Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

by Erik Larson

  Shotgun News also carried ads placed by an Athens, Georgia, company for products designed to convert semiautomatic weapons to full-auto machine guns, a company later included in ATF’s wide-ranging effort to discover how the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, managed to acquire enough firepower to repel the 1993 ATF raid on the compound.

  When I opened the July 10, 1992, edition of Shotgun News, to which I had subscribed, I found an advertisement for a Nazi tank—“a rare opportunity to own a fine piece of German artillery.” A Chillicothe, Ohio, broker of vintage military vehicles offered the tank for $145,000. “There’s no difference between owning a tank and a Ferrari except four inches of armor,” he told me during a visit to his office. Oddly enough, such ads may be among the most innocent in the publication. Private buyers of tanks tend to be history-loving souls and members of the Military Vehicle Preservation Association, which doesn’t allow live guns of any kind at its various meets.

  Once notorious for running quasi-legal and occasionally racist ads, including an advertisement placed by the Ku Klux Klan, Shotgun News has grown more circumspect, at least in terms of its published policies. It now includes a notice that it no longer accepts ads for silencer parts, plans for making explosives and booby traps, “plans, videos or books” for full-auto conversions, and such burglar-friendly tools as lockpicks, slim-jims, and books on how to pick locks. Nonetheless, my April 1993 issue contained an advertisement from a Sun City, Arizona, company offering instructions for converting Chinese SKS semiautomatic assault rifles to full-auto operation. Another company, Jonathan Arthur Ciener Inc. of Cape Canaveral, Florida, “Manufacturer of the Finest in Suppressed Firearms,” ran a full-page ad offering sound-suppressed handguns and rifles, and separate silencers for a variety of assault weapons including the MAC-10 and MAC-11 and Nicholas Elliot’s gun, the Cobray M11/9.

  During a reporting journey unrelated to guns, I inadvertently wound up at the fountainhead of aftermarket suppliers, the huge annual “surplus” show in Las Vegas, also the source of much of the cheap merchandise we encounter in “dollar” and Army-Navy stores and in low-rung direct-mail catalogs. Some thirty thousand retailers from around the world visited the show, shopping its four thousand booths for bargains in bulk quantities of those ubiquitous purple-haired trolls, cheap plastic toys, and other merchandise. But I found dozens of dealers selling a darker sort of merchandise, including surplus night-vision scopes like the one used by the serial killer in the movie Silence of the Lambs, dummy hand grenades, combat knives, police badges, and black caps emblazoned with the law-enforcement acronyms we see routinely in newspaper photographs of raids conducted by ATF, DEA, and the FBI. “It’s perfectly legal,” an attendant at one of the cap booths told me. These caps and badges, along with the magnetic blue or red police-style flashing lights offered in U.S. Cavalry’s catalog, can turn anyone into a convincing replica of a bona fide lawman.

  At one of the largest booths at the Las Vegas show I encountered Jim Moore, chief executive officer of Military Supply Corp., LaCenter, Washington, who told me he sold uniforms and other equipment to armies around the world. He was also selling .50-caliber long-range sniper rifles. In fact, he said, he had one up in his room at the Las Vegas Hilton at that very moment. He flipped to a page in his catalog that contained a sketch of the bipod-mounted rifle. “It’s called reach out and touch someone at two thousand yards,” Moore said. “Would you like to come out and shoot it?”

  He later canceled the demonstration. The colonel was a victim of jet lag, Moore explained; he had napped through the afternoon.

  The aftermarket has so much to offer that Nicholas Elliot need not have gone to all the trouble of making the combat accessories police found in his backpack. With a little effort, he could have ordered them directly from S.W. Daniel’s mail-order catalog. It offered a brass catcher, complete with see-through bag and Velcro fastener; an official Cobray “assault sling,” wrist strap, and rear sling collar (“Get Super Control By Adding These Accessories,” the catalog said); “fake” silencers; slotted barrel extenders; and flash suppressors, designed to keep that all-too-detectable muzzle flash to a minimum. For $127.95 Cobray enthusiasts could also order a screw-on barrel-and-grip assembly to make the Cobray M-11/9 resemble “the fabled Thompson” machine gun. Instead of jungle-clipping his magazines with tape, Nicholas could simply have ordered a plastic magazine joiner tailored to the purpose. S.W. Daniel named this product Double Trouble.

  The catalog asked, “Can You Imagine 64 Rounds?”

  Two institutions share much of the responsibility for cultivating the anything-goes attitude of firearms makers and the aftermarket bazaar. They have declared themselves each other’s enemy, but together both served as a kind of cultural cheering squad, nudging Nicholas Elliot and his Cobray along their path to Atlantic Shores.

  The first is the National Rifle Association.

  To people who dislike guns, the NRA is the Great Satan. They see its influence in every act of gun-related legislation and in every political race. Although its impact on electoral politics has been greatly inflated, the association has indeed been influential in lobbying against firearms regulation, as when it diminished the authority of the Gun Control Act of 1968 by promoting the McClure-Volkmer Act. Where the NRA has been most influential, however—and where its influence has been least acknowledged or appreciated—