Lethal Passage (9 page)

There is evidence too that manufacturers don’t see crime as being an entirely negative phenomenon.
Why else would the now-defunct Charter Arms Co. engrave the barrels of a brace of husband-and-wife revolvers with the names Bonnie and Clyde?

The gun industry has long contended that only a small percentage of guns are used in crime, while at the same time resisting efforts to document the true number and to identify the most popular crime guns by maker, model, and caliber. As of 1989, rather late in the computer revolution, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at last became able to provide some rudimentary statistics on which guns turned up most often in federal traces. Reports from the new database have already battered the NRA’s “guns don’t kill” stance, proving beyond doubt that certain guns turn up during the commission of crime far more often than others. The company whose handguns were traced most often from January of 1990 to December of 1991, simply because of the sheer magnitude of its production, was giant Smith & Wesson. However, when the frequency of traces is compared with each company’s production, S.W. Daniel, the company that made Nicholas Elliot’s gun, shows a tracing rate far higher.
By 1989 the company had produced some 60,500 handguns and an untold number of accessories, including silencers and machine-gun kits.
It fondly advertised Nicholas’s gun, the Cobray M-11/9, as “the gun that made the eighties roar.”

Condemned by police, ridiculed even by those who sell it, the gun has been inordinately controversial ever since its initial design by Gordon Ingram, a California engineer and gunsmith who sought
to make a cheap, reliable submachine gun for close military combat. How that gun went on to become a readily available mass-consumer product—something S.W. Daniel once even gave away free in a monthly contest—provides a clear example of the culture of nonresponsibility at work in America’s firearms industry. It is but one example of how this commercial ethos governed the gun’s progress from conception to its use as a murder weapon in a Virginia Beach classroom.

“
We’ve got technology running amok,” said Col. Leonard Supenski, the Baltimore County firearms expert. “No gun manufacturer ever decided in its R-and-D process that the product it was developing might not have any useful purpose for society and might in fact harm society. When Gordon Ingram began production and eventually tried to get into the commercial market, I’m sure the thought never entered his mind. The people at SWD don’t give a damn who gets those guns.”

CHAPTER FOUR
N
ICHOLAS

O
N
F
RIDAY
, D
ECEMBER
16, 1988, N
ICHOLAS
Elliot awoke feeling ill. He had an ear infection and was taking medication for it, but that did not account for his malaise. He had made big plans for the day, and suddenly those plans seemed too big. The anxiety sickened him. “
I didn’t feel like going to school,” he told Detective Adams. “But I knew I would get in trouble if I didn’t, so I went.…
I was just so sick.”

He planned to bring his gun to school for the express purpose of scaring Billy Cutter, his tormentor, and at last getting some respect. He had bought the gun two months before, a Cobray M-11/9 semiautomatic pistol capable of firing thirty-two rounds before requiring the shooter to reload. His mother did not know about his acquisition. Nicholas told Adams he had hidden the gun in a bird cage, but Adams believed he probably kept it in his attic.

“I was scared,” Nicholas told the detective, “because I didn’t know how I would feel with a gun at school.”

He packed his backpack and caught his usual bus. He attended the first of his classes. “I was looking for him from the beginning,” Nicholas said. “I wasn’t angry … I wanted to scare him, to make him see how much of a wimp he was in front of everyone.”

During Nicholas’s ride to school, the knowledge of what he carried
in his backpack and what he could do with it deeply frightened him. “
I was scared,” he said. “I was looking for Billy, but I also was scared.”

At one point, he considered abandoning his mission. He could not find the boy and was surprised at the fear he felt walking around school with a gun. “I was kind of thinking about just hiding the gun and getting it later on … take it home and just leave it.”

“Just forget the whole thing?” Adams prompted.

“Well, sort of, yeah, I mean, I wasn’t planning to shoot them.”

Briefly he had imagined an alternative means of getting back at Billy Cutter. “I was thinking about having someone do something to him. Well, like, you know, beat him up and teach him not to pick on people. Just do something to him, you know. I wanted to scare him. That’s what I really wanted to do.”

