Boom. Fire shot out of the cannon and there was a deafening boom. This was my go-to toy, as I realized quickly At the time, I could put things like corks, wadded paper, or a rubber stopper in the end of the barrel and shoot them across the yard. This is even closer to a modern gun. My gun had the sparker, which was the equivalent of a percussion cap in the center of a bullet. The gunpowder was the calcium carbide. The bullet itself was whatever I could find to stick in the end of the barrel. Gun technology has not changed much since the musket loaders of the Revolution. I had one of those, too.
My musket loader was a rifle and, like the Revolutionary soldiers, I had to load my musket from the end of the barrel. The soldiers’ bullets were made from lead and mine were made from cork. Each of my bullets was a small cork ball and, like the Revolutionary soldiers, I had a plunger to push it all the way down the barrel. Another difference between my rifle and that of the Revolutionary solider was that before the soldier could put in his bullet he had to tear open a paper cartridge with his teeth, put some gun powder in his priming pan, pour the rest of the powder into the barrel, and then shove the musket ball down.
I had to do something extra, too, and that was to pull back the trigger, the hammer, and put a cap on the anvil. The anvil had holes that led to the barrel and this would allow the explosion of the cap to propel my cork mini-ball out of the barrel. It didn't go very far, but neither had the colonial's bullet that he fired at the British—about eighty yards. That was it. After eighty yards the patriot could not be sure he was going to hit anything because all accuracy went out the window. Like my cork ball, the lead ball came out of the barrel and would veer off. It was hard to hit your target with an eighteenth-century musket and the best way was for the soldiers to fire en masse and hope the volley would hit as many people as possible.
In 1855, a new discovery changed guns forever. It was called rifling. The barrel was grooved, and “these grooves guided a lead ball or other projectile to spin as it exited the barrel ensuring a straighter line shot.”3 This made all the difference in the United States’ wars against the Native Americans, who still had smooth bore muskets and so had to get within eighty yards to hit the soldiers. The rifling caused the lead ball to spin, and this spinning kept the bullet straight and allowed a shooter to be much farther away from his target. The combination of this improvement in accuracy with higher caliber bullets (larger lead balls) led to the horrific carnage of the Civil War.
Soldiers still had to load their weapons like I loaded my musket loader, but the rifled musket changed tactics on the battlefield. Armies no longer had to fire en masse to hit their target. They could sharpshoot and fire individually and cause much more damage. The defenders now hid behind rocks or trees and picked off the advancing troops with deadly accuracy. Even though military leaders knew this new accuracy made troops in the open vulnerable they still marched across fields, with the most famous of these open charges being Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. The dug-in Union troops destroyed Pickett's regiment five hundred yards out and the stragglers who made it to the line were butchered. Still, loading was slowed by shoving a bullet down the barrel, and it wasn't until the breech loader of the late nineteenth century that this changed. I had one of those, too.
The breech loader took what we now call a modern bullet. My breech loader was a toy shotgun, if you can believe it. I cracked it open and put in two plastic shells that were actually the bullets. But I put them in from the rear of the barrel, much like the breech-loading muskets. A soldier now put in a bullet composed of a metal jacket filled with gunpowder and a percussion cap, or small explosive charge, in the center. The lead bullet was fitted to the cartridge. When the hammer fell on a breech loader, the percussion cap exploded inside the bullet, which ignited the gunpowder that burned and exploded, transferring the expanding energy to the bullet that flew out of the rifled barrel.
I had percussion caps, too. My friend reloaded his own ammo, meaning he had boxes of percussion caps and a container of gunpowder and shot (small BBs). He reloaded his shotgun shells and was nice enough to give me a fistful of percussion caps to take home. Once home I took a hammer and hit the percussion caps, which blew up like mini bombs not much bigger than a firecracker. I also would throw them on the garage floor, where they would sometimes detonate. Such was the all-American boyhood of the later twentieth century.
