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By Root 1063 0

in its lethality. It was heavy, the weight of a six-pack of beer. Its grip had none of the warm, close-fitting contours of more costly guns, such as the expensive Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter Supenski carried. I held the Cobray out in front of me with one hand and tried to “acquire” the sights—that is, to line up the sight at the rear with the stub of metal at the front. The bolt knob, which protruded from a point midway along the frame, made this virtually impossible. My arm sagged. The gun was cumbersome. As trite as it sounds, however, the gun did look evil. It was a Darth Vader among guns.

Its reputation matched the look. A 1989 study by the Cox Newspapers found that the pistol ranked fourth among assault guns most often traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). A study of all guns confiscated in Detroit from January of 1989 through April of 1990 put the Cobray first among assault guns, fifth among all models—higher in the rankings than guns made by Beretta, whose production dwarfs that of the S.W. Daniel company. The head of ATF’s Atlanta office told me early in 1992 that his agents conducted twenty to thirty traces involving S.W. Daniel guns each month.

The Cobray and its ancestors became the favorites of drug rings, street gangs, and assorted killers throughout the 1980s. Shortly after nine P.M. on June 18, 1984, a member of the Neo-Nazi Order used the Cobray’s ancestor, an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol, to assassinate Denver talk-show host Alan Berg as he stepped from his car. Within seconds Berg suffered a devastating array of bullet wounds—thirty-four entry and exit wounds in all from a dozen .45-caliber bullets that crushed one eye, destroyed his brain, and caused massive injuries throughout his upper body. During a sweeping investigation of the Order, federal agents seized eight MACs and MAC successors. Later, on April 15, 1988, another member of the Order allegedly used a nine-millimeter MAC, converted to full auto, to kill a Missouri state trooper.

A note on terminology is in order here. A machine gun fires rifle-caliber bullets; a submachine gun fires pistol calibers. Both are fully automatic or “full-auto” weapons, meaning that they continue to fire for as long as you pull the trigger. The MAC-10, therefore, is a fully automatic submachine gun. The Cobray, which closely mimics the MAC-10 and is often described as a MAC, is a semiautomatic. A semiautomatic fires one round per pull. That the term automatic is sometimes applied to a pistol like the Colt Army .45 confuses the issue. When used to describe a pistol, automatic is simply the short form of “automatic reloading,” which means the gun uses the explosive force of each cartridge to load and cock itself after each shot. Such pistols are in fact semiautomatics.

The popular TV series “Miami Vice” fanned interest in the MAC family of weapons. “It slices, it dices,” one character said as he used a MAC to shred two female mannequins that had been chained to a wall. In March 1989, a Colorado man used a MAC-11 (a smaller cousin to the MAC-10) to kill two women and wound two deputies. The same month, Modesto, California, police arrested Albert E. Gulart, Jr., for illegal possession of explosives and found he possessed a semiautomatic variant registered to his half brother, Patrick Purdy. Two months earlier, Purdy had killed five children and wounded thirty others when he sprayed a Stockton schoolyard with an AKS rifle, a semiautomatic version of the AK-47. While investigating Purdy’s background, Stockton detectives paid Gulart a call in Modesto. The investigators said Gulart told them that before the schoolyard shootings he and Purdy had planned to kill at random a member of the Modesto police force. Gulart, according to the police account, also made a chillingly cryptic remark: “Patrick was successful in what he did, and I have a hard time driving by any school.” Although unsure just exactly what Gulart meant, Modesto police began round-the-clock surveillance, which led to the explosives arrest.

Six months later, Joseph T. Wesbecker packed