Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [94]
Gun writers often skirt the gory reality of gunshot injury by driving euphemism to new heights, deftly avoiding the words kill, murder, and death, using instead such etymological eunuchs as knockdown, stopping power, and—this is my favorite—double-tap, meaning to shoot a guy twice. (Double Tap also happens to be the name of a Virginia Beach gun store, whose sign features a black human silhouette with two red holes over the heart.)
To the gun press, no firearm is unworthy of praise, not even the Saturday night specials made by the now defunct RG Industries, one of which was used by John Hinckley when he shot James Brady in the head. In its “Combat Annual” American Handgunner included a defense of RG’s guns written by Mark Moritz, special projects editor. Moritz, who noted that his first gun was an RG, tested a .22-caliber RG revolver against an expensive Smith & Wesson .22, comparing their performance in both head and body shots.
The RG was a little slower.
However, Moritz wrote, “even out of the box we are only talking about two-tenths of a second for multiple headshots at the relatively long range of seven yards.”
Moritz won’t win any awards for sensitivity in journalism. Early on in the story, in an angry denunciation of the “slimebucket” lawyers who sued RG Industries out of business after the Reagan-Brady shootings, he wrote: “When John Hinckley shot James Brady, with an RG .22 revolver, his wife, Sarah, head spokesnut at Handgun Control, Inc., sued RG. She was offended that her husband was shot with a cheap, low-powered gun. I guess she wanted him to be shot with an expensive, high-powered gun.”
A writer for American Survival Guide even had nice things to say about S.W. Daniel’s Ladies’ Home Companion shotgun, the gun the Maryland state police ballistics expert refused even to test-fire. “When we first came across the Ladies’ Home Companion at a large gun show earlier this year, we found it a highly interesting and unique firearm,” the author wrote. He never commented on the inappropriate name of the weapon. The gun’s heavy trigger pull, he wrote, “makes the LHC a very safe gun.”
The Cobray M-11/9, Nicholas Elliot’s gun, gets its share of praise too. The Gun Digest Book of Assault Weapons included a chapter on the pistol and its heritage. The author described it as “a plinker’s delight and the bane of all tin cans, milk jugs, clay pigeons and other inanimate objects.” He saw its primary practical value as being home defense. “Appearance alone should cause most burglars and intruders to consider instant surrender if brought before its muzzle.”
In the closing paragraphs, the writer waxed nostalgic: “It is nice to know the Ingram family of submachine guns still is living and well. Because of their use on television and in the movies, they are justifiably famous.”
America’s entertainment media provide the last ingredients to the perverse and lethal roux that sustains our gun culture. Today’s TV producers and movie directors have not only adopted and amplified the elemental messages of frontier myth—in particular the notion that only a gun can set you free—but so deified guns as to promote the use and proliferation of specific kinds of weapons. Just as McQ promoted the Ingram, so too Dirty Harry promoted the Smith & Wesson Model 29, and “Miami Vice”—in addition to also promoting the Ingram line—such assault weapons as the Uzi and Bren 10. Dr. Park Dietz, the La Jolla forensic psychiatrist, studied the effect of “Miami Vice” on gun prices and demand and found that the appearance of the Bren 10 in the hands of Sonny