Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [49]
Mike Dick also gave the Cobray a poor appraisal. “I hate to use this particular term, but it’s a toy,” he told me. “It’s a fun gun for a person who wants to go out and line up a bunch of cans on a log, or to shoot at a target at very close range.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “What I have a problem with is the implication that this particular gun because of what it costs or what it looks like or how many bullets it holds is inherently bad. With very little effort at all, cosmetically, that gun could be any other gun.”
And yet it is cosmetics that account for some of the Cobray’s appeal, as even he acknowledged.
“The Cobray is bought, I think, mainly because of its looks. It does in fact look kind of evil. And it does carry an awful lot of rounds.” He was careful, however, to hew to yet another gun-camp theme: the large-capacity magazine had a sporting purpose. “Many people like to get multiple magazines or larger-capacity magazines simply to save time on reloading while they’re at the range. When you’re paying by the hour for range time, a lot of people do feel the need to stock up as much as possible.”
Just as Nicholas Elliot knew he wanted to buy his gun at Guns Unlimited, so too have other traffickers, gang members, and killers chosen Guns Unlimited as their dealer of choice, a fact that had given Guns Unlimited something of a notorious reputation in Virginia’s Tidewater region—unjustly, perhaps, but also unavoidably, given the peculiar nature of firearms retailing.
In two cases in the 1990s gun traffickers recruited straw-man buyers to shop at Guns Unlimited and purchase large numbers of guns, from high-quality Glocks to cheap Davis pistols. In both cases, according to documents in Norfolk federal court, the traffickers specifically directed their recruits to Guns Unlimited; in both cases Guns Unlimited did indeed act as an exemplary corporate citizen.
But a closer look at the two trafficking cases shows that Guns Unlimited and gun dealers in general operate in a world where profit and morality bear an inverse relationship to each other—where a truly moral dealer who followed his best social instincts at every turn would more than likely wind up on a bread line. What does it mean that even a “good” dealer can wind up promoting crime? Has gun retailing become simply too costly a pursuit for our society to tolerate?
In August 1991, Amir Ali Faraz, a twenty-two-year-old student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, asked a friend of his, Matthew Jones, about buying “a couple of firearms.” Faraz couldn’t buy the guns on his own, he knew, because his permanent residence was in Pennsylvania and he had only a Pennsylvania driver’s license.
This posed no great problem in Jones’s eyes. About two weeks later, on August 30, 1991, Faraz met with Jones. Jones gave Faraz a Virginia driver’s license belonging to a twenty-one-year-old Virginia resident, Brant Gomez Requizo, who had lost his driver’s license earlier that year. Jones took Faraz to Guns Unlimited, where Faraz bought six high-caliber handguns—four for himself, and one each for Jones and a friend of Jones’s who had accompanied them to the store. A week later Faraz sold three of his guns to Jones for $1,200. Faraz would later tell ATF agents that Jones had bragged he could sell the guns “for a ‘big profit’ in the Tidewater area to people who would take them up north and make even a bigger profit from them.”
In the gun trade, buying more than one gun at a time automatically raises a warning flag; in fact, ATF requires dealers to mail in a multiple-purchase form anytime a customer buys two or more handguns within a period of five working days. Nonetheless, in the absence of specific local regulations, anyone in America