Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [81]
Here too I found the How to Kill series by John Minnery, all six books now packaged in one handy 512-page volume called Kill Without Joy: The Complete How to Kill Book, whose chapters according to the catalog “provide gruesome testimony to why these books have been banned by certain countries around the globe.” The catalog calls this a how- to history of murder, but quickly inserts its catchall disclaimer, “For information and academic purposes only!”
I ordered Kill Without Joy. Paladin, the L.L. Bean of mayhem, delivered it shortly thereafter.
The book begins: “The object of this study is to instruct the reader in the techniques of taking another human life, up close, and doing it well.” It includes a chapter called “Smothering” and offers a few tips on decapitation. “If the subject’s execution is to be ritualized, kneel him down, hands tied behind his back. Pass the blade of the weapon lightly over the back of his bowed head. This causes the muscles to stiffen.”
Interested readers can find the book in the rare-book collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Not because it’s at all rare, however. “For security reasons,” a librarian there told me. “A book like that wouldn’t stay on the shelf for long.”
Paladin Press merits closer examination. It represents the distillation of the attitude of nonresponsibility that prevails in America’s gun culture and that so influenced the evolution of Nicholas Elliot’s gun. At a time when America is struggling with a rising tide of violence, Paladin Press enthusiastically peddles primers on how to produce such violence. Its books are well-known to police and federal agents across the country, who have found them in the libraries of serial killers and bombers. Paladin, moreover, is but one company, albeit the most visible, in a little-known industry nurtured by America’s infatuation with violence and sheltered by the free-speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Often referred to as the “gun aftermarket,” the industry includes scores of small companies devoted to peddling murderous know-how of all kinds, including at least one guide to torture. That such an industry exists at all demonstrates how deep the roots of our infatuation with guns and violence descend.
Paladin Press keeps a low profile in Boulder, a town whose pronounced leftward lean prompts many residents to refer jokingly but pridefully to the city as the People’s Republic of Boulder. A business columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera, the city’s newspaper, had never heard of the company. Nor had anyone at the city’s public broadcasting radio station. Paladin occupies several small, nondescript buildings a few blocks north of Pearl Street, the city’s chic pedestrian mall. No sign announces the location, just a small plaque by a side door to the main building.
The company, however, makes no effort to discourage inquiries. Its owner, Peder Lund, is unabashedly candid about the 450 books he sells and his motives for doing so.
“I prefer to make decisions about publishing based on what we want to publish and what our customers want, rather than acceding to any particular desire for respectability,” he told me. With a gravelly laugh, he added, “Why bother? It’s not on my agenda.”
Lund is a midsize man with dark hair, steady blue eyes, and a deep, assured voice. Although his roots are Scandinavian, at first glance he leaves an impression of Irishness. His nose is on the long side of pug, his ears are cantilevered outward in a mildly elfish way. As always, a fully loaded .357 Magnum revolver rested on the right-hand surface of his desk, in full view.
Lund and a partner, Robert K. Brown, founded Paladin in 1970 after both had served with the Army’s Special Forces in Vietnam. The two first met in Miami in 1964 where Lund was working on a plan to lead a group of amateur soldiers into Castro’s Cuba to rescue some refugees and to capture the whole heroic saga on film.