After the invention of breach loaders, soldiers could reload rapidly, but they still could only load one bullet at a time. Enter Samuel Colt. Colt came up with the idea for a revolver in 1836 while on a ship.4 The early revolvers had to be loaded like a musket from the front of the barrel up until breech loaders, but this was only a single shot mechanism. The Colt revolver could be fired multiple times. This meant that when the shooter pulled back the trigger the next cylinder advanced and a person could shoot six shots in succession. The famous term “six shooter” was born.
Then Colt made his classic breakthrough, namely the Colt .45. This revolver was loaded from the rear with a cartridge and fired as fast as the hammer could be pulled back. A double-action revolver was offered later, in which the cylinder was advanced by the trigger, but it was slower. Americans know the Colt .45 or the “Peacemaker” from every Western that was ever shown in a theater. Every gunfight, every showdown in a dusty old town, was a showdown between two Colt. 45s.5
I had a metal Colt .45 that fired caps. The barrel did not revolve, but later I got a blank gun with plastic blanks that were loaded into the cylinder just like real bullets. This gun fired like a Colt with the barrel rotating up each blank to the hammer. Then much later in life I was able to shoot a real Colt .45, one that a gun enthusiast owned. He warned me that the accuracy was terrible. I shot six bullets at a far target and when it came back without a single hole I knew he was right.
The truth is, cowboys mostly missed each other and rarely did men face off on Main Street. But gunslingers in the West did have revolvers tied to their legs and many ended up in gun battles. The black powder used at that time created so much smoke that no one knew who had been hit until sometime after the shooting. Usually men in the West fought spontaneously and many times no one hit their mark.6 Bullets were expensive and not many cowboys had time or money for practice. The Colt and the Winchester dominated Western gun culture.7
The Winchester rifle was a short-barreled repeating rifle that was useful when shooting from a horse. As fast as a cowboy could cock the rifle, he could fire the Winchester with a much higher accuracy than a Colt. But most cowboys did not want to get in a gunfight, and the majority of Colts and Winchesters were used for hunting and deterrence. A man's reputation for killing was much stronger than his actual use of the gun. Still, if there was a golden period for American guns it was during the period after the Civil War up until 1890, when the frontier was declared closed. Cowboy culture has been handed down ever since.
The twentieth century brought some improvements in guns, but the big step forward belongs to General John T. Thompson, who wanted a more efficient gun to kill Germans in World War I. He had wanted to upgrade the Browning automatic and came up with a machine gun that used the force of the bullet to eject the shell and chamber up another one. All you had to do was pull back the bolt the first time. “Once you pulled the trigger, the twenty-round clip or fifty-round barrel fed the bullets into the firing pin like a frenzied creature spewing fire and death. Thompson came up with the name the Annihilator.”8
The general thought he would sell his machine gun to the army for “trench sweeping” in World War I. The problem was that the war ended two days after Thompson had gotten the bugs out of the gun. The only bullets that worked with the Annihilator were the armor piercing .45 cartridge. Some of the soldiers who did use the gun later felt it was too heavy and the larger fifty-round barrel was hard to load. The British complained about the rattling noise of the trigger mechanism. But everyone loved the way it fired. Two men with Thompson machine guns had the firepower of nine. The US post office bought some after a
series of robberies but General Thompson was disappointed with initial sales. The Thompson machine gun cost two hundred dollars and this was at a time when the price of a Model A Ford was four hundred dollars.
But gangsters loved the Thompson machine gun, or what they called the tommy gun. General Thompson had unwittingly provided outlaws with the perfect gun. When Al Capone's car and driver were riddled with bullets while he was inside a restaurant, he studied the bullet holes and knew the game had changed. A man with a Thompson could decimate a couple of cops. He could riddle their car with holes in seconds, and if the cops weren't running for cover they were dead. The gun was compact and could be kept under an overcoat until you were ready. Then you pulled the bolt back and you could simply annihilate somebody with the gun. It fit weirdly into a violin case and many gangsters looked like they were going to a recital before they wiped somebody out.
