Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [64]
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre marked a change in the public’s willingness to accept gang violence. The brutality of the crime, the fact the men were shot in the back, somehow seemed a violation of criminal etiquette.
As other massacres followed, the revulsion grew. On July 28, 1931, gangster Vincent Coll tried to kill one of Dutch Schultz’s men as he sat in front of a social club on E. 107th Street in New York. The target escaped unharmed, but the attack, quickly dubbed the Baby Massacre, left five children wounded. One, a baby in a baby carriage, later died. Coll may or may not have used a tommy gun, but the gun took the blame anyway.
Within a month, two other New York gun battles killed two girls, one eighteen, the other only five. In the latter, gunfire also killed two policemen and three of the assailants and wounded twelve other people.
Crime seemed poised to overwhelm the country. In 1932, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and murdered. (Capone offered $10,000 for information on who did it.) Killers of all kinds—John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine-Gun Kelly (who contrary to myth never fired a gun in the course of a crime), Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Baby Face Nelson, and “Ma” Barker—rampaged over the countryside. Bonnie Parker, once again demonstrating that penchant of our heroes of violence for promoting their own legends, wrote poetry about her exploits with Clyde. One, titled “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” and released to newspapers by Bonnie’s mother, linked the pair to the mythic outlaws of the Wild West:
You’ve read the story of Jesse James—
Of how he lived and died,
If you’re still in need
Of something to read
Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
Soon after the poem was published, police at last caught up with Bonnie and Clyde and killed them both.
One result of all this mayhem was a host of gangster movies, beginning with the 1930 hit Little Caesar. In 1931 alone, Hollywood made fifty gangster films. And once again myth and reality converged. On October 14, 1931, Edward G. Robinson, who starred in Little Caesar, sat in on Al Capone’s tax evasion trial, which would end three days later and result ultimately in his being sent to a brand-new prison built on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
A more significant result, however, was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which regulated the sale and manufacture of machine guns and other “gangster-type” weapons, such as silencers and sawed-off shotguns, and gave responsibility for enforcement to the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Internal Revenue Service. You could still buy a machine gun, but now you had to register the gun and pay a $200 tax. At the time, this was real money, more than the retail price of a Thompson, which Auto-Ordnance had reduced to $175 in its continuing quest for orders from the U.S. military. The tax remains $200 today, no longer quite the disincentive the law’s crafters meant it to be.
In 1938, Congress passed the next round of federal controls with the Federal Firearms Act, which required the licensing of gun dealers and set the cost of a license at a whopping one dollar. (The National Rifle Association had argued even this was too high and should have been something nominal, say fifteen cents or a quarter.)
The next great spasm of domestic violence took place in the 1960s, with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Charles Whitman’s shooting spree from the top of the University of Texas tower, which killed fourteen people; and the overall unrest that tore the nation’s cities apart in the late 1960s. This time the result was a more comprehensive set of firearms laws, called the Gun Control Act of 1968. It boosted dealer fees to $10 and required that they keep detailed records of incoming and outgoing guns. It also