CHAPTER FIVE
T
HE
G
UN

T
HE
B
ALTIMORE
C
OUNTY
P
OLICE SHOOTING RANGE
occupies a wooded area just north of Towson, Maryland, where the broad six-lane strip roads of Baltimore city taper to rolling two-lane highways. I heard the range the moment I stepped from my car, the sound like something you would get if you put a microphone beside a package of microwave popcorn in midpop. The range was a flat plane carved from a hillside so as to leave an earthen cliff at one end, which serves as a backstop to keep stray rounds from bounding north into Baltimore County horse country. Colonel Supenski arrived carrying a gray attaché case and led me onto the range where a group of county corrections officers was undergoing pistol training. He asked their instructor to have the group stand down for a few minutes, even though he and I were headed for the far end of the range roughly one hundred yards away. His caution was a measure of the deep respect police officers have for the quirky dangers of bullets and guns. During my pursuit of Nicholas Elliot’s gun, I often observed a subtle dance that law-enforcement people do whenever an amateur in their midst handles a gun, whether the gun is loaded or not. As the gun shifts, they shift, but ever so slightly in an instinctive, drilled-in twitch meant to ensure that if an imaginary line were drawn outward from the muzzle, it would never intersect their bodies.

Supenski occupies an at-times uncomfortable position in the gun debate. On the one hand, he is a big fan of guns. I accompanied him to a gun show in Westminster, Maryland, one Sunday morning. Despite his constant contact with guns he still could not resist handling some of the handguns we encountered, especially the old collector’s guns and the “tricked out” competition guns with their scopes, compensators, and hand-checked grips. “
I grew up in the era of the B westerns,” he told me. “Loved them, still love them. My single most prized possession is an original Colt single-action ‘cowboy’ gun. Nickel-plated, hand-engraved, ivory stock.” But the Colonel, as everybody calls him, also believes in reasonable controls to force a heightened level of responsibility in the sale and use of firearms. This has not won him many friends among the gunslingers of America. He received a lot of sober stares from dealers at the gun show. One pro-gun group twice threatened to kill him, prompting a mischievous female assistant to don a bulletproof vest before joining him for lunch. “If I want to go sit behind the wheel of a fifteen-foot powerboat, I’ve got to get certified,” Supenski said. “I’ve got to go through a nine-week course, take a take-home exam, and have a natural-resources exam, and go through every conceivable aspect of safe boating—to sit behind the wheel of a boat.” He pointed to a handgun. “To buy one of those I don’t have to do squat. Now you tell me that’s sane.”

His is a pragmatic stance. He worries that irresponsible behavior by gun dealers, manufacturers, and the National Rifle Association may soon lead to truly restrictive controls well beyond the simple, yet crucial, regulations sought by moderate gun-control proponents, such as the 1993 Brady law’s mandatory waiting period and background checks. “My concern as a person who enjoys the shooting sports is that unless some reason comes in, things will get worse, and when that happens, those three million people in the NRA are going to find out what the
fifteen
million in the AARP [American Association of Retired Persons] are all about. Right now the other side hasn’t been mobilized.”

He considers the Cobray pistol made by S.W. Daniel Inc., and the means by which Nicholas Elliot came to own it, a study in irresponsibility in the gun marketplace, and he testified to that effect. The gun, he argues, serves no useful purpose—certainly none of the purposes traditionally cited by the gun camp when opposing new controls. It’s not useful for hunting, Supenski said. “First of all, you couldn’t use it to hunt. Most states have a limit on magazine capacity for hunting, three to five rounds. [The Cobray has a thirty-two-round magazine.] Second, most states have a minimum-caliber rule—clearly nine millimeter is not something you would use. It’s too big a cartridge to be used to hunt small game, it’s too small to hunt big game.”

Nor is the Cobray a target gun. Its two-inch barrel sharply reduces accuracy. It is a clumsy, heavy weapon, prone to rock up and down when fired. “It’s almost impossible to shoot one-handed, except at point-blank distances,” Supenski said. “It is a
hands
gun, plural, because you need both hands to employ it effectively. About the only thing you can do with it is hold it someplace in front of you, pull the trigger as fast as you can, put as many bullets out as you can, and hope like hell they’ll hit something. Now that may be nice on a battlefield. It isn’t so nice in an urban environment where that bullet may go through your bedroom into your child’s bedroom or into your neighbor’s bedroom, or may go outside and kill a passerby.”

Supenski opened his attaché case. Inside, against a thick layer of foam, was a Cobray pistol and a magazine packed with gleaming nine-millimeter cartridges. His department had confiscated the gun during an arrest; it was the same gun he had brought with him to Virginia Beach to show the jury in a civil trial against the dealer who sold a Cobray to Nicholas. He passed it to me.