The Thompson was also perfect for firing from a car into a store that hadn't paid for protection or didn't want a gangster's booze. The machine gun wasn't accurate, but it didn't matter; the Thompson literally sprayed bullets, and it wasn't uncommon for someone to have fourteen bullet wounds. Hit men liked it because they could be sure their man was dead. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago would make the Thompson world famous. Nobody could survive a Thompson onslaught; General Thompson's Annihilator always lived up to its name. And the two hundred dollar price tag was not an issue. The only drawback to the Thompson was that it kicked back and bruised the shooter's ribs.
The Thompson would eventually lead to semiautomatic weapons that would later became assault weapons, which would lead to a short-lived ban on these type of weapons.
The Assault Weapons Ban was a direct result of the actions of Patrick Edward Purdy and George Hennard. Purdy was an abused child left homeless at thirteen, who entered into a life of crime on the streets of San Francisco.9 He then lived with his father and entered high school, where he drank and became addicted to drugs. His father was killed by a speeding car and Purdy was homeless again at seventeen. Eventually he was placed with a foster mother in Los Angeles. He was arrested for prostitution, drug dealing, possession of an illegal weapon, and armed robbery. He spent thirty-two days in county jail and tried to commit suicide twice. A psychiatric report found him mildly mentally challenged.10
He then drifted across the country working as a welder and doing menial work. He ended up as a boilermaker in Portland, Oregon, and lived with his aunt in nearby Sandy. In August of 1988, he bought an AK 47 from the Sandy Trading Post.11 Not long after this he moved to Stockton, California. In December he purchased a 9mm Taurus pistol at the Hunter Loan Company in Stockton. Friends said he was frustrated at not being able to make it on his own and was angry about everything.
On January 17, 1989, he set his car on fire behind the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, using a Molotov cocktail. He then went to the playground of the school and began firing with his AK 47 at the Cambodian and Vietnamese children who made up the majority of the school's enrollment. Purdy fired 106 rounds in three minutes and killed five children, wounding thirty others and one teacher. He then shot himself in the head.12 The question as to how Purdy could buy automatic weapons with a criminal record sparked a debate on banning assault weapons in Washington.13
Then, two and a half years later, a thirty-five-year-old merchant mariner, George Hennard, who hated black people, gay people, and women, would finally push the ban through. George Hennard's father was a surgeon and his mother a homemaker. He graduated high school in 1974, joined the Navy, and was discharged three years later. He then joined the Merchant Marine but was busted for pot and discharged. His parents divorced in 1983 and George moved to Henderson, Nevada, with his mother. In 1991, Hennard bought a Glock 17 and a 9mm Ruger P89 pistol at a gun shop in Henderson.14
Hennard was a misogynist. He sent two sisters in his neighborhood a menacing note and called them “treacherous female vipers.”15 A store owner said later he would push women out of the way to buy his soda or cigarettes.16 Others said he spoke little and was prone to wild outbursts and rants about people he hated, calling women snakes.
On October 16, 1991, Hennard drove his 1987 Ford Ranger pickup through the front window of Luby's Cafeteria, where about 140 people were eating lunch. He jumped out and yelled, “It's payback time. Is it worth it?”17 He then opened fire, killing twenty-three people. Hennard reloaded three times and shot people in the head, walking between the tables to shoot more.18 He called women bitches before he shot them and passed up men to kill more women. When the police arrived, he fired at them, but he was wounded and retreated to the bathroom, where he shot himself in the head. Twenty-three people were killed in the rampage, with another twenty-seven wounded.
The time was ripe for a federal assault weapons ban that would prohibit the manufacture, transfer, and possession of semiautomatic assault weapons. The ban passed in 1994 and was set to expire in 2004.19 The NRA launched numerous challenges and lost in court each time. Studies following the ban could find no link between the ban and a reduction in crime, but these were countered by a report from the Brady Center citing a three-percent reduction. No study centered on mass shootings specifically and the use of automatic weapons. The ban expired on September 13, 2004.
