Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [86]
In fact, he argued, vulnerable readers migrate to such material and may incorporate the “worldview” of the publication into their thinking. “My concern,” he said, “is not just that one can learn to build a better bomb this way, but also that through sufficient immersion in this subculture one comes to find a greater need to build the bomb.”
I asked Peder Lund what he thought of Dr. Dietz’s views.
“I really can’t be bothered by him,” he said. Dr. Dietz, he said, had seized on a few aberrant cases to postulate a link between Paladin’s books and crime. “If you take two hundred thousand people, statistically you’re going to find two or three who don’t wear underwear, four or five who cultivate bonsai trees, six or eight who’ve shaved their heads. There’s no statistical validity to the man’s conclusions. It’s as if you went to a party last night and met five people who were divorced and decided the divorce rate had gone up catastrophically.”
Lund dismissed Dr. Dietz’s product-tampering theory as “conjecture.” On the reports of bomb injuries from books published by Paladin and others, Lund said, “As a human, I feel very sorry for anyone who’s put through any physical suffering. As a publisher and as a pragmatist, I feel absolutely no responsibility for the misuse of information.”
Paladin is merely a vehicle for conveying information, he said. “We are not encouraging illegal activity.”
No one, at least no one I could find, has sued Paladin over the ways people put its books to use. “And I think it would be a travesty of the legal system to do so, don’t you?” Lund said. “Do you sue General Motors because a kid runs over his schoolmate in a stolen car? Do you sue the manufacturer of a hammer because a child picks it up and bashes his little sister’s head in? I can’t see any clear-thinking person holding someone responsible for conveying information.”
The U.S. Supreme Court agrees. “The general rule is, people do have a constitutional right to engage in speech which might cause serious harm or danger to others,” said Bruce Ennis, a First Amendment attorney. Speech, or a written work, can be deemed illegal only when it is virtually certain to lead a listener or reader to an immediate act of violence. “These are difficult standards to meet,” said Floyd Abrams, considered a leading expert in First Amendment law. “They are supposed to be difficult.”
Even bomb investigators, the people who most often encounter the fruits of the violence-industry’s advice, oppose banning such books. “You can’t say they can’t print this stuff,” said Joe Grubisic, commander of the Chicago bomb squad. “I don’t like it, but I really don’t know what the solution is. I don’t want a police state.”
No problem would exist, argued Sergeant Stumph of Orange County, if Paladin and its peers simply chose not to publish their violence primers. “It’d be so nice if the big R-word would just come into play, if some of these people would just take responsibility for their friggin’ actions.”
Jack Thompson, a Miami lawyer whom the ACLU picked to be one of its 1992 Arts Censors of the Year, took a less indulgent view. That Paladin can continue to sell a book like Kill Without Joy, he said, is evidence of a lack of prosecutorial initiative. “The ACLU has been very successful in convincing an entire generation of prosecutors that you can’t do anything about this stuff,” he said. The majority of Americans, he argued, want the likes of Paladin Press “aggressively pursued and prosecuted, but they’ve been abandoned because of a lack of will by the government at every level.”
Some books even Paladin will not publish, Lund told me. He will not accept anything racist or “scatological.” He will not publish advice on altitude-sensitive