Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [35]
RPB challenged the ATF decision. A federal judge backed the agency, but to reduce the fiscal hardship imposed on RPB by the ruling allowed the company time to continue manufacturing the weapon and selling off existing stocks. Any gun assembled before June 21, 1982, would be classed as a semiautomatic; the same gun made one day later would be a machine gun subject to federal restrictions.
This delay, a surprise bonus for RPB, provided another example of the willingness within our culture to overlook the inherent deadliness of guns. The threat of a ban boosted demand for the gun, and according to Earl Taylor, RPB accelerated production and sales. “They knew that weapon was going to be outlawed, they knew it was going to be worth a hell of a lot more money once you couldn’t produce it anymore, so I guess it made sense to go for it.”
June proved a profitable month for RPB. Gun consumers—far from being put off by the gun’s lethal reputation and the ATF ruling—rushed to buy the last of the weapons before the deadline. The company’s final after-tax profit doubled over that of May, for a profit margin—net income as a percentage of gross sales—of 37 percent.
The next month, with the ruling in effect, the company’s net income plummeted to just one-sixteenth of the June total.
In September, the RPB board approved a final plan for liquidating the company; in October, an auction house sold its assets for half a million dollars.
A reasonable man might expect that at this point the gun, this weapon built to kill soldiers in close combat and adopted by dope peddlers and urban gangs, would be allowed to disappear from America’s arsenal and consigned to Thomas Nelson’s history books. But RPB Industries rose quickly from the tomb, this time as S.W. Daniel Inc., named for Sylvia Williams Daniel. After ATF’s ruling the Daniels set out in earnest to develop a weapon that could be sold readily to the public. They succeeded—introducing by 1983 the Cobray M-11/9—but nonetheless continued sending prototype after prototype to the ATF technical branch in Washington, as if probing for holes in the law. Once, for example, they sent a prototype of what they claimed was a single-shot weapon. It was the same weapon that previously had been ruled a machine gun, but with a plate over the bottom of the grip where the magazine would otherwise be inserted. ATF, however, found that the plate could be removed and classified this weapon too as a machine gun.
The company also sold machine-gun “flats,” stamped and notched pieces of steel that could be bent to form the frame, or “lower receiver,” of a machine gun. Under federal law, a machine-gun receiver is treated as if it were a complete firearm. The flats, however, were legal, provided they were left unbent and certain holes were left undrilled. All a consumer had to do to commit an instant felony was to drill out a single hole—but that was the consumer’s problem.
The Daniels knew their market well, said Earl Taylor. “I’ve always had a hunch that Wayne and Sylvia were not so much believers in all the pro-gun propaganda that goes on and that they so freely talk about, but that they were more interested in making money than anything else.” Of Wayne, he said, “He’s got a reputation for testing the waters, so to speak. He’ll come close to the edge of the envelope—maybe not blatantly doing something illegal, but he’s very anxious to test and see how far he can go in the weapons field.”
Wayne’s attitude, according to Taylor, made his products all the more attractive to gun buyers. “He can kind of feel the pulse of this gun culture out there and kind of say things and do things and market things that appeal to those people.”
Indeed, far from embarking on a PR campaign to sweeten the gun’s reputation, Sylvia and Wayne played up its bloody history, marketing the Cobray as “The Gun That Made the Eighties Roar.”
The company’s marketing ideology soon led it to begin a business venture that provides a case