by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
Proposals to regulate 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles are part of a struggle between good and evil, in Barrett’s view.96 “When you have governments disarming citizens, you have catastrophe on your hands,” Barrett told a reporter.97
The gun situation in America is not the inevitable corollary of a free society. The Harvard public health professor David Hemenway, for example, compared the U.S. record with those of the three other developed “frontier” nations where English is spoken: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Hemenway points out that, although the four countries are similar in per capita incomes, cultures, histories, and rates of violent and property crimes, “What distinguishes the United States is its high rate of lethal violence.” The difference, he concluded, is that these other countries “do a much better job of regulating their guns.”98 Like the tobacco industry before it, the American gun industry and its lobby have successfully employed political intimidation, the crassest form of flag-waving propaganda, and mass-marketing techniques appealing to fear and loathing to prevent being called to account for the public health disaster it has inflicted on America and to avoid meaningful regulation.
What drives the gun industry is, perhaps surprisingly, not success but failure. The civilian firearms industry in the United States has been in decline for several decades. Although it has from time to time enjoyed brief peaks in sales, it has been essentially stagnant. For example, demand for firearms apparently increased beginning in 2008 because of fears that “high unemployment would lead to an increase in crime” and that the administration of President Barack Obama would “clamp down” on gun ownership by regulating assault weapons. But demand fell back as neither of these happened.99 Unlike many other consumer product industries, the gun industry has failed to keep up with population growth. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. population grew from 226,545,805 to 281,421,906—a 24 percent increase.100 Over the same period, total domestic small arms production fell from 5,645,117 to 3,763,345—a 33 percent decrease.101
In short, as America has gotten bigger, the gun industry has gotten smaller. But like a snake in its death throes, the gun industry has also become more dangerous. This trend began in the mid-1980s, when China began dumping semiautomatic AK-47 and SKS assault rifles on the last great civilian market, the United States. Militarization gathered steam through the 1990s, and is now hurtling through America. As a recent article in an industry publication observed, “If you’re a company with a strong line of high-capacity pistols and AR-style rifles, you’re doing land office business. If you’re heavily dependent on hunting, you are hurting.”102
The gun industry today feverishly designs, manufactures, imports, and sells firearms in the civilian market that are to all intents and purposes the same as military arms. It then bombards its target market with the message that civilian consumers—just like real soldiers—can easily and legally own the firepower of militarized weapons. The industry has done this through three major types of firearms: high-capacity handguns like the FN Five-seveN used by Major Hasan, assault rifles and pistols like the AK-47 clones that are flooding in from the factories of Eastern Europe, and sniper rifles like the Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor rifle.
One last story from Murfreesboro serves as a bridge to further discussion of the industry’s effect on America in the next chapter.
In March 2009, Stephen Summers, a fifty-one-year-old Murfreesboro man, was showing his wife, Evy Elaine Summers, fifty-three, how to clean and disassemble his Glock pistol. Summers, the holder of a concealed handgun carry permit, and his wife were watching television at the same time. “Mr. Summers advised that he and his wife were watching ‘Cher’ on television and must have been distracted,” a Murfreesboro police officer reported. “Mr. Summers cocked the Glock and it went off and struck Mrs. Summers in her right wrist, left breast and (traveled) out her left tricep.” Police checked Summers’s story with his hospitalized wife. “She advised that her husband . . . racked the slide and the gun went off,” police reported.103
The report naturally generated wry criticism, including the sarcastic observation that “one of those highly trained, absolutely responsible, law-abiding citizens who are licensed to carry handguns in Tennessee almost killed his wife with his Glock,” and the incident was “more proof of how much safer Tennessee has become since our elected officials, in their infinite wisdom, decided to let a couple hundred thousand Barney Fifes walk around with loaded handguns.”104
This, however, is precisely what advocates of allowing the unrestricted carrying of handguns argue: that more guns in circulation make us all safer. The next chapter examines this rationale and links it to a long-standing gun industry marketing and legislative campaign to sell more—and more powerful—handguns.
