Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [88]
During a reporting journey unrelated to guns, I inadvertently wound up at the fountainhead of aftermarket suppliers, the huge annual “surplus” show in Las Vegas, also the source of much of the cheap merchandise we encounter in “dollar” and Army-Navy stores and in low-rung direct-mail catalogs. Some thirty thousand retailers from around the world visited the show, shopping its four thousand booths for bargains in bulk quantities of those ubiquitous purple-haired trolls, cheap plastic toys, and other merchandise. But I found dozens of dealers selling a darker sort of merchandise, including surplus night-vision scopes like the one used by the serial killer in the movie Silence of the Lambs, dummy hand grenades, combat knives, police badges, and black caps emblazoned with the law-enforcement acronyms we see routinely in newspaper photographs of raids conducted by ATF, DEA, and the FBI. “It’s perfectly legal,” an attendant at one of the cap booths told me. These caps and badges, along with the magnetic blue or red police-style flashing lights offered in U.S. Cavalry’s catalog, can turn anyone into a convincing replica of a bona fide lawman.
At one of the largest booths at the Las Vegas show I encountered Jim Moore, chief executive officer of Military Supply Corp., LaCenter, Washington, who told me he sold uniforms and other equipment to armies around the world. He was also selling .50-caliber long-range sniper rifles. In fact, he said, he had one up in his room at the Las Vegas Hilton at that very moment. He flipped to a page in his catalog that contained a sketch of the bipod-mounted rifle. “It’s called reach out and touch someone at two thousand yards,” Moore said. “Would you like to come out and shoot it?”
He later canceled the demonstration. The colonel was a victim of jet lag, Moore explained; he had napped through the afternoon.
The aftermarket has so much to offer that Nicholas Elliot need not have gone to all the trouble of making the combat accessories police found in his backpack. With a little effort, he could have ordered them directly from S.W. Daniel’s mail-order catalog. It offered a brass catcher, complete with see-through bag and Velcro fastener; an official Cobray “assault sling,” wrist strap, and rear sling collar (“Get Super Control By Adding These Accessories,” the catalog said); “fake” silencers; slotted barrel extenders; and flash suppressors, designed to keep that all-too-detectable muzzle flash to a minimum. For $127.95 Cobray enthusiasts could also order a screw-on barrel-and-grip assembly to make the Cobray M-11/9 resemble “the fabled Thompson” machine gun. Instead of jungle-clipping his magazines with tape, Nicholas could simply have ordered a plastic magazine joiner tailored to the purpose. S.W. Daniel named this product Double Trouble.
The catalog asked, “Can You Imagine 64 Rounds?”
Two institutions share much of the responsibility for cultivating the anything-goes attitude of firearms makers and the aftermarket bazaar. They have declared themselves each other’s enemy, but together both served as a kind of cultural cheering squad, nudging Nicholas Elliot and his Cobray along their path to Atlantic Shores.
The first is the National Rifle Association.
To people who dislike guns, the NRA is the Great Satan. They see its influence in every act of gun-related legislation