Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [55]
Form 4473 is flimsy protection indeed for an enterprise under assault from all quarters. Mike Dick must defend against trucks. He has armored his doors and windows against burglars. He must be vigilant for traffickers, killers, and other felons seeking to buy his wares—or simply to murder him and take the guns. In the early 1990s a growing number of traffickers apparently decided that killing a gun dealer might be more efficient than recruiting a straw purchaser. In 1991, ATF’s FFL Newsletter, which the bureau sends periodically to all federally licensed firearms dealers, warned of a rash of robberies and burglaries in Minnesota and Wisconsin. It devoted three pages to the July 29, 1991, robbery of an Ohio gun store during which the robber shot the dealer dead. The killer and two accomplices escaped with sixteen conventional guns—handguns, rifles, and shotguns—and eleven true machine guns, including two MAC-10s and an M-11 A1, a fully automatic variation of the MAC made by S.W. Daniel of Atlanta.
Increasingly, gun dealers have taken to wearing guns during the workday. Mike Dick often wore one but, unlike his colleagues, kept his concealed. “The object of a concealed weapon is that nobody knows you have it,” he said matter-of-factly. “I wear it about forty percent of the time and let people decide if they’re going to be lucky or not.” He concedes, however, that a handgun offers only limited protection. “If somebody wants to get you, you’re never going to draw your weapon. They’re going to start blasting before they get in the door. They’re going to have surprise, and unless they’re poor shots or you’re very lucky, you’re doomed.”
All this for skimpy profits in a crumbling national industry facing ever-more-stringent controls.
“Why,” I asked Dick, “do you stay in the business?”
“That’s a difficult question. I come out of the hospitality industry, hospitality is my first love. I came here out of necessity to help my father. It has become a challenge to me, taking a declining business under constant siege by various aspects of society—it is a monumental challenge. My goal is to become profitable enough that at some point we can sell and I can go back to what I do best, and that is run hotels and restaurants.”
I asked Raymond Rowley, the ATF special agent who investigated Nicholas Elliot’s acquisition of his gun, how he would describe ATF’s relationship with Guns Unlimited.
“I would say it’s a good relationship,” Rowley said. “We try to deal with all these firearms dealers as fairly as we can. They are selling a legal commodity. Obviously, guns can be used in crimes. We try to deal with them fairly.”
Baltimore County’s Col. Leonard Supenski was a bit less circumspect. Of James Dick, Mike Dick’s father, he said, “That guy is a pariah. He ought to be turned out of that industry. But ATF didn’t do anything—ATF should have nailed him to the cross.”
ATF, indeed, plays a curious role in regulating the commerce of guns. A division of the Treasury Department, it is a bastard agency to which America has grudgingly assigned the well-nigh-impossible task of ensuring that the companies that make and distribute booze, cigarettes, and guns—together the nation’s most prolific killers—pay their taxes and operate within a set of rules designed not to prevent the killing, but to keep it honest.
CHAPTER NINE
NICHOLAS
“NOW YOU,” NICHOLAS SAID.
Susan Allen had seen Sam Marino literally backing Nicholas into a comer of the classroom; she heard Marino insist that Nicholas hand over the gun. Then she saw Marino’s body jump. She saw the books and folders he was carrying fly in all directions.