by Erik Larson
Increasingly, gun dealers have taken to wearing guns during the workday. Mike Dick often wore one but, unlike his colleagues, kept his concealed. “The object of a concealed weapon is that nobody knows you have it,” he said matter-of-factly. “I wear it about forty percent of the time and let people decide if they’re going to be lucky or not.” He concedes, however, that a handgun offers only limited protection. “If somebody wants to get you, you’re never going to draw your weapon. They’re going to start blasting before they get in the door. They’re going to have surprise, and unless they’re poor shots or you’re very lucky, you’re doomed.”
All this for skimpy profits in a crumbling national industry facing ever-more-stringent controls.
“Why,” I asked Dick, “do you stay in the business?”
“That’s a difficult question. I come out of the hospitality industry, hospitality is my first love. I came here out of necessity to help my father. It has become a challenge to me, taking a declining business under constant siege by various aspects of society—it is a monumental challenge. My goal is to become profitable enough that at some point we can sell and I can go back to what I do best, and that is run hotels and restaurants.”
I asked Raymond Rowley, the ATF special agent who investigated Nicholas Elliot’s acquisition of his gun, how he would describe ATF’s relationship with Guns Unlimited.
“I would say it’s a good relationship,” Rowley said. “We try to deal with all these firearms dealers as fairly as we can. They are selling a legal commodity. Obviously, guns can be used in crimes. We try to deal with them fairly.”
Baltimore County’s Col. Leonard Supenski was a bit less circumspect. Of James Dick, Mike Dick’s father, he said, “That guy is a pariah. He ought to be turned out of that industry. But ATF didn’t do anything—ATF should have nailed him to the cross.”
ATF, indeed, plays a curious role in regulating the commerce of guns. A division of the Treasury Department, it is a bastard agency to which America has grudgingly assigned the well-nigh-impossible task of ensuring that the companies that make and distribute booze, cigarettes, and guns—together the nation’s most prolific killers—pay their taxes and operate within a set of rules designed not to prevent the killing, but to keep it honest.
CHAPTER NINE
NICHOLAS
“NOW YOU,” NICHOLAS SAID.
Susan Allen had seen Sam Marino literally backing Nicholas into a comer of the classroom; she heard Marino insist that Nicholas hand over the gun. Then she saw Marino’s body jump. She saw the books and folders he was carrying fly in all directions. She heard Marino cry, “My God, my God,” and she watched as he fell forward.
And now this boy—this gangly black child with the sweet smile and serious demeanor, a student in her algebra class—had just turned toward her and pointed his gun at her, saying, “Now you.”
She sprinted toward the door, then out and down the short flight of steps. Nicholas followed.
At first she planned to run to the school’s main building to try to get help for Marino and have someone call the police, but realized that if she did so, she would lead Nicholas right to the heart of the school. She headed instead for the church.
She knew Nicholas was shooting at her. She heard one shot as she left the trailer. A few moments later, she heard another. She had the good sense to run serpentine fashion like a character in a grade-B war movie as Nicholas fired shot after shot at her back, sweeping the courtyard with a back-and-forth motion, stopping his pursuit now and then to clear a jammed cartridge. For Allen and Nicholas both, the sound was deafening. Her ears rang. His hurt.
After each shot she would pause an instant, wondering if she had been hit, waiting to see if she would fall. Then immediately she’d start running again, glancing back at intervals to see where Nicholas was and if he was still pursuing her.
Allen reached the end of the courtyard. With nowhere else to go, she made a sharp turn around the end of one of the classroom trailers. Something struck her with shocking force and knocked her immediately to the ground—with Nicholas close behind, firing at her, she had turned that corner and run face first into a utility shed.
“I hit the shed full force,” she said. “I hit it, fell down. There was ringing around my ears. I fell down, and I was trying to get underneath the trailer—trying someway to get away.”
Breathless and petrified, she wriggled under the trailer.
