Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [48]
The company was hardly a big-time arms dealer. Financial statements filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Norfolk show that in April 1992 it had sales of $30,000, which produced a net profit after wages, taxes, and other operating costs of only $503. The best month of the preceding dozen had been April 1991, when Guns Unlimited’s revenue of $51,000 yielded a net profit of $1,752, the kind of money a big arms dealer like Interarms of Alexandria, Virginia, probably spends on lunch when wooing a major customer.
At its peak, the company advertised aggressively on television and with huge fourteen-by-forty-eight-foot billboards that featured a giant handgun and proclaimed NO PERMITS, a reference to the fact that in Isle of Wight County as in most of the rest of Virginia you didn’t need a permit to buy handguns. Regulations were much stiffer in individual cities in Hampton Roads. Portsmouth, for example, required that buyers first had to get a city police permit. Guns Unlimited used the placement of its three stores to defeat these laws. In a deposition, Christopher Hartwig, a clerk until May 1991, said that if a customer at the Portsmouth store needed a gun right away, a clerk would drive the gun to the Carrollton store and meet the buyer there.
The practice came to light in a deposition given by Hartwig during the negligence suit against Guns Unlimited.
“Is that something the salesclerk would suggest or the customer?” asked Randy Singer, the Norfolk attorney who brought the suit on behalf of the murdered teacher’s family. A bright, soft-spoken young man, Singer had been driving back from Disney World on December 16, 1988, with his own children safely in the car—they were Atlantic Shores students also, but had gotten permission for the trip—when he heard a news broadcast about Nicholas Elliot’s shooting spree.
“I can’t lie,” Hartwig said. “We would do it.”
But other shops did it too, he said. “Most people don’t want to wait.… It would be like waiting two weeks to buy a nice car. You would want it today if you got the money. So they’d send the gun … to the other store and then all the paperwork, everything would be done right there.”
This bit of gun-law arbitrage was legal. In the ethos of the gun trade, legal meant acceptable.
“Guns Unlimited is very well respected,” Mike Dick assured me over coffee at the convenience store at the end of the little mall. He told me he’d been invited to join the state police firearms advisory board and had assisted ATF in numerous investigations, often calling the regional office after—or even during—suspicious transactions. “In fact, I would venture to say if you talked to the local regional office of ATF, you would find that no one in this region assists them as much as we do.”
At the same time, Guns Unlimited was more than willing to sell an especially lethal weapon to an adolescent—a weapon, moreover, that its own staff had derided as serving no useful purpose. At one point in the deposition process, Randy Singer asked another former Guns Unlimited clerk what anyone would use a Cobray M-11/9 for.
“Whatever you want to use it for,” the clerk answered. “Off the record, personally I wouldn’t use the damn thing for crab bait.”
The clerk went on to say that he would never recommend the gun for target shooting, hunting, or self-defense.
Was there anything he could recommend it for, Singer asked?
“Boat anchor.”
Hartwig was equally disparaging: “It’s good for nothing.” He allowed, however, that one class of customer did seem drawn to the weapon. “Your blacks are real impressed with them. We usually joke around about it because that’s the first thing they want to look at when they come in, or we get phone calls—’Do you have an Uzi? Do you have an M-11?’—because they see it on TV. They feel pretty powerful having one of those.”
Nonetheless, he said, “the gun is a piece of junk.”
As to whether the Cobray was any more deadly than other guns, Mike Dick, James Dick, and