Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [39]
The agents filed a private libel suit against Wayne Daniel and Snell Publishing, the publisher of Shotgun News. “It wasn’t the fact that he was attacking ATF, because ATF was accustomed to being attacked,” Taylor told me. “It was the fact that he mentioned the ATF agents by name. I was offended by it and so were most of the other agents.”
None of the agents hoped to get rich from the suit, Taylor said. They knew that at the time Wayne Daniel had few personal assets. “It was, by God, to let them know that they couldn’t do that to law-enforcement officers who were doing their mandated duty.”
The court ruled in the agents’ favor and ordered Wayne Daniel to pay each agent $1,000 in damages, a symbolic victory. The court found Snell not liable.
Undaunted, the Daniels branched out into other firearms. They introduced a pistol-grip shotgun with a high-capacity drum magazine and a forward grip and called it the Street-Sweeper, best described as resembling a shotgun version of a tommy gun. “Delivers Twelve Rounds In Less Than Three Seconds!!!!” one ad proclaimed in Shotgun News. “Time for spring cleaning,” the ad continued. “Why try clean-ups with inadequate equipment?? Buy the machine designed to clean thoroughly on the first pass.”
The company’s latest innovation is the Ladies’ Home Companion, apparently intended for use by women to protect themselves and their homes. A variation on the Street-Sweeper, it is just under two feet long, has a twelve-shot revolving drum, and fires a heavy rifle-caliber .45–70 “government” cartridge that causes explosive recoil—yet the gun has only a rear pistol grip and no other handle. A gun dealer submitted the weapon to the Maryland Handgun Roster Board for consideration as a “revolver.” The trigger requires thirty to forty pounds of pressure, according to tests by Don Flohr, a Maryland State Police firearms expert who tests weapons for the board. S.W. Daniel advertised the gun as being “ideal for use in confined spaces,” yet Flohr refused to test-fire it for fear of damaging the backstop to the state’s indoor pistol range. With the degree of understatement common to forensic investigators, Flohr noted that anyone shooting this gun “may be somewhat disturbed by the force of escaping gases, noise, and recoil experienced.”
The board ruled the gun had no valid use, thus making it one of the precious few handguns awful enough to be banned for sale in Maryland. An official with the Maryland board described the gun as “a sick joke.”
I would have liked to ask Sylvia and Wayne why they seemed hell-bent on skirting firearms laws, but neither returned the many calls I made—and the faxes and overnight letters I mailed—to their Atlanta headquarters. I asked Earl Taylor whether the Daniels were driven in their corporate antics by some kind of Second Amendment fundamentalism.
“Shit no,” he said. “I think Wayne’s strictly in it for the money. That doesn’t make him a bad guy—he’s a sharp businessman. And Sylvia’s a sharp businesslady.”
Sylvia in particular makes an appealing character for America’s gun lovers—“those assholes” in the NRA, as Taylor put it. “Here’s a woman who’s a manufacturer of a submachine gun. She brings lawsuits against the government all the time for mistreating us gun owners. She’s just a person they can identify with.”
In Towson, Colonel Supenski had me slip on pistol earmuffs and safety glasses, then handed back the Cobray, now fully loaded with a thirty-two-round clip. He invited me to fire away.
I fired slowly at first, trying to accustom myself to the trigger action and the roll of the weapon. The trigger action was uneven, but quick. I fired with abandon, trying to aim at a series of steel man-shaped targets named Pepper Poppers after their inventor. The targets are designed to fall backward when struck by a bullet. The cliff came alive as if a tribe of beetles had suddenly decided to decamp. I downed all four targets and then turned