Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [72]
Soon after the murder of Sheldean Simon, however, Baltimore detective Harry Edgerton told a Sun reporter, “As we speak, people who are out there right now, who are killed or wounded, could be the responsibility of Carroll Brown. In the end, all this gun stuff comes down to one guy who says, ‘I don’t want to follow the rules.’ ”
Among the guns Brown sold were twenty-seven Cobray pistols of the kind carried by Nicholas Elliot.
On those occasions where ATF does take a proactive rather than merely reactive approach to policing America’s gun dealers, it invariably discovers crooked dealers responsible for diverting thousands of weapons into criminal hands. A classic example of such enforcement, and the kind that ought to be pursued as a matter of routine, is Project Detroit, an ongoing effort by ATF and the Detroit police to trace as many guns as possible.
ATF began the first Project Detroit study with a pool of 2,342 weapons entered into the property room at Detroit police headquarters between January 1989 and April 1990. Common wisdom nurtured by an endless series of TV crime shows and detective novels holds that all weapons can be traced readily, but that is not the case. ATF agents were able to trace only half the weapons in the initial pool. The remainder of the guns had been incorrectly identified by investigators, were too old to be traced (any weapon sold before the Gun Control Act of 1968 is essentially untraceable), had obliterated serial numbers that could not be restored, or could not be traced because of inadvertently or deliberately sloppy record-keeping among licensed dealers.
In its report on this first phase of Project Detroit, the bureau—gun-shy ever since its near demise under Ronald Reagan—was careful to note that high-volume dealers would necessarily experience more traces. It is a truism, indeed, that the bigger the gun dealer’s volume of sales, the more often the guns he sells will be used in homicide, suicide, rape, robbery, assault, and gang warfare. The report said, “Just because an FFL has sold a large number of weapons that were subsequently used in crimes does not necessarily indicate the FFL is intentionally diverting weapons to the criminal element.”
Yet of the five licensed dealers identified most often in the Project Detroit traces, four—including the top three—became the targets of full-scale ATF investigations. The worst offender, according to the report, was Sherman Butler of Sterling Heights, Michigan, near Detroit, whose Sherm’s Guns accounted for twenty-nine traces stemming from a range of crimes that included at least two homicides. Butler’s specialty was the sale of S.W. Daniel Cobrays modified to include a sixteen-inch barrel and shoulder stock, thus qualifying them as long rifles and allowing purchasers to buy them without first having to comply with stricter federal and local handgun regulations. For $125 extra, however, Butler threw in a pistol-length barrel and enough of a pistol frame—a pistol “upper receiver”—to allow buyers to quickly turn their carbines back into semiautomatic pistols.
Next in line, with twenty-seven traces, was Steven Durham, whose All Gun Cleaning Service in Detroit “provided hundreds of firearms to the most visible and most violent narcotics organizations in the Detroit metropolitan area.” Durham persuaded acquaintances to fill out the form 4473s for specific handgun purchases even though these associates never actually bought the guns. Instead Durham simply filed their records and sold the guns to illegal buyers.
Three other federally licensed dealers, as a routine business practice, obliterated the serial numbers on every gun they received from wholesalers. The report estimated that together the three had sold more than three thousand firearms “and that law-enforcement officers will be recovering them in various crimes for years