Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [30]
In February 1990 the Cobray came up for review by Maryland’s Handgun Roster Board, which had been created by legislation designed to restrict the sale of Saturday night specials. The S.W. Daniel handgun passed muster, but only because of the law’s strict limits on what characteristics can allow the board to ban a gun. Cornelius J. Behan, then chief of the Baltimore County police and a member of the board, found himself forced to vote for the gun. “It’s a terrible killing instrument that has no business meeting quality standards. But our law … doesn’t cover that weapon.” The day before, Behan had appeared in a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times paid for by Handgun Control Inc. holding the gun under a bold headline that asked, “Who Goes Hunting With a MAC-11?” The third speaker, Elmer H. Tippet, also a board member and at the time head of the Maryland State Police, said he “echoed” Behan’s assessment. “I certainly question the legitimacy of a weapon like that for sporting or self-defense or anything else, but as the law is written I have no alternative other than to vote what the law says I must do, and that’s what I will do.” The gun joined the twelve hundred other handguns on the roster.
The list of killings involving MACs and Cobrays continued to grow; the crimes often achieved national notoriety.
At about midnight, September 27, 1990, an Iranian immigrant named Mehrdad Dashti fired into a popular bar in Berkeley, California, with a Cobray and two other weapons. He killed a university senior, then began a seven-hour standoff during which he wounded four other students. He was shot dead by a police SWAT team. California had outlawed the Cobray in 1989.
In May 1990 police in Vancouver, British Columbia, became profoundly alarmed after discovering three MAC submachine guns in six weeks. One officer predicted that soon a police officer or bystander would be injured or killed by such weapons. “They’re a recipe for disaster,” he told the Vancouver Sun.
His remarks were prophetic. On October 20, 1991, a Chinese immigrant, Chin Wa Chung, humiliated by the failure of a restaurant he had opened with his partner, Sheng Cheung, went to Cheung’s Vancouver house early one morning and used a Cobray M-11/9 to kill Cheung, Cheung’s wife, their seven-year-old son, and their fourteen-month-old baby before at last killing himself.
The same month a disgruntled ex-postal worker named Joseph M. Harris walked into the Ridgewood, New Jersey, post office clad in battle fatigues, a bulletproof vest, and a black silk face mask and shot and killed two of his former colleagues. Earlier he had stabbed his former supervisor to death at her home after first killing the woman’s boyfriend with a single gunshot to the head as the man sat watching television comfortably nestled under a blanket. Harris carried two fully automatic weapons: an Uzi and a MAC-10.
The Cobray was involved in an odd lot of other incidents. In 1991, New York City police were astonished to find that the sniper who had just barely missed hitting a clerical worker in a Bronx office building was a nine-year-old boy wielding a Cobray. Asked how he learned to operate the gun, the boy answered, “I watch a lot of TV.” The following year, in Denver, a sixteen-year-old boy used a Cobray M-11/9 to kill a fifteen-year-old with whom he had argued a few moments earlier. His mother, involved in a live-in relationship with a Denver police officer, had bought the boy the gun. “She’s certainly guilty of not having good sense,” a Denver police spokesman told the Denver Post, “but that’s not a criminal act.”
The Cobray and its MAC progenitors became icons of America