Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [47]
A thick printout of Virginia’s licensed firearms dealers, which I bought from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ disclosure branch, captured this penchant for mixing gun peddling with other pursuits. The list included Capt. Mike’s Seafood, Ray’s Used Cars, Dale’s Exxon & Grocery, Miss Molly’s Inn, Miracle Chimney Sweep, the Capitol Cafe, Forbes Window Co., Stallard’s Shoe Shop, Jenning’s Music Co., Bucks Barber Shop, Glasgow Video, the Portsmouth-Norfolk chapter of the Izaak Walton League, and Camp Sequoya for Girls in Abingdon. Some of the business names listed in the printout were tantalizing in and of themselves, such as Boys Noisy Toys, The Gunrunner, Gut Pile Guns, and, my favorite, Life Support Systems of Norfolk.
Dick was late, but two of his clerks arrived and invited me and the sheriff’s deputy inside. The shop was small, no larger than a suburban living room, with display cases arranged in a U shape and a central table containing miscellaneous accessories and special “safety” ammunition for use in home defense, including the Glaser “safety” round, a bullet that ruptures on impact and scatters a multitude of tiny steel balls through whomever it strikes. One medical examiner, writing in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, reported on the mysterious X ray he had made of the skull of a suicide victim. Instead of finding one or two bits of metal, he saw dozens scattered through the dead man’s brain like stars. The manufacturer calls the bullet a safety round in the belief that its pellets are less likely to pass through bodies and walls to injure bystanders on the other side. At up to $3 a cartridge, Glaser safety rounds are not for practice.
The store was a fortress. The Dicks had embedded steel “tank traps” in the sidewalk out front, this to prevent the recurrence of what has now become a fairly routine, if hardly subtle, means of burglarizing the gun stores of America: the use of trucks to crash through the front wall of the store. The Dicks learned the value of tank traps a few years ago when a thief backed a dump truck into the display windows of Guns Unlimited, then climbed out and stole dozens of handguns. An alarm system now guarded the place at night. The front door had been reinforced with steel. Steel herringbone grates covered the inside surfaces of the two large plate-glass windows. A big Pepsi machine stood against the grate just inside the door as a barrier to anyone hoping to cut through the glass to reach the door locks. As a last defense, the two clerks wore large-bore handguns strapped to their hips, one a revolver, the other a black auto-loading pistol. One clerk, dressed in black and wearing tinted glasses, told me he and his partner were careful to stand at different points in the shop so that no one could get the drop on them simultaneously. He untacked a brief news clipping from the bulletin board behind him and proudly handed it to me. The item reported how just that week a Portsmouth gun-shop owner had shot and killed a would-be robber. No charges were filed.
Mike Dick arrived in jeans and a T-shirt. He was a young man, a bit round at the corners, whose prior career was in the hospitality industry. He joined Guns Unlimited to help his father salvage the business, which had suffered badly not only from the recession but from the sudden decampment of so many military men from the Hampton Roads area during the Gulf War. The domestic gun industry as a whole had likewise experienced declining sales over the previous few years, and that March one of the country’s highest-profile arms makers, Colt’s Manufacturing, had filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11. At the time of the shootings at Atlantic Shores, however, the industry was enjoying a robust surge in sales, and Guns Unlimited was thriving. As of 1990, James Dick owned three Guns Unlimited stores, including branches in Virginia Beach and Portsmouth. But he too had been forced to file for