Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [46]
What no federal authority ever bothered to ask, however, is what would possess Guns Unlimited to allow this sale to be made, given the apparent level of Nicholas’s involvement.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE DEALER
ON A BRILLIANT MORNING IN JUNE 1992, I paid a visit to Guns Unlimited. I had arranged to meet its manager, Mike Dick, at the store at nine. His full name was J. Michael Dick and he was the son of the store’s founder and owner, James S. Dick, who by then had limited his gun-dealing to sales at weekend gun shows.
My drive had begun an hour earlier in Virginia Beach, on an expressway that took me past metropolitan Norfolk, then plunged under the Elizabeth River. From the highway Norfolk looked prosperous, with a perimeter of high glass buildings, a brand-new hotel, and a festive riverside development similar to Baltimore’s Harborplace. But I had been downtown several times before and knew that urban pressures had turned this portion of Norfolk into a Potemkin village. Two blocks in from the city’s gleaming rim, life seemed to stop. Abandoned buildings, some boarded, some just empty, lined block after block. The streets were clean, however. There were no piles of litter, no plumes of broken glass, and no people, just a clean desolation like that of a city awaiting a hurricane.
As I traveled, the landscape gradually softened. Brittle urban architecture gave way to suburbs, then to cool green countryside. From time to time I spotted the giant cranes of shipyards and cargo wharves along the distant blue band of the Roads. I had expected Carrollton to be a neat little Southern town of stores and a church or two arrayed along a clearly demarcated central avenue. The Carrollton I found, however, consisted primarily of a small shopping plaza on the north side of Route 17.
Guns Unlimited occupied one of the plaza’s seven retail establishments, which were arrayed along a cinder-block rectangle fronted with a hot, white-gravel parking lot. A BP gas station and convenience store occupied the western end of the lot. A poster in the window of the video store immediately to the right of Guns Unlimited advertised a movie called Mobsters; the poster consisted mainly of eight stylized bullet holes. The only other car in the parking lot was a black-and-white Ford Mustang belonging to the local sheriff’s department. The deputy glanced my way now and then, before wandering into the convenience store. As it happens, he too was waiting for Guns Unlimited to open. He had heard about a new kind of ammunition and wanted to ask about it. He was a frequent browser at the store, the clerks would later tell me—one of that class of shooter who finds guns and everything about them infinitely compelling. He was welcome, they said; it was always nice to have a patrol car parked outside as a deterrent against the daylight gun-shop robberies that as of 1992 had become a frequent and often lethal fact of life in the gun trade.
Mike Dick and his father held two of the nation’s 245,000 firearms-dealer licenses, and two of the 7,500 licenses issued to residents of Virginia alone, where at the time of our meeting gun controls outside the major cities were virtually nonexistent. The lack of regulation probably traced its roots to 1776 when Virginia became the first colony to adopt a bill of rights, which included the declaration that a “well regulated Militia, composed of the body of the People, trained to Arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defense of a free state.” By the time Nicholas acquired his gun, Virginia’s enthusiasm for firearms had turned the state into a massive shopping mall for gun traffickers from the North. A Baltimore police detective described Virginia to me this way: “It’s the only place I know where you can go get gas, diapers,