“It was not the smartest thing to do, if you think about it,” Detective Adams told me.
As she lay there, she struggled for breath. She was indeed trapped. She watched Nicholas’s legs as he advanced along the pavement outside.
“My God, make him stop,” she whispered. “My God, please make him stop.”
He took two more steps in her direction.
Then turned around.
Two things had distracted Nicholas: a loud thumping noise nearby, and Sam Marino, who, wounded in the shoulder, now stood at the door to room T108. When Susan Allen had fled the room, Marino recalled, Nicholas had run past him in pursuit. “I got myself up off the floor … and noticed my shoulder had a tremendous ache in it.” He moved toward the door, opened it, and shouted for help: “Please help me. I’ve been shot. I’ve been shot.”
“All of a sudden,” he said, “I looked down the steps and there he was again.”
Nicholas stood only three or four feet away, at the bottom of the steps. This time he aimed a bit lower. The gun, once advertised by its manufacturer as “the gun that made the eighties roar,” roared again. There was an elliptical flare. The bullet penetrated Marino’s abdomen.
Marino fell onto the steps, then managed to stand again. He allowed himself to fall inside the classroom. He grabbed the doorknob, shut the door, and locked it.
Nicholas tried to open it, then gave up.
Meanwhile, the thumping had gotten louder. Nicholas knew the noise. He had heard it before during a class, when kids in a nearby trailer had been playing a game to see who could stamp hardest on the floor of the trailer.
In this case, however, the thumping was the sound made as terrified students scrambled to the rear of the trailer. On any other Friday, Nicholas would have been in that trailer, attending the Bible class taught by Hutch Matteson.
Marino, who had by now pulled himself to a window of room T108, watched as Nicholas crossed the courtyard, climbed the steps of the opposite trailer, and shot out the glass window in the door.
Hutch Matteson had heard a loud explosion; like Marino, he assumed at first it had been generated by a large firecracker. He looked over his shoulder out the window of his classroom. “I saw Mr. Marino hanging out of the door yelling, ‘Help. Help. He shot me, I’ve been shot.’ At the time I didn’t think that it was a real incident because I thought perhaps he was doing a demonstration for a class; so I began to walk over to the doorway of the class. As I opened the door, I took a step out and looked down the courtyard towards the church building. I saw Nicholas Elliot coming from that direction towards me. I shut the door and stood back against the wall glancing out of the door.”
Nicholas was carrying what looked to be a gun. “It appeared to me at that point it was sort of like an Uzi water pistol because it seemed very small at a distance.” (Cobray pistols are often confused with Uzis, police say.)
Through the glass window in the door, Matteson watched Nicholas approach. “I saw Nicholas go up to Mr. Marino. He was still hanging out of the door. He was approximately four to five feet away from him. I heard the shot go off.”
Matteson turned to his students.
“I told them to get down and get back, so the class quickly started to move to the back of the trailer. One young man had the presence of mind to come up, and he locked the door.”
The students—some three dozen of them—crouched at the back of the classroom, praying and crying. Matteson took up a sheltering position halfway between the students and the door and stood to see where Nicholas had gone.
“
I was watching Nicholas as he came towards us. I thought perhaps he might go around the trailer. He came up to the stairway, tried the door. The door was locked. At that time, he shot the glass out and entered the room.”
Nicholas walked up to the crowd of now terrified children.
“Don’t do it,” Matteson pleaded. “Nicholas, this is no way to handle this.”
Nicholas had seen Matteson watching him through the window of the portable classroom. He knew Billy Cutter was probably in the class as well. “I don’t know how I got in,” Nicholas told Detective Adams. “I did not shoot the door. I did not shoot the door or the knob itself. I shot the glass in the door. I don’t know how I got it open.… When I shot the glass, I guess it shaked the door and got it open.”
