Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [54]
Robert Dowe too had been struck in the head, but he had been lucky. The bullet entered at his temple, exited near his ear, then reentered his body, plunging into his right shoulder and exiting through his arm. Another of Hill’s bullets struck John Senatore in the arm, then continued on into his chest where it punctured a lung. Leonard Allen, the luckiest of the three, dove for cover when he heard the shots. “As I was diving,” he testified, “something glanced through my hair.” He was uninjured.
Jean-Claude Hill was found guilty of first-degree murder, with the caveat that the jury believed he was mentally ill.
“How did you feel when you heard about this?” I asked Mike Dick. “That this guy had taken these guns you sold him, even though you had doubts, and killed somebody—the ultimate deprivation of somebody’s rights? Did it cause you any sleepless nights?”
“No.”
“Did you get drunk?”
“No. I did everything I possibly could have, short of compromising something I feel very strongly about. And that is, I’m not going to decide if you are a worthwhile person or not. He gave me red flags. I checked him out. Had there been anything, had ATF found mental instability in his background, had ATF said he was [dishonorably] discharged, I could have gone to him and said, ‘Jean-Claude, I’m not going to sell you these guns.’ But I’m not going to decide somebody’s character based on my impressions of him, I’m just not gonna do it. It’s not necessarily tied to any Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, it’s not tied to my right as a retailer not to do business with somebody. I just would not want to put myself in the position of deciding someone else’s character arbitrarily based on my own opinion. Empowering people to do that is dangerous.”
In most jurisdictions in America, however, there is little else to protect society from sales of handguns. Form 4473, far from helping to keep guns out of the wrong hands, has become a conduit for the discharge of responsibility. You would have to be naive indeed to put a yes in any of the eight boxes asking if you have been indicted, have been convicted of a felony, are a fugitive from justice, an addict, an illegal alien, have renounced your citizenship, or have ever been committed to a mental institution. In most jurisdictions no formal channel exists to check the truth of your answers. (In 1989, Virginia established an “instant-check” system that requires dealers to run a quick criminal check on every purchaser. But the system only looks for Virginia convictions and tells nothing about whether a buyer has been committed to a mental institution or is addicted to drugs.) One can argue that it is unfair to ask America’s gun dealers, who after all are merely businessmen, to go beyond what the law requires of them. Nevertheless, the dealers and the gun lobby, in particular the NRA—as I’ll show in Chapter Ten—played a large role in shaping the very laws that now allow gun dealers to disregard whatever qualms they may feel about selling guns to particular individuals.
The result is yet another of those curious ironies that mark America’s gun culture. On the one hand, federal law clearly recognizes the dangers inherent in arming certain classes of individuals,