5
THE THIRD WAVE:
BEYOND THE GUNSHINE STATE
When it comes to lax gun laws and frequent gun violence, Florida is an epidemic in itself.1 Editorialists, op-ed writers, and journalists in the state’s own newspapers regularly mock it as the “Gunshine State.”2 The sarcastic phrase is a verbal play on Florida’s official nickname, “The Sunshine State,” adopted by the state legislature in 1970.3 The mockery is well earned. The state’s compliant legislature has been used for several decades as a Petri dish by the gun-mad scientists of the NRA’s lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA).4
The NRA’s person on the spot in Florida is Marion Hammer.5 Starting as an NRA volunteer lobbyist in 1975, Hammer rose to become the first female NRA president. But Hammer told the Washington Post in 1987 that she was “certainly not” a feminist and scoffed at such women’s initiatives as equal pay for equal work. “That’s their fault,” she said. “No one ever gave me special favors.” She also told the newspaper that her personal arsenal consisted of fourteen handguns, six rifles, two shotguns, and three muzzle-loading rifles.6 Currently an NRA board member, Hammer has been the executive director of the Unified Sportsmen of Florida (USF) for more than thirty years.7 “Organized in 1976, with the assistance of the National Rifle Association,” according to a membership application, USF is “affiliated with NRA as the Florida Legislative affiliate.” Hammer herself “did business” with the NRA in the amount of $122,000 in 2011, according to the NRA. The exact nature of the business was not specified.8
Throughout her career, Hammer has been portrayed as something of a cross between a chain-smoking bulldog and a steely-eyed, uncompromising drill sergeant.9 “Generally, the NRA brings out the redneck good ol’ boys with the gun racks, but when you scratch Marion, she’s no different,” Harry Johnston, a former Florida State Senate president, said in 1987. “She’s a good ol’ boy in a skirt.”10 For decades, this “good ol’ boy in a skirt” has lashed Florida’s legislators—Democrat and Republican, urban and rural alike—into impotent compliance while she rams the most bizarre and deadly “gun rights” laws imaginable through the halls of Florida’s capitol in Tallahassee.
Some have shrugged and concluded that Florida’s inert citizenry gets the kind of weak gun laws it deserves.11 But these virulent ideas—from Florida’s pioneering “shall issue” concealed-carry-permit law to the misshapen monster twins of its “castle doctrine” and “stand your ground” laws—have been injected into the veins of scores of other state legislatures all over the country. The NRA, packaging its poison in the back rooms of a slick and well-funded network of right-wing legislators known as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, has already pushed two great waves of ill-advised and poorly considered legislation into American life. The first was a nationwide weakening of state concealed-carry laws; the second, a combination of the “shoot first” castle doctrine and the “shoot anywhere” stand-your-ground laws.12
It’s interesting that many rank-and-file police organizations sat out these waves of legislation. Some endorsed them. But a third wave—a mutated form of “self-defense” with law enforcement officers in the crosshairs—may be building. The idea is to grant citizens the right to shoot first, eve
n at a police officer, if they conclude that the officer’s intrusion into their lives is unconstitutional. The disastrous potential of this “shoot cops” third wave has got the attention, and the opposition, of at least one otherwise gun-friendly police organization, the Grand Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police.13 “Shoot first” may have been OK, even a good thing, when ordinary citizens were being put at risk. But it seems not to be such a good idea when cops are endangered.
The case of concealed-carry-permit holder Humberto Delgado Jr. is an instructive parable about this infectious gun madness. Delgado was pushing a shopping cart full of guns down Nebraska Avenue in the Sulphur Springs neighborhood of Tampa, Florida, at about ten o’clock on the night of August 19, 2009. A few minutes later, he used one of his guns to pistol-whip Tampa police corporal Michael Roberts, then shot him to death.
Just about everyone who came into serious contact over any length of time with Humberto Delgado—including the judge who sentenced him to death on February 10, 2012—concluded that he had serious mental illness. The question Circuit Judge Emmett Lamar Battles addressed at the time of Delgado’s sentencing was not whether he was seriously mentally ill. That was evident. The question was whether Delgado was legally insane.
