Lethal Passage (30 page)

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 Crockett (Don Johnson) in the early episodes of the show immediately boosted demand for the weapon. Dietz has argued that “Miami Vice” by itself “was the major determinant of assault-gun fashion for the 1980s.”

Dr. Dietz told me he believes America’s news and entertainment media—its action movies, “reality” shows, news broadcasts, novels, and newspapers—play a far greater role in stimulating the country’s bloodlust than any other source, including underculture publishers like Paladin Press. “Nothing evil or disgusting known to man lacks a guidebook,” he told me. “But it’s not only Paladin producing them. Today Hollywood studios market more widely a more graphic version for the illiterate than Paladin would be capable of generating or selling. Whereas ten years ago someone wanting to know how to more effectively rob a bank or kill with poison or booby-trap a crack house would have to consult a more experienced offender or go to a library or bookstore, today they need merely turn on HBO. And so a lower intellectual grade of offender has been given access to what only those who could read or communicate had available in the past. That’s not Paladin’s doing. That’s Hollywood’s doing.”

Clearly, the role of movies and television in stimulating violence can never be quantified. Their impact, however, seems obvious. Consider how the phrase “Make my day” migrated from the movie
Dirty Harry
to car bumpers from coast to coast, even to a presidential speech, and, in slightly altered form, to the dialogue in a Disney “Duck Tales” cartoon. Recall too how sales of the Ingram submachine guns boomed after
McQ
, how
Dirty Harry
jolted sales of the Smith & Wesson Model 29.
Add to this the American Psychological Association’s estimate that by the time a child finishes elementary school he will have watched eight thousand murders on television.

Early in 1993 I again visited the Frederick County gun show and, while loitering at a booth offering sawed-off shotguns, silencers, and submachine guns (including a MAC-10 for $595), listened in as
a young boy peppered the dealer with questions. The image was pure Rockwell, but with a rather dark contemporary twist. The boy wore a baseball cap with the beak lifted high off his forehead. He had freckles and ruddy cheeks, and glasses that had slipped a bit down his nose. His jacket was new, and too big. Instead of trying out the stethoscope of some kindly Rockwellian doctor, he caressed the smooth metal finish of a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. He paused before a Barrett Firearms .50-caliber sniper rifle, which reared above the table on its bipod barrel rest. This was the gun Jim Moore had offered to show me in Las Vegas.

“Is this the same gun they used in the movie?” the boy asked the dealer.

“Right,” the dealer said. “
The Navy SEALs
.”

The boy touched the rifle. “He used this to shoot through a building,” the boy said with the kind of reverence once reserved for home-run baseballs.

“You shoot this at a building, it’ll take off a pretty good piece,” the dealer agreed.

The boy pointed at the powerful scope mounted on the rifle. “And he used this to see through the building.”

The dealer kept a straight face.

The power of the entertainment media in fostering the appeal of guns became especially clear to me one afternoon when I and my daughters visited a video store in hopes of renting
Peter Pan
. My two-and-a-half-year-old was immediately distracted by an almost life-size cardboard cutout of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in their
Lethal Weapon
roles, with Mel Gibson’s arm and his trademark Beretta extended into space. My daughter closed her hands around the Beretta, then pulled away, making her hands into the shape of a gun. She held them out before her in a position astonishingly like the isosceles combat stance used by police and their TV counterparts and, while imitating as best she could the sound of a gun, fired two pretend shots at her older sister. This was sibling rivalry, American style.

Our movies and TV shows do far more damage than simply
boosting the appeal of weapons, however. They teach a uniquely American lesson: when a real man has a problem, he gets his gun. He slaps in a clip, he squints grimly into the hot noon sun, then does what he’s gotta do. The training begins early. In the summer of ’92, for example, I watched a TV commercial for the Super Soaker water gun, then the rage among pint-size assassins. The commercial offered a chilling parallel to the kind of real-life revenge killings carried out every day in the streets of America’s inner cities:

Two nerdy boys show up for a pool party at the home of a snooty preppy girl named Buffy. She shuts the door in their faces.

They return, however, this time dressed in black suit jackets, white shirts, black ties, black fedoras, and of course dark glasses, exactly like the Blues Brothers as portrayed by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, except that in place of black slacks the boys wear gaudy swim trunks. One boy solemnly opens a briefcase. His friend reaches in and pulls out the Super Soaker. “Oh, Buffeeee,” he calls in a mocking, nasal voice. She turns. He fires. Buffy is so shocked she spills her glass of punch over her face and torso.

The punch, of course, is dark red.

It was this lesson, above all, that Nicholas Elliot absorbed: when all else fails, maybe a gun can solve your problem.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
N
ICHOLAS

T
WO DIFFERENT TEACHERS TOLD
L
ORA
F
ARLEY
that her mother, Karen, was either tending to a wounded teacher or comforting a teacher who had been chased. Both scenarios seemed plausible to her. That’s the kind of woman her mother was, always giving and always getting involved. “I was like, ‘Well, that sounds right too. I can see her doing both of them, but I don’t know how she could do it at the same time.’ ”

Soon afterward, a teacher asked Will and Lora to come out into the hall.

“And one of my teachers was standing there and she was staring off … like out into where all the trailers were. She like gave me a hug and then they said, ‘Take them back in the auditorium.’

“So we went back in the auditorium, and then about ten or twenty minutes later, they came and got us and they took us into Pastor Sweet’s office, and my pastor was there.” (The Farleys were members of a different church but sent their kids to Atlantic Shores.) “They never said that, you know, your mom has been shot or your mom is dead. They just—my pastor was crying, and then, I mean, we just sort of knew what had happened.”

Sweet was at the hospital waiting as Sam Marino underwent emergency surgery. One of his assistants telephoned him there. “George, you need to get back here right away.”

“Why?”

“They found Karen Farley and she’s dead.”

“She came at you?” Det. Donald Adams asked Nicholas as their conversation proceeded.

Nicholas nodded.

“Did she say something to you about the gun?”

“
She did say something, but I didn’t really hear her.”

“Then what did you do? You didn’t want her to take the gun, so what did you do?”

“It went off again.”

“Do you know how many times?”

“Once, I think. I’m pretty sure once.”

Adams spent the next few moments trying to pin Nicholas down on exactly what had occurred and in what order. Periodically his mother inserted questions and urged Nicholas to tell the truth.

“
I know I went in there and she wanted the gun,” Nicholas said. “… She was saying something, but I didn’t hear her. She was coming at me and the gun went off.”

Mrs. Elliot asked impatiently, “You didn’t hear what she was saying?”

“I’m not deaf,” Nicholas said.

But he could not remember.

Bill Farley learned of his wife’s death about two o’clock that afternoon from his pastor, who arrived accompanied by a female police officer.
The Virginia Beach police had not found Mrs. Farley until ninety minutes after the shootings when the head count determined she alone was missing. A teacher saw her through the window in her
trailer, but could not reach her because the door was locked. One of the Virginia Beach officers rushed over and broke the glass with his baton.

“
It was unbelievable,” Farley said, recalling his reaction. “Nobody gets shot at a Christian school. It’s in a church building. Come on, get real. People don’t get killed in church.”

Detective Adams believes Karen Farley may have walked in on Nicholas as he was preparing his weapon before his return to the trailer where he encountered Sam Marino and Susan Allen. When police found her, she was still wearing her winter coat. The first bullet had struck her forearm before entering her torso, suggesting to investigators that she had raised her hand either to ask for the gun or to plead for her life, or perhaps merely in another of those magical efforts to defend against the bullet.