Once inside, he quickly spotted Billy Cutter. Cutter had heard the shot and the sound of shattering glass, but was the last to rush to the back of the room and now lay on the floor ahead of the mound of students, fully in the open and utterly exposed. “There were chairs overturned and everything, so I would probably be about three or four feet in front of everyone else,” Cutter later testified.
“Billy,” Nicholas said, “I hate you, man.”
Cutter was screaming, “No, don’t.”
Nicholas aimed the gun at Cutter.
“I know I said his name,” Nicholas told Detective Adams. “I don’t remember exactly what I said about him, because I was mad.”
Others, however, do recall. “Billy Cutter,” Nicholas said. “This is for you. I’m going to kill you.”
As the other students huddled closer and wept and prayed, Nicholas pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ENFORCERS
GUN AFICIONADOS MAY LIKEN THE BUREAU of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to the Gestapo, but in its relationship to America’s gun dealers it behaves more like an indulgent parent. This is partly the result of concrete restrictions imposed on the bureau by budget and statute, partly of an institutional reluctance to offend its primary source of investigative leads and to provoke the always cantankerous gun lobby—a legacy of the bureau’s near demise in the early years of the Reagan administration at the hands of the National Rifle Association and its powerful allies on Capitol Hill.
In a 1981 congressional hearing, the bureau’s then-director, G. R. Dickerson, defended the bureau, proclaiming to the House Judiciary Committee that the bureau had for the prior two years “focused over ninety-two percent of its enforcement resources on the prevention of violent crime and the pursuit of violent criminals.” ATF had used aggressive, proactive tactics to enforce firearms laws, he said, including undercover stings designed to trap dealers into making illegal sales. The NRA and other members of the gun lobby saw nothing positive in these measures and charged ATF with trampling the constitutional rights of ordinary gun owners. The charge fell on sympathetic ears. In 1981, then-president Ronald Reagan announced his plan to make good on a campaign promise to abolish the ATF.
Today a chastened ATF (rescued at the last minute, as I’ll show, by a most improbable angel, the NRA itself) describes its mission in more modest terms. “There’s been a misconception that we’re in the prevention business,” said Jack Killorin, a former law-enforcement agent who now heads the bureau’s public affairs office. (A plaque on the wall behind his desk identifies him as Jack “Ganja” Killorin, commemorating his role in an ATF raid against a drug dealer.) “We’re not in the prevention business. We’re in the business of catching those people who do wrongful acts, and causing them to be punished, and hopefully finding enough of that to create some deterrence.”
Where once the bureau prided itself on running firearms sting operations, it now describes even its battles against illegal traffickers as a means not so much of halting the proliferation of guns, but of protecting and maintaining the paper trail that tracks a gun from manufacturer to distributor to dealer and finally to first purchaser. “Illegal traffickers in weapons inhibit the effectiveness of the tracing function and must be identified and put out of business,” said a 1992 report from ATF’s divisional office in Detroit. “The integrity of the tracing system must be preserved to ensure that valuable leads continue to be provided to law-enforcement agencies.”
As things stand now, federal gun laws foster a built-in disincentive to rigorous investigation. Gun-purchase records, the most crucial element of the tracing network, remain in the hands of the dealers themselves. When riled, dealers can make the workday lives of ATF agents far more difficult. Good industry relations can mean the difference between merely having to call the dealer on the phone or making a personal visit, a significant bureaucratic obstacle for an undermanned agency. “If it were not for cooperative [dealers],” noted a 1992 report from the bureau’s Detroit office, “ATF’s task in locating and removing illegal firearms sources would be dealt a serious blow.”
All this, however, adds up to a reactive orientation that helps bolster the culture of nonresponsibility in the firearms industry, with the unintended effect of leaving all but the most blatantly crooked dealers free to push the limits of the law.
In fairness, ATF stands in an almost untenable position. It must police the nation’s 245,000 licensed firearms dealers—known in the industry as FFLs, or Federal Firearms Licensees—with only four hundred inspectors, each of whom must also conduct inspections of wineries, liquor distributors, distilleries, breweries, tobacco producers, and the country’s 10,500 explosives users and manufacturers. This ratio of inspectors to licensees is an improvement, by the way, over the rough-and-ready 1960s when only five inspectors faced the daunting task of inspecting the records of one hundred thousand gun dealers.
At the same time, the agency finds itself obliged by law to grant a firearms license to virtually anyone who asks for one, provided the applicant has $30 to cover the licensing fee. In 1990, 34,336 red-blooded Americans applied for an FFL. ATF denied licenses to only 75. Another 1,408 withdrew or abandoned their applications, yielding a combined rejection/withdrawal rate of about 4 percent. If the current rate of licensing continues, the number of FFLs will double through the 1990s to well over half a million licensed weapons dealers, even though the fortunes of domestic arms manufacturers are likely to continue their current decline. Increased competition for the shrinking gun-consumer dollar can only increase the already prevalent tendency among dealers to do only the minimum required by law to keep guns out of the wrong hands.
Depending on one’s stance in the gun debate, the application process is either too stringent or appallingly lax. An applicant doesn’t have to demonstrate any firearms knowledge, not even whether he knows the difference between a revolver and a pistol, a .44 or a .45. It is much harder to get a license to operate a powerboat on the Chesapeake Bay, to become a substitute teacher in New Jersey, or to get a California driver’s license—far, far harder to get a Maryland permit to carry a single handgun or a license to hunt in Maryland’s forests—than it is to get a license that enables you to acquire at wholesale prices thousands of varieties of weapons and have them shipped right to your home. Roughly half the federal firearms licensees don’t maintain a bona fide store, according to ATF, but operate instead out of their homes. Some of these “kitchen-table” dealers sell guns at gun shows, but many don’t deal guns at all; they hold a license simply to buy their guns at cheap wholesale prices. A small but obviously important segment use their licenses to buy guns wholesale for distribution to inner-city arms traffickers.
“We’re not in the business of putting people out of the firearms business,” said Anthony A. Fleming, chief of ATF’s firearms and explosives operations branch, in charge of dealer licensing and inspections. “If people qualify for a firearms license, by law we have to issue them a license.”
But federal law, at least on paper, also insists that anyone who receives a license must actually engage in the business of selling firearms. In practice, however, Fleming concedes there is little ATF can do to compel a licensee to become a legitimate commercial busines
s. “We can’t force him to advertise,” Fleming said. “We can’t say you’ve applied for a license and by the end of two years you have to have at least ten sales. Your retort, immediately, would be, ‘I’m open for business, I’ve got my door open, anybody comes in here I’m ready to sell them a gun.’ There’s nothing we can do about that.”
He added that some licensees who operate from their homes do run sophisticated dealerships. “I’ve seen residential dealers with a better setup and better inventory than a commercial business. And then I’ve gone into commercial places and found only five or six guns in there. You wonder why they’re paying rent. But they’re allowed to have a license and be in the business.”
A look at ATF licensing records can turn up some surprising revelations about who among us are licensed gun dealers. Licensed dealers turn up everywhere, even on the quietest streets in the best neighborhoods. My ATF printout of Maryland dealers identified 334 in Baltimore alone, yet the 1992–93 yellow pages for Greater Baltimore listed only eighteen established dealers and pawnshops. Among the dealers not listed in the phone book were two entities with the intriguing names Make My Day Guns and Shalom Services Company.
A Los Angeles Times reporter, David Freed, acquired the roster of Los Angeles County licensees and found the list included a Chinese baker, a survivalist, a fertility specialist, a school policeman employed by the Los Angeles Unified School District (he listed school offices as his licensed place of business), a man who told Freed he had experienced “multiple personality changes,” and an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (he listed DEA headquarters in Los Angeles). The list also included a former soldier dishonorably discharged from the Army and arrested on burglary and concealed-weapons charges whose licensed premises was a hotel room.