Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [40]
Watching the dirt fly, one can be lulled into believing this is, after all, just fun and games. I wanted to fire off another clip; hell, I wanted to “rock and roll,” the gun culture’s euphemism for firing a machine gun in full auto. This was fun. Remote destruction is a dynamite rush.
As I drove home, however, I was struck by the dissonance between the innocent clink of the Pepper Poppers and the deadly power of each bullet. What cost, this fun and games? Any one of those bits of lead invisibly traversing the space between me and the target would have been enough to blow a man’s brains out.
“You put a gun like this in the hands of a juvenile,” Supenski testified at the civil trial that examined how Nicholas Elliot acquired his gun, “and you’ve got death waiting to happen.”
The judge struck this and most of Supenski’s testimony from the record as prejudicial and inflammatory.
“Well, I should say so,” Supenski told me, nodding fiercely. “Damn right! It should have been inflammatory. A whole lot of people should have heard it and they should have been inflamed.”
At his office, Supenski placed two weapons on a conference table, one the Cobray M-11/9, the other the new Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter he carries each day, a beautifully machined weapon with a wood grip and three different safety mechanisms designed to prevent accidental shootings. “The gun industry, unlike any other, is allowed to run amok,” he said. “If you had industry regulations, or if you had safety regulations or product-liability regulations, you better believe they’d see the light, you’d see a lot more of those”—he pointed to the Smith & Wesson pistol—“and none of those. And you wouldn’t need the California assault-weapon ban, you wouldn’t need a New Jersey ban, a Maryland Saturday-night-special law. You wouldn’t need them because that kind of garbage would never be released into the mainstream.
“Could Nicholas Elliot have killed people with this?” Supenski said, touching his own pistol. “Yeah, he could have. That’s true. But he wasn’t drawn to that one. He was drawn to this one.” The Cobray lay on the table, dull and black. The only gleam came from the holes left where the previous owner had drilled out the serial numbers. “The sad part of it is, you look at what happened and you ask, is that something that with a little bit of foresight and a little less greed or maybe stupidity, or whatever the hell it was—is that something that could have been prevented? The answer, quite simply, is yes.”
He pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “You know the part of that case that really bothered me—the clerk who sold the kid that goddamn gun. He was an ex-cop.”
CHAPTER SIX
NICHOLAS
NICHOLAS DID COME ACROSS BILLY CUTTER on Friday morning, and true to form Cutter again called him a name. Nicholas went into a bathroom and took his Cobray from his backpack. He left both there, however, and exited the room. What he did next is not entirely clear. According to his own statement, made to Det. Donald Adams, the lead homicide investigator, he wandered into the band room and, at one point, helped a man with the very apt name of Mike Lucky.
At some point between ten-twenty and ten twenty-two that morning, Nicholas walked into one of the trailers—the relocation modular units—that had been partitioned into classrooms. The room, called T108, was small, one of three classrooms built from a large trailer akin to those that serve as field offices at large construction sites. Each classroom had windows, its own door, and a stairway down to the central courtyard of the school. Other similarly divided trailers were positioned around the courtyard. Room T108 was occupied at that moment by a single individual, Sam Marino, who taught French and English at the school.
Nicholas, who that semester was taking Marino