Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [87]
He also said he would not publish books on poisons—although in fact several books in Paladin’s catalog, including Kill Without Joy, include tips on the subject. He countered that these references were very general. “We try to avoid publishing specifics.”
But why this scruple if Paladin’s customers are just Walter Mitty types in search of a psychic release?
Lund tipped back his chair. “Perhaps I can’t tell you accurately,” he said slowly. “I find it very offensive, poisoning. Because it’s something done by the devious, it isn’t a direct-confrontation kind of thing.”
“Bombs are pretty devious,” I suggested.
“We all have our boundaries, wouldn’t you say?” His voice was mild, but his gaze turned perceptibly cooler. “Perhaps my boundaries are different from yours. My boundaries are different from many people’s.”
The “aftermarket” bazaar offers far more than mere advice. Dozens of large and small companies peddle all manner of accessories capable of turning your neighborhood bully into a Rambo-esque urban warrior. U.S. Cavalry, a mail-order company in Radcliff, Kentucky, offers “military and adventure equipment,” including laser sights, a “sleeve dagger” meant to be strapped to the user’s arm or leg (complete with “blood grooves” ground into its triangular blade), a plastic hairbrush with a knife embedded in the handle, and all the accessories needed to turn your Mossberg Model 500 shotgun into a tactical assault gun with front and rear “assault grips,” folding stock, and a perforated barrel shroud that gives the weapon the look of an exotic machine gun.
The lushest source of weapons and accessories remains Shotgun News, the thrice-monthly advertising tabloid in Hastings, Nebraska. The front page invariably includes half a dozen ads from companies offering to help people acquire their own federal gun-dealer licenses (“Confused? Call Bob or Jennie today!”). The rest of each issue consists of 150 or more onionskin-like pages of classified and display advertising directed at gun dealers, collectors, and shooters of all tastes. In July 1989 the newspaper carried an advertisement offering the “Whitman Arsenal,” consisting of the seven weapons and accessories that Charles Whitman brought with him on August 1, 1966, when he climbed the twenty-seven-story clock tower at the University of Texas and spent the next ninety minutes firing away at anyone who happened to fall within his sights. He killed sixteen people, including a receptionist and two tourists in the tower; he wounded another thirty-one. The ad offered the guns along with a copy of the Life magazine edition that covered the shooting and called the incident “the most savage one-man rampage in the history of American crime.”
Shotgun News also carried ads placed by an Athens, Georgia, company for products designed to convert semiautomatic weapons to full-auto machine guns, a company later included in ATF’s wide-ranging effort to discover how the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, managed to acquire enough firepower to repel the 1993 ATF raid on the compound.
When I opened the July 10, 1992, edition of Shotgun News, to which I had subscribed, I found an advertisement for a Nazi tank—“a rare opportunity to own a fine piece of German artillery.” A Chillicothe, Ohio, broker of vintage military vehicles offered the tank for $145,000. “There’s no difference between owning a tank and a Ferrari except four inches of armor,” he told me during a visit to his office. Oddly enough, such ads may be among the most innocent in the publication. Private buyers of tanks tend to be history-loving souls and members of the Military Vehicle Preservation Association, which doesn’t allow live guns of any kind at its various meets.
Once notorious for running quasi-legal and occasionally racist ads, including an advertisement placed by the Ku Klux Klan, Shotgun News has grown more circumspect, at least in terms of its published policies. It now includes a notice that it no longer