by Erik Larson
A New York Times reporter once asked the marketing director at Intratec, a Miami company that makes an assault pistol similar in spirit to the Cobray, how he felt about the widespread condemnation of his company’s weapons. Like the Cobray, the TEC 9 is a handgun of “dirty” design, meant to evoke a submachine gun. It has a perforated barrel sheath, akin to those that appear on full-scale machine guns. “I’m kind of flattered,” he replied. “It just has that advertising tingle to it. Hey, it’s talked about, it’s read about, the media write about it. That generates more sales for me. It might sound cold and cruel, but I’m sales oriented.”
Intratec was so oriented to sales that when California banned assault weapons and included the Intratec 9 on the list, Intratec sidestepped the law through the simple maneuver of changing the gun’s name to TEC-DC-9. Gian Luigi Ferri bought two in Las Vegas and, on July 1, 1993, took them to the thirty-fourth floor of a gleaming San Francisco office building. He killed eight people, wounded six, then shot himself to death. Like Nicholas, indeed, like so many of our very many spree shooters, he carried an excessive amount of ammunition, some six hundred rounds. He had acquired the guns legally. “Everything was by the book,” said a Las Vegas police officer.
The passion for lethality suffuses the process through which guns and ammunition are conceived and made. Manufacturers routinely test their prototypes not by firing them at tin cans, but by blasting away at blocks of Jell-O–like goo—ordnance gelatin—intended specifically to simulate human tissue. Their enthusiasm for gore can lead to some vivid advertising. In the March/April 1992 issue of American Handgunner, a magazine for the civilian firearms consumer, the Eldorado Cartridge Corp. ran a full-page ad for its Starfire cartridge under the bold headline “IF LOOKS CAN KILL.” The ad called the Starfire the “deadliest handgun cartridge ever developed for home or personal defense, and hunting” and went on to describe how the bullet expands on impact “resulting in a massive wound channel.” Its deep penetration, the ad crowed, “helps assure fast knockdown.”
During one of several visits to a gun show in Frederick, Maryland, I stood at one dealer’s table beside a man and his young son who, like me, were intently watching a promotional video produced by Power-Plus, a maker of exotic ammunition. The narrator, dressed in a dark T-shirt and speaking in that laconic backcountry drawl that characterizes today’s notion of toughness, demonstrated his company’s rounds by firing a sample of each into a fresh block of yellowish gelatin, with the camera then cutting to offer a close side-view of the depth of penetration and the jagged wound channel coursing through the translucent plasma. Each round was more destructive than the last, until the narrator fired a sample of the company’s Annihilator high-explosive bullets, which slammed into the gelatin, exploded, and knocked the quivering block from its stand. Anyone wondering who might use such a bullet need only look to John Hinckley, who used a similar bullet marketed under the brand name Devastator in his attack on Ronald Reagan. Only one of the bullets he fired did actually explode, much to the benefit of Reagan, who did not even realize he had been shot, but to the lasting detriment of James Brady, in whose brain that one bullet happened to perform as intended.
The Power-Plus narrator moved on to demonstrate the company’s Multi-Plex rounds, which launched anywhere from two to four bullets from a single cartridge. An Alabama mail-order ammunition dealer described these bullets in its catalog as “an outstanding choice for home defense.”
As if all this weren’t enough, our narrator next demonstrated the effects of the company’s bullets on a pail packed with clay. This time those of us watching were treated to the additional audio enticement of hearing the wet slapping sound of the clay as the bullets entered, fragmented, and ruptured the surrounding muck, gouging caverns the size of pumpkins.
“Still watching, Son?” the father asked softly, his hands resting on his son’s shoulders.
His son, clearly entranced, nodded slowly.
Gun shows are marvelous places to capture a feel for America’s gun culture. The moment I stepped from my car, I saw a middle-aged man with a well-developed paunch sauntering toward the show entrance. He was dressed in a short-sleeve shirt and loose, wrinkled slacks and looked like a TV producer’s dream image of the average suburban American male—except, that is, for the black Colt AR-15 assault rifle slung over his shoulder.
The show occupied two buildings at the Frederick County fairgrounds. A few men walked the aisles wearing little signs on their backs listing the guns they owned and wanted to sell. Another man had stuck a FOR SALE sign in the barrel of the rifle dangling at his back. Seated behind battered fold-down tables, dealers sold guns, books, accessories, and ammunition, even those hard-to-find .50-caliber rounds needed for long-range sniper rifles and battlefield machine guns. Several dealers sold books on how to kill and, for those who knew how already, how to do it more effectively, including books on how to make silencers, military manuals on how to make booby traps, black-covered Army manuals on how to make “improvised munitions,” and a nifty little tome courtesy of the Pentagon on how to brush up on your sniper skills.
One dealer offered a Browning heavy machine gun complete with tripod. A thin, balding clerk wearing a black T-shirt commemorating the 1992 “Machine Gun Shoot” told me the gun worked and asked, was I interested?
“I don’t have the tax stamp,” I said. (I was referring here to the $200 transfer tax any adult must pay before acquiring a machine gun, a silencer, or any other weapon restricted by the National Firearms Act of 1934.)
“No problem getting one,” he said. “If it’s the cost—think how much money you’d spend if you had a boat. You fill that tank, that’s what? Fifty bucks each time you go out?”
Elsewhere in his booth he displayed an S.W. Daniel Street-Sweeper shotgun, a Cobray M-11/9, and on an adjacent table the Cobray’s full-auto RPB-made ancestor, its price reduced to $410 from $598 as a special deal for this show only.
“Looks new,” I said, referring to the RPB. “Has it been fired?”
“That’s the display gun. All the rest, new in the box.”
“How many have you got?”
I hadn’t meant to be cagey, but he gave me a sly grin all the same. “How many you need? I got lots and lots.”
For an advanced course in dealing death, all Nicholas Elliot would have had to do was turn to the back pages of his treasured gun magazines, where advertisers peddle all manner of lethal know-how. One afternoon I sat down with my checkbook and the classifieds from a current issue of American Handgunner and scanned the ads as would, say, a presidential assassin.
I wrote to the Kinetic Energy Corp., at a post office box in Tavernier, Florida, to learn about its products, which it called the “world’s deadliest handgun ammunition.” A week later I received a badly typed one-page photocopy listing the company’s cartridges and, to the probable delight of police officers everywhere, touting their ability to penetrate bulletproof vests. Kinetic wrote, for example, that its nine-millimeter bullet “will penetrate the Kevlar Type IIA bullet proof vest and make a 1 ½ inch diameter hole through 1600 pages of a dry phone book protected by the Kevlar vest from a distance of 45 feet.”
Kinetic felt moved to add three rather ill-crafted lines to the very end of the flyer. “Any one including the worst of criminals can purchase a kevlar bullet proof vest. More and more of the criminals are commiting hold ups and home invanisons [sic] wearing these vests.”
I also sent three dollars to Lafayette Research of Varnell, Georgia. This company proposed not to sell me deadly ammunition, but to teach me how to make my own. A week or so later I received from Lafayette a set of directions on how to make exploding bullets. The two-page instructions, clearly produced on a none-too-sophisticated computer printer, began with the warning: “This plan is for information only!!”
This disclaimer struck me as less than convincing, however, in light of another warning that followed closely thereafter: “Warning: Always wear proper safety equipment including p
rotective eye wear whenever in the vicinity of moving machinery or tools such as drills!!”
Explicit, step-by-step instructions followed, detailing how to drill out the nose of a .44-caliber bullet, pack the hole with oil and a BB, then reassemble the cartridge. On impact, the steel BB is rammed backward into the softer lead of the bullet, thus causing the bullet to shatter.
Despite the “information only” disclaimer, the directions included machining tolerances down to a few thousandths of an inch.
One American Handgunner ad was especially compelling to my inner terrorist.
“MEN OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE,” it hailed.
This was Paladin Press of Boulder, Colorado, offering me a fifty-page catalog of books and videos on “new identity, improvised explosives, revenge, firearms, survival, and many other outrageous and controversial subjects.” I sent in my dollar and soon afterward received a catalog chock-full of books every red-blooded American really ought to be reading.
Inside I found dozens of books that promised to turn me into a major neighborhood asset. Here, for example, were Breath of the Dragon: Homebuilt Flamethrowers; Improvised Land Mines: Their Employment and Destructive Capabilities (“Just in case your future includes a little anarchy,” the blurb reads); Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives (with the author’s techniques “a single individual can easily dig a dry well, redirect creeks, blow up bad guys and perform a host of otherwise impossible chores of immense benefit to mankind”); Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, purportedly written by a practicing professional named Rex Feral; and Death by Deception, on how to turn ordinary objects like computer modems and showerheads into deadly booby traps.
Here too I found the How to Kill series by John Minnery, all six books now packaged in one handy 512-page volume called Kill Without Joy: The Complete How to Kill Book, whose chapters according to the catalog “provide gruesome testimony to why these books have been banned by certain countries around the globe.” The catalog calls this a how- to history of murder, but quickly inserts its catchall disclaimer, “For information and academic purposes only!”
I ordered Kill Without Joy. Paladin, the L.L. Bean of mayhem, delivered it shortly thereafter.
The book begins: “The object of this study is to instruct the reader in the techniques of taking another human life, up close, and doing it well.” It includes a chapter called “Smothering” and offers a few tips on decapitation. “If the subject’s execution is to be ritualized, kneel him down, hands tied behind his back. Pass the blade of the weapon lightly over the back of his bowed head. This causes the muscles to stiffen.”
Interested readers can find the book in the rare-book collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Not because it’s at all rare, however. “For security reasons,” a librarian there told me. “A book like that wouldn’t stay on the shelf for long.”
Paladin Press merits closer examination. It represents the distillation of the attitude of nonresponsibility that prevails in America’s gun culture and that so influenced the evolution of Nicholas Elliot’s gun. At a time when America is struggling with a rising tide of violence, Paladin Press enthusiastically peddles primers on how to produce such violence. Its books are well-known to police and federal agents across the country, who have found them in the libraries of serial killers and bombers. Paladin, moreover, is but one company, albeit the most visible, in a little-known industry nurtured by America’s infatuation with violence and sheltered by the free-speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Often referred to as the “gun aftermarket,” the industry includes scores of small companies devoted to peddling murderous know-how of all kinds, including at least one guide to torture. That such an industry exists at all demonstrates how deep the roots of our infatuation with guns and violence descend.
Paladin Press keeps a low profile in Boulder, a town whose pronounced leftward lean prompts many residents to refer jokingly but pridefully to the city as the People’s Republic of Boulder. A business columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera, the city’s newspaper, had never heard of the company. Nor had anyone at the city’s public broadcasting radio station. Paladin occupies several small, nondescript buildings a few blocks north of Pearl Street, the city’s chic pedestrian mall. No sign announces the location, just a small plaque by a side door to the main building.
The company, however, makes no effort to discourage inquiries. Its owner, Peder Lund, is unabashedly candid about the 450 books he sells and his motives for doing so.
“I prefer to make decisions about publishing based on what we want to publish and what our customers want, rather than acceding to any particular desire for respectability,” he told me. With a gravelly laugh, he added, “Why bother? It’s not on my agenda.”
Lund is a midsize man with dark hair, steady blue eyes, and a deep, assured voice. Although his roots are Scandinavian, at first glance he leaves an impression of Irishness. His nose is on the long side of pug, his ears are cantilevered outward in a mildly elfish way. As always, a fully loaded .357 Magnum revolver rested on the right-hand surface of his desk, in full view.
Lund and a partner, Robert K. Brown, founded Paladin in 1970 after both had served with the Army’s Special Forces in Vietnam. The two first met in Miami in 1964 where Lund was working on a plan to lead a group of amateur soldiers into Castro’s Cuba to rescue some refugees and to capture the whole heroic saga on film. “It was a harebrained scheme hatched by harebrained people, myself included,” Lund said.
Brown advised Lund not to get involved. The plan stalled of its own accord.
In July 1964, Lund joined the Army and in December 1966 went to Vietnam, where he served as a second lieutenant and company commander. He joined the Special Forces in July 1967. He fought in the Central Highlands until July 1968 when the Army tried to transfer him to the U.S. to run a training company. “It was a waste of talent,” he said. He quit the service, did odd jobs, until he and Brown founded Paladin in 1970, taking the name Paladin not from the lead character in the old TV series “Have Gun Will Travel,” but from a class of medieval knight that rode about the countryside correcting injustice.
Paladin Press had no particular interest in righting wrongs, however. “The point,” Lund told me, “was pure profit.”
Initially Paladin concentrated on subjects in which Lund and Brown felt they had some professional expertise, such as guerrilla warfare and firearms. Paladin’s first title was Silencers, Snipers and Assassins by J. David Truby, a book Paladin still sells.
Brown left Paladin in 1974 to found Soldier of Fortune magazine, also based in Boulder. Paladin branched into other topics. Lund had noticed an increasing interest in survivalism during the last days of Jimmy Carter’s administration. Lund moved to capitalize on the trend and published Life After Doomsday, a guide intended to help individuals, families, and small groups survive after a nuclear holocaust. Lund also published The Great Survival Resource Book, a consumer’s guide to the tools of survival. The book evaluated weapons, water-filtration systems, and other products.
In 1980, Paladin expanded beyond the survival movement with Get Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks, a half-serious primer on nonlethal revenge by an author using the name George Hayduke, a name more widely recognized as that of the maverick environmentalist in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Lund approached Hayduke with the idea, he said, “because I realized there was a great deal of frustration among people against institutions that screwed them.” Get Even remains a Paladin staple, its top seller as recently as the autumn of 1992; Hayduke became one of its star authors, identified in Paladin’s catalog as the “Master of Malice.”
Nicholas Elliot might have produced a better silencer if he had read Paladin’s catalog and ordered Hayduke’s The Hayduke Silencer Book: Quick and Dirty Homemade Silencers. “These simple, effective silencer designs are your passport into the world of muffled mayhem,” the catalog says of the Hayduke classic. “And best of all, they ca
n be made right at your kitchen table with common items found around the house.” Or, Nicholas could have picked any of seven other books advertised on the same page, including several more how- to primers on silencers and books on the history and fundamental design requirements of effective sound suppression.
Lund declined to tell me his company’s profit or revenue, other than to say that over the previous decade revenue had doubled. The company, which employed fifteen people full-time, seemed to provide him a comfortable living. He owned a $45,000 Range-Rover free and clear and said he customarily spent up to five months of every year at a cottage Paladin owns in Britain’s Cotswolds. For the rest of the year, he lived in a house in Boulder Canyon with a skeet and rifle range off one of its several decks and a one-story indoor waterfall.
Paladin’s books have exposed the company to business trials not typically faced by small companies. Printers have refused to print its books. Magazines have declined to accept its ads. Two different banks asked Paladin to take its business elsewhere.
Even Paladin betrays a certain lawyerly squeamishness about its books. The first page of Kill Without Joy, for example, disavows any responsibility for “the use or misuse of the information herein.” Most of Paladin’s books and catalog blurbs include the caveat “For Information Purposes Only.”
But surely, I argued, Lund knew that some customers would try out the advice and instructions included in his books, particularly Kill Without Joy.