Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [80]
Elsewhere in his booth he displayed an S.W. Daniel Street-Sweeper shotgun, a Cobray M-11/9, and on an adjacent table the Cobray’s full-auto RPB-made ancestor, its price reduced to $410 from $598 as a special deal for this show only.
“Looks new,” I said, referring to the RPB. “Has it been fired?”
“That’s the display gun. All the rest, new in the box.”
“How many have you got?”
I hadn’t meant to be cagey, but he gave me a sly grin all the same. “How many you need? I got lots and lots.”
For an advanced course in dealing death, all Nicholas Elliot would have had to do was turn to the back pages of his treasured gun magazines, where advertisers peddle all manner of lethal know-how. One afternoon I sat down with my checkbook and the classifieds from a current issue of American Handgunner and scanned the ads as would, say, a presidential assassin.
I wrote to the Kinetic Energy Corp., at a post office box in Tavernier, Florida, to learn about its products, which it called the “world’s deadliest handgun ammunition.” A week later I received a badly typed one-page photocopy listing the company’s cartridges and, to the probable delight of police officers everywhere, touting their ability to penetrate bulletproof vests. Kinetic wrote, for example, that its nine-millimeter bullet “will penetrate the Kevlar Type IIA bullet proof vest and make a 1 ½ inch diameter hole through 1600 pages of a dry phone book protected by the Kevlar vest from a distance of 45 feet.”
Kinetic felt moved to add three rather ill-crafted lines to the very end of the flyer. “Any one including the worst of criminals can purchase a kevlar bullet proof vest. More and more of the criminals are commiting hold ups and home invanisons [sic] wearing these vests.”
I also sent three dollars to Lafayette Research of Varnell, Georgia. This company proposed not to sell me deadly ammunition, but to teach me how to make my own. A week or so later I received from Lafayette a set of directions on how to make exploding bullets. The two-page instructions, clearly produced on a none-too-sophisticated computer printer, began with the warning: “This plan is for information only!!”
This disclaimer struck me as less than convincing, however, in light of another warning that followed closely thereafter: “Warning: Always wear proper safety equipment including protective eye wear whenever in the vicinity of moving machinery or tools such as drills!!”
Explicit, step-by-step instructions followed, detailing how to drill out the nose of a .44-caliber bullet, pack the hole with oil and a BB, then reassemble the cartridge. On impact, the steel BB is rammed backward into the softer lead of the bullet, thus causing the bullet to shatter.
Despite the “information only” disclaimer, the directions included machining tolerances down to a few thousandths of an inch.
One American Handgunner ad was especially compelling to my inner terrorist.
“MEN OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE,” it hailed.
This was Paladin Press of Boulder, Colorado, offering me a fifty-page catalog of books and videos on “new identity, improvised explosives, revenge, firearms, survival, and many other outrageous and controversial subjects.” I sent in my dollar and soon afterward received a catalog chock-full of books every red-blooded American really ought to be reading.
Inside I found dozens of books that promised to turn me into a major neighborhood asset. Here, for example, were Breath of the Dragon: Homebuilt Flamethrowers; Improvised Land Mines: Their Employment and Destructive Capabilities (“Just in case your future includes a little anarchy,” the blurb reads); Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives (with the author’s techniques “a single individual can easily dig a dry well, redirect creeks, blow up bad guys and perform a host of otherwise impossible chores of immense benefit to mankind”); Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, purportedly written by a practicing