Black, functional, it had none of the gleaming machined beauty of more expensive weapons. It was a brick of black steel with a pistol grip jutting from the center of its bottom face and a tiny barrel protruding from the front. To cock it, you need a good deal of strength. You pull back a black knob on top, which forces the bolt against a
spring. When you pull the trigger, the bolt springs forward, stripping a fresh cartridge from the magazine and firing it. The pressure of the gases released from the cartridge forces the bolt backward, ejecting the now-empty cartridge case. An internal mechanism prevents the bolt from automatically coming forward and holds it cocked for the next shot. The gun’s ancestor was a submachine pistol, in which the bolt would immediately leap forward after each shot to fire a new round, repeating the process over and over at incredible speeds until the magazine was emptied or the shooter released the trigger.

It was undeniably, if darkly, appealing in its lethality. It was heavy, the weight of a six-pack of beer. Its grip had none of the warm, close-fitting contours of more costly guns, such as the expensive Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter Supenski carried. I held the Cobray out in front of me with one hand and tried to “acquire” the sights—that is, to line up the sight at the rear with the stub of metal at the front. The bolt knob, which protruded from a point midway along the frame, made this virtually impossible. My arm sagged. The gun was cumbersome. As trite as it sounds, however, the gun did look evil. It was a Darth Vader among guns.

Its reputation matched the look.
A 1989 study by the Cox Newspapers found that the pistol ranked fourth among assault guns most often traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).
A study of all guns confiscated in Detroit from January of 1989 through April of 1990 put the Cobray first among assault guns, fifth among all models—higher in the rankings than guns made by Beretta, whose production dwarfs that of the S.W. Daniel company.
The head of ATF’s Atlanta office told me early in 1992 that his agents conducted twenty to thirty traces involving S.W. Daniel guns each month.

The Cobray and its ancestors became the favorites of drug rings, street gangs, and assorted killers throughout the 1980s.
Shortly after nine
P.M
. on June 18, 1984, a member of the Neo-Nazi Order used the Cobray’s ancestor, an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol, to assassinate
Denver talk-show host Alan Berg as he stepped from his car. Within seconds Berg suffered a devastating array of bullet wounds—thirty-four entry and exit wounds in all from a dozen .45-caliber bullets that crushed one eye, destroyed his brain, and caused massive injuries throughout his upper body.
During a sweeping investigation of the Order, federal agents seized eight MACs and MAC successors.
Later, on April 15, 1988, another member of the Order allegedly used a nine-millimeter MAC, converted to full auto, to kill a Missouri state trooper.

A note on terminology is in order here. A machine gun fires rifle-caliber bullets; a submachine gun fires pistol calibers. Both are fully automatic or “full-auto” weapons, meaning that they continue to fire for as long as you pull the trigger. The MAC-10, therefore, is a fully automatic submachine gun. The Cobray, which closely mimics the MAC-10 and is often described as a MAC, is a semiautomatic. A semiautomatic fires one round per pull. That the term
automatic
is sometimes applied to a pistol like the Colt Army .45 confuses the issue. When used to describe a pistol,
automatic
is simply the short form of “automatic reloading,” which means the gun uses the explosive force of each cartridge to load and cock itself after each shot. Such pistols are in fact semiautomatics.

The popular TV series “Miami Vice” fanned interest in the MAC family of weapons. “
It slices, it dices,” one character said as he used a MAC to shred two female mannequins that had been chained to a wall.
In March 1989, a Colorado man used a MAC-11 (a smaller cousin to the MAC-10) to kill two women and wound two deputies.
The same month, Modesto, California, police arrested Albert E. Gulart, Jr., for illegal possession of explosives and found he possessed a semiautomatic variant registered to his half brother, Patrick Purdy. Two months earlier, Purdy had killed five children and wounded thirty others when he sprayed a Stockton schoolyard with an AKS rifle, a semiautomatic version of the AK-47. While investigating Purdy’s background, Stockton detectives paid Gulart a call in Modesto. The investigators said Gulart told them that before the schoolyard
shootings he and Purdy had planned to kill at random a member of the Modesto police force. Gulart, according to the police account, also made a chillingly cryptic remark: “Patrick was successful in what he did, and I have a hard time driving by any school.” Although unsure just exactly what Gulart meant, Modesto police began round-the-clock surveillance, which led to the explosives arrest.