President Barack Obama made reinstituting the Assault Weapon Ban permanently one of his priorities.20 After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, a new version of the ban went up for a vote in Congress and was defeated forty to sixty in the US Senate in April 2013. Efforts to prohibit high-capacity clips, which allow mass shooters to not waste time reloading, were also defeated in Congress.21
I'm making my way back to Terminal 1 for our luggage. Florida is a hot, humid glove now. We have been under a lockdown situation since 1:30. It is not so much a lockdown as a lock-in. No one can leave the airport grounds. We have talked to media people and asked if we might get a ride out but they are going nowhere. The story is still developing as there is an active shooter somewhere, but here we get lost in semantics. The police chief has called it an “active situation.” If you look up “active situation” on the internet, it is all the same—an active or fluid situation means that the police do not have the area under control. It means anyone could be shot at any time.
This is the paradox of ten thousand people being stranded in a major American airport. We are here because of a shooter the police say does not exist. When Esteban Santiago shot and killed five people and wounded thirteen others there was no lockdown. Terminal 1 was calm. People went about their business and the airport was open. People were arriving for flights and being picked up. It was only after the four shots rang out in Terminal 1 and the ensuing panic that the airport was closed and the situation declared active. That is when the SWAT teams swung in.
I am walking through what looks like a third-world country now, with soldiers and police holding guns at the ready. People are sitting, lying down, hiding, staring, some crying, a woman is strumming a ukulele. I stop to watch her. She is walking back and forth along the curb and singing. It is so out of place, yet I know why she is doing it. She is young and pretty and she is trying to get away from where she is. She wants to leave the unreality of our situation, where anyone can get shot. The SWAT teams are armed to the teeth and then some. They have shotguns, automatic weapons, and pistols. I find out later that SWAT teams must outfit themselves. If you get the SWAT manual off the internet, a good deal of it is about the equipment, and it is all optional. In fact, the SWAT team is just a group of police officers with more intensive training.
The SWAT teams are walking by me in Kevlar vests, holding shotguns, submachine guns, 9mm handguns. They are wearing helmets. Pistols are strapped to their legs and shotguns are at the ready. Some of their helmets are ill-fitting and slide around at funny angles. They are looking at the parking garage; some are looking up, many just have their guns in the ready position with their fingers on the triggers. I wonder then if there are many accidents? Do these guns go o
ff accidentally, and what is the protocol when they do? It would seem that with this many guns, accidents are bound to happen. Actually, they do, with tragic consequences.
A man who was suspected of gambling illegally was shot and killed in a botched SWAT team operation in the middle of the night. The man mistook the SWAT team for an intruder and went for his gun and was shot dead.1 A woman whose son was wanted for marijuana thought the SWAT team kicking in her door in the night was an intruder.2 She, too, went for her gun and was shot dead. Students in high schools who have been suspected of possessing drugs have been made to kneel with guns to their head.3 The problem with SWAT teams is that they are paramilitary with a minimum of training. Until there is a need, the SWAT member is the cop pulling you over for a speeding ticket. He or she has bought a lot of gear on the open market and much of it is overflow from the defense department. They keep it at home and, when called, quickly change into the gear and become a SWAT team member.4 They are part of an aggressive paramilitary unit possessing overwhelming firepower. They are let loose on an unsuspecting populace that is not used to seeing heavily armed men and women out in public. The sight of them conjures up images of a military dictatorship or a coup.
I am now getting close to Terminal 1. I should at least try to get our luggage before we try to leave the airport. One advantage we have is that our luggage was not processed and is still on the baggage cart. If we had checked our baggage, we would be like thousands of other people who left behind the 25,000 pieces of abandoned luggage. Many will not get their luggage or belongings for days, and there are people who don't have their wallets or phones. Some who were going through security don't even have shoes. Everyone left their belongings behind as they ran from what they perceived to be a possible coordinated attack on the airport. That had been my first thought. There was a 9/11-style attack under way in the terminals and Terminal 1 was next. Esteban Santiago had just been the first of many.
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