Florida law presumes everyone to be sane. The burden is on a defendant to prove otherwise. The applicable statute required Delgado to show not only that at the time of his offense he had “a mental infirmity, disease, or defect.” He also had to show that either he “did not know what he . . . was doing or its consequences” or that although he “knew what he . . . was doing and its consequences,” he did not know that what he was doing “was wrong.”14 Judge Battles ruled against Delgado. “The court is reasonably convinced that the defendant was under the influence of an extreme mental or emotional disturbance at the time he killed Cpl. Roberts,” he wrote in his sentencing order. “The court is reasonably convinced that the defendant’s ability to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law was impaired, albeit not substantially.”15
Humberto Delgado was born in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He was a police officer there from April 1996 to October 2000.16 During this period, according to his family and mental health professionals who examined him after his arrest, Delgado began to develop a lifelong complex of paranoid delusions. More specifically, he became convinced that a woman in the Virgin Islands had tried to poison him and that she had influenced a cult of Masons to get him.17 The Masons, he believed, were harassing him, threatening him, and interfering with his work.18 His life spiraled downward after he left the police force. He worked for a while in an oil refinery, but his paranoia—he thought it was the Masons at work against him—ruined that job. His family ticked off some of the manifestations he displayed. “He made his wife and children sleep on the floor because there were demons outside, people in trees and eyes peering through the windows. He wore gloves, walked with a cane and said he was Abel from the Old Testament. He said his kids had goat legs that needed to be cutoff.”19
Somehow, Delgado managed to enlist in the United States Army and served between September 2004 and December 2005.20 Private First Class Delgado was a petroleum supply specialist, fueling aircraft and vehicles. He was stationed at Fort Lee, near Petersburg, Virginia, and at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.21 But his illness caught up with him at Fort Bragg, home of the Eighty-second Airborne Division. According to an army doctor, Delgado started carrying a pellet gun, a hammer, and a flashlight for self-defense. He thought the rapper 50 Cent was out to get him. Diagnosed by an army psychiatrist as “bipolar with psychotic issues,” Delgado was medically discharged from the Army in December 2005.22 After his discharge, Delgado had trouble finding a job. His girlfriend in North Carolina, the mother of one of his children, told detectives that she kicked him out.23
It was sometime around then that Delgado apparently decided to acquire guns. In November 2006, he was issued a concealed-handgun permit in Cumberland County,24 where Fayetteville and Fort Bragg are located. Sometime later, probably in 2008, he bought at least four guns from Guns Plus, at 1503 North Bragg Boulevard in Spring Lake, near Fort Bragg.25 The nature of Guns Plus is described in the following review, posted on the North Carolina Gun Owners website:
It’s well stocked with both handguns and rifles, although most of it leans toward military style guns. Based on that, if you’re looking for pure hunting stuff, you might be better off going somewhere else, but if you are looking for high-speed, low-drag Soldier of Fortune stuff, this is the place to go. Guns Plus definitely caters to the Ft Bragg community, with a hint toward the Black-Ops wannabes (you know the type). Like previously mentioned, they do carry virtually everything you will need to go out and fight the war on terror single-handedly.26
This “high-speed, low-drag Soldier of Fortune stuff” is exactly what sustains the gun industry’s dimming fortunes today. “The modern sporting rifle . . . platform continues to provide dealers with strong sales, even as the buying frenzy of a couple of years ago has quieted,” Shooting Industry reported in March 2012. The magazine highlighted the strong role that follow-up accessories also play in the assault weapon market. “Manufacturers are introducing new models of the rifle, along with a seemingly endless number of add-ons and accessories. There are magazines and loaders, lights and lasers, slings, multi-rail hand-guards, conversion kits, bipods and rests—the list goes on and on.” One manufacturer’s representative told the magazine, “The AR platform is like Legos for grown men.”27
On the night of August 19,2009, Humberto Delgado was well stocked with the guns he thought he would need to fight his personal terror. He had in his possession a Kel-Tec PLR-16, a Glock Model 17 semiautomatic 9mm pistol, a Taurus Millennium 45 caliber semiautomatic pistol, and a 22 caliber revolver of uncertain make and model.28 The Kel-Tec PLR-16, manufactured in Cocoa, Florida, has been mistakenly identified in some reports as an assault rifle.29 It is actually an assault pistol. Designed to accept the high-capacity magazines of the AR-15 and M-16 assault rifles, it combines the power of a rifle with the concealability of a handgun. As the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine put it in its review of the gun, “You can enjoy all of the head-turning flash and hoorah of a magnum revolver, but with modest recoil similar to that of a 9mm pistol.”30
Delgado had drifted south from North Carolina to live with an uncle in the town of Oldsmar, located about fifteen miles west of Tampa. But his family said he refused to accept the fact that he was mentally ill and had stopped taking his medication because it made him “feel like a zombie.”31 His uncle had thrown him out of the house. Delgado had thus been homeless, probably for about a week.32 Disheveled, his hair a tangled mass of unkempt dreadlocks, he had cleaned out most of a storage locker he rented, put the contents in his shopping cart, and walked all day from Oldsmar to Tampa. Among the items in the cart was a laptop computer. Mental health experts for the defense testified that lack of food and sleep made Delgado delusional by the time he got to Tampa.33
Corporal Mike Roberts spotted Delgado pushing his shopping cart down Nebraska Avenue. It was an area where there had recently been a rash of burglaries. At 9:58 P.M., Corporal Roberts radioed two cryptic phrases to the police dispatcher. “Lincoln 61,” he said. “Signal 80.” The first was his personal identifier, the second signaled his intent to conduct a “field interrogation.” There was relative silence after that, except for a brief, inaudible transmission three minutes and forty seconds later. The dispatcher interpreted that transmission as a sign of distress. Other units were dispatched to the scene, where Corporal Roberts was found, lying on his back.34 He had been shot once. Although he was wearing body armor, the powerful 45 caliber slug had ripped through his shoulder, into his chest, and perforated his heart and lungs.35 At 10:50 P.M., less than an hour after he had signaled his intention to question Humberto Delgado Jr., Corporal Michael Roberts was pronounced dead at Tampa General Hospital.36
The field interrogation had gone terribly wrong, terribly fast. The
exact sequence is unknowable, but it appears that at some point within those few minutes, Corporal Roberts may have looked into Delgado’s backpack and asked him about the laptop computer. Delgado tried to run away and Roberts fired a nonlethal, ordinarily disabling Taser gun at him. At least one of the barbed electrodes the gun fires became entangled in Delgado’s dreadlocks instead of anchoring in his flesh. Rather than falling immobilized to the ground, Delgado turned around, and the two men fought. Delgado got the upper hand, pistol-whipped Roberts into unconsciousness, and then shot the officer with Delgado’s Taurus Millennium 45 caliber semiautomatic pistol.37
Responding police officers found Delgado hiding nearby. During a struggle with them, Delgado shouted, “Don’t hurt me,” “I’m sorry,” “I’m crazy,” and “I’m one of you.”38 The next day, investigators opened Delgado’s storage locker. Among other things, they found a 22 caliber semiautomatic rifle with a scope and laser sight, and a Shooter’s Bible, a popular source for gun enthusiasts, a combination gun catalog and reference book.39
There is a final thread to this tragic story. A record was made of Delgado’s statements while he was in a holding cell. Among them were these: “He deserved it. . . . It was self defense. . . . I was scared and I ran when he discovered my guns. . . . He f—violated my rights by going through my bag. . . . He shouldn’t have went through my s—.”40
Later, Delgado had a conversation with a defense psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Scott Maher. “He told me that the police officer searched through his backpack without asking permission,” Dr. Maher said. “Mr. Delgado was afraid that the police officer would misunderstand and react to the fact that he had a laptop computer . . . and guns.” According to the doctor, Delgado reacted with fear and paranoia. “This was confirmation that the officer was after him. He was going to get him. He was going to kill him. He was going to do bad things to him. There was no way out of this situation.”41