Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [42]
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PURCHASE
TO BE A GUN DEALER IN America is to occupy a strange and dangerous outpost on the moral frontier. Every storefront gun dealer winds up at some point in his career selling weapons to killers, drug addicts, psychos, and felons; likewise, every storefront dealer can expect to be visited by ATF agents and other lawmen tracking weapons from their use in crime to their origins in the gun-distribution network. One must be a cool customer to stay in business knowing that the products one sells are likely to be used to kill adults and children or to serve as a terrorist tool in countless other robberies, rapes, and violent assaults. Yet gun dealers sell guns in America the way Rite Aid sells toothpaste, denying at every step of the way the true nature of the products they sell and absolving themselves of any and all responsibility for their role in the resulting mayhem. Guns used in crime are commonly thought to have originated in some mythic inner-city black market. Such markets do exist, of course, but they are kept well supplied by the licensed gun-distribution network, where responsibility is defined as whatever the law allows.
And the law, as written, allows much.
Guns Unlimited, of Carrollton, Virginia, demonstrates the kind of position every legitimate gun shop must eventually find itself in. Guns Unlimited considered itself a “good” dealer. Indeed, in the view of Mike Dick, the general manager of the company and the son of its founder, Guns Unlimited was not just a sterling corporate citizen but also a de facto deputy of ATF and a vital bulwark in the fight against crime and civil-rights abuse.
Nonetheless, Guns Unlimited sold Nicholas Elliot a Cobray M-11/9 under circumstances that led, early in 1992, to a jury verdict against the dealer on civil charges that its sale of the gun to Nicholas was negligent. The suit was filed by the husband of the teacher Nicholas killed.
Federal law bars anyone under twenty-one from buying a handgun, but Nicholas acquired his with ease through a “straw-man” purchase three months before the shootings, when he was fifteen years old. Straw-man purchases, in which a qualified buyer buys a handgun for an unqualified person, are the primary means by which America’s bad guys acquire their weapons, and one the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms cannot hope to put an end to, given the implicit and explicit restraints on its law-enforcement activities.
Nicholas not only knew the gun he wanted, but where to go to buy it. How he knew which dealership to patronize is not clear. Nicholas would not agree to an interview at Virginia’s Southampton Correctional Center, where he is serving a life sentence. It is an easy assumption, however, that Nicholas learned of Guns Unlimited from the dealership’s aggressive advertising efforts, which included TV commercials and giant billboards.
One peaceful weekend in September of 1988, Nicholas Elliot, apparently at loose ends, called his second cousin Curtis Williams, a truck driver, to ask if he would go with him to look at guns in a gun store. The two had talked about guns before. Nicholas proudly told his cousin how he had shot rifles in California with his father. Williams, in turn, told Nicholas about his encounters with weapons in the Marine Corps, which had given him advanced weapons training.
Nicholas had pestered him before about going to look at guns.
“He was calling me all the time,” Williams recalled during his trial in Norfolk federal court on charges of conducting an illegal straw purchase. (Most of what follows is derived from testimony during that trial and from the subsequent civil suit against the dealer, as well as related court documents and interviews.) “We had right many conversations on the phone, but that particular Saturday I was at home stripping my floors, getting ready to take the old wax off and rewax them.”
Williams lived in Norfolk, in a small bungalow with a creaky wooden porch and a front door heavily framed in decorative anti-crime grillwork. His neighborhood, shaded and