expensive weapons. It was a brick of black steel with a pistol grip jutting from the center of its bottom face and a tiny barrel protruding from the front. To cock it, you need a good deal of strength. You pull back a black knob on top, which forces the bolt against a spring. When you pull the trigger, the bolt springs forward, stripping a fresh cartridge from the magazine and firing it. The pressure of the gases released from the cartridge forces the bolt backward, ejecting the now-empty cartridge case. An internal mechanism prevents the bolt from automatically coming forward and holds it cocked for the next shot. The gun’s ancestor was a submachine pistol, in which the bolt would immediately leap forward after each shot to fire a new round, repeating the process over and over at incredible speeds until the magazine was emptied or the shooter released the trigger.
It was undeniably, if darkly, appealing