Lethal Passage (25 page)

Homicide, or rather the homicide fantasy, is the engine that drives America’s fascination with guns. Target shooters spend hour after hour firing into human silhouettes. Practical shooting competitions held nationwide test civilian competitors’ ability to hit targets after leaping from a car. Occasionally such meets conclude in an explosive finale, with entrants firing away at a distant target consisting of dynamite and a gasoline-filled barrel. In this milieu, guns used in grisly crimes actually wind up gaining popularity. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, sales of the otherwise undistinguished Mannlicher-Carcano rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald soared.
Hundreds “were immediately bought by souvenir-seekers who wanted to get the feel of the weapon that had brought down the president,” wrote Robert Sherrill in
The Saturday Night Special
Even the murder of schoolchildren boosts sales. After Patrick Edward Purdy opened fire on a schoolyard in Stockton with his AKS, a semiautomatic version of the now-infamous AK-47, sales of the gun and its knockoffs boomed. Prices quadrupled, to $1,500. Guns Unlimited felt the surge in demand. “
I didn’t sell an AK until Stockton in California; then everybody wanted one,” said James S. Dick, the owner of Guns Unlimited, in a deposition.

A
New York Times
reporter once asked the marketing director at
Intratec, a Miami company that makes an assault pistol similar in spirit to the Cobray, how he felt about the widespread condemnation of his company’s weapons. Like the Cobray, the TEC 9 is a handgun of “dirty” design, meant to evoke a submachine gun. It has a perforated barrel sheath, akin to those that appear on full-scale machine guns. “
I’m kind of flattered,” he replied. “It just has that advertising tingle to it. Hey, it’s talked about, it’s read about, the media write about it. That generates more sales for me. It might sound cold and cruel, but I’m sales oriented.”

Intratec was so oriented to sales that when California banned assault weapons and included the Intratec 9 on the list, Intratec sidestepped the law through the simple maneuver of changing the gun’s name to TEC-DC-9. Gian Luigi Ferri bought two in Las Vegas and, on July 1, 1993, took them to the thirty-fourth floor of a gleaming San Francisco office building. He killed eight people, wounded six, then shot himself to death. Like Nicholas, indeed, like so many of our very many spree shooters, he carried an excessive amount of ammunition, some six hundred rounds. He had acquired the guns legally. “
Everything was by the book,” said a Las Vegas police officer.

The passion for lethality suffuses the process through which guns and ammunition are conceived and made. Manufacturers routinely test their prototypes not by firing them at tin cans, but by blasting away at blocks of Jell-O–like goo—ordnance gelatin—intended specifically to simulate human tissue. Their enthusiasm for gore can lead to some vivid advertising. In the March/April 1992 issue of
American Handgunner
, a magazine for the civilian firearms consumer, the Eldorado Cartridge Corp. ran a full-page ad for its Starfire cartridge under the bold headline “IF LOOKS CAN KILL.” The ad called the Starfire the “deadliest handgun cartridge ever developed for home or personal defense, and hunting” and went on to describe how the bullet expands on impact “resulting in a massive wound channel.” Its deep penetration, the ad crowed, “helps assure fast knockdown.”

During one of several visits to a gun show in Frederick, Maryland,
I stood at one dealer’s table beside a man and his young son who, like me, were intently watching a promotional video produced by Power-Plus, a maker of exotic ammunition. The narrator, dressed in a dark T-shirt and speaking in that laconic backcountry drawl that characterizes today’s notion of toughness, demonstrated his company’s rounds by firing a sample of each into a fresh block of yellowish gelatin, with the camera then cutting to offer a close side-view of the depth of penetration and the jagged wound channel coursing through the translucent plasma. Each round was more destructive than the last, until the narrator fired a sample of the company’s Annihilator high-explosive bullets, which slammed into the gelatin, exploded, and knocked the quivering block from its stand. Anyone wondering who might use such a bullet need only look to John Hinckley, who used a similar bullet marketed under the brand name Devastator in his attack on Ronald Reagan.
Only one of the bullets he fired did actually explode, much to the benefit of Reagan, who did not even realize he had been shot, but to the lasting detriment of James Brady, in whose brain that one bullet happened to perform as intended.

The Power-Plus narrator moved on to demonstrate the company’s Multi-Plex rounds, which launched anywhere from two to four bullets from a single cartridge. An Alabama mail-order ammunition dealer described these bullets in its catalog as “an outstanding choice for home defense.”

As if all this weren’t enough, our narrator next demonstrated the effects of the company’s bullets on a pail packed with clay. This time those of us watching were treated to the additional audio enticement of hearing the wet slapping sound of the clay as the bullets entered, fragmented, and ruptured the surrounding muck, gouging caverns the size of pumpkins.

“Still watching, Son?” the father asked softly, his hands resting on his son’s shoulders.

His son, clearly entranced, nodded slowly.

Gun shows are marvelous places to capture a feel for America’s
gun culture. The moment I stepped from my car, I saw a middle-aged man with a well-developed paunch sauntering toward the show entrance. He was dressed in a short-sleeve shirt and loose, wrinkled slacks and looked like a TV producer’s dream image of the average suburban American male—except, that is, for the black Colt AR-15 assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

The show occupied two buildings at the Frederick County fairgrounds. A few men walked the aisles wearing little signs on their backs listing the guns they owned and wanted to sell. Another man had stuck a
FOR SALE
sign in the barrel of the rifle dangling at his back. Seated behind battered fold-down tables, dealers sold guns, books, accessories, and ammunition, even those hard-to-find .50-caliber rounds needed for long-range sniper rifles and battlefield machine guns. Several dealers sold books on how to kill and, for those who knew how already, how to do it more effectively, including books on how to make silencers, military manuals on how to make booby traps, black-covered Army manuals on how to make “improvised munitions,” and a nifty little tome courtesy of the Pentagon on how to brush up on your sniper skills.

One dealer offered a Browning heavy machine gun complete with tripod. A thin, balding clerk wearing a black T-shirt commemorating the 1992 “Machine Gun Shoot” told me the gun worked and asked, was I interested?

“I don’t have the tax stamp,” I said. (I was referring here to the $200 transfer tax any adult must pay before acquiring a machine gun, a silencer, or any other weapon restricted by the National Firearms Act of 1934.)

“No problem getting one,” he said. “If it’s the cost—think how much money you’d spend if you had a boat. You fill that tank, that’s what? Fifty bucks each time you go out?”

Elsewhere in his booth he displayed an S.W. Daniel Street-Sweeper shotgun, a Cobray M-11/9, and on an adjacent table the Cobray’s full-auto RPB-made ancestor, its price reduced to $410 from $598 as a special deal for this show only.

“Looks new,” I said, referring to the RPB. “Has it been fired?”

“That’s the display gun. All the rest, new in the box.”

“How many have you got?”

I hadn’t meant to be cagey, but he gave me a sly grin all the same. “How many you need? I got lots and lots.”

For an advanced course in dealing death, all Nicholas Elliot would have had to do was turn to the back pages of his treasured gun magazines, where advertisers peddle all manner of lethal know-how. One afternoon I sat down with my checkbook and the classifieds from a current issue of
American Handgunner
and scanned the ads as would, say, a presidential assassin.

I wrote to the Kinetic Energy Corp., at a post office box in Tavernier, Florida, to learn about its products, which it called the “world’s deadliest handgun ammunition.” A week later I received a badly typed one-page photocopy listing the company’s cartridges and, to the probable delight of police officers everywhere, touting their ability to penetrate bulletproof vests. Kinetic wrote, for example, that its nine-millimeter bullet “will penetrate the Kevlar Type IIA bullet proof vest and make a 1 ½ inch diameter hole through 1600 pages of a dry phone book protected by the Kevlar vest from a distance of 45 feet.”

Kinetic felt moved to add three rather ill-crafted lines to the very end of the flyer. “Any one including the worst of criminals can purchase a kevlar bullet proof vest. More and more of the criminals are commiting hold ups and home invanisons [sic] wearing these vests.”

I also sent three dollars to Lafayette Research of Varnell, Georgia. This company proposed not to sell me deadly ammunition, but to teach me how to make my own. A week or so later I received from Lafayette a set of directions on how to make exploding bullets. The two-page instructions, clearly produced on a none-too-sophisticated computer printer, began with the warning: “This plan is for information only!!”

This disclaimer struck me as less than convincing, however, in light of another warning that followed closely thereafter: “Warning: Always wear proper safety equipment including protective eye wear whenever in the vicinity of moving machinery or tools such as drills!!”

Explicit, step-by-step instructions followed, detailing how to drill out the nose of a .44-caliber bullet, pack the hole with oil and a BB, then reassemble the cartridge. On impact, the steel BB is rammed backward into the softer lead of the bullet, thus causing the bullet to shatter.

Despite the “information only” disclaimer, the directions included machining tolerances down to a few thousandths of an inch.

One
American Handgunner
ad was especially compelling to my inner terrorist.

“MEN OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE,” it hailed.

This was Paladin Press of Boulder, Colorado, offering me a fifty-page catalog of books and videos on “new identity, improvised explosives, revenge, firearms, survival, and many other outrageous and controversial subjects.” I sent in my dollar and soon afterward received a catalog chock-full of books every red-blooded American really ought to be reading.

Inside I found dozens of books that promised to turn me into a major neighborhood asset. Here, for example, were
Breath of the Dragon: Homebuilt Flamethrowers; Improvised Land Mines: Their Employment and Destructive Capabilities
(“Just in case your future includes a little anarchy,” the blurb reads);
Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives
(with the author’s techniques “a single individual can easily dig a dry well, redirect creeks, blow up bad guys and perform a host of otherwise impossible chores of immense benefit to mankind”);
Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors
, purportedly written by a practicing professional named Rex Feral; and
Death by Deception
, on how to turn ordinary objects like computer modems and showerheads into deadly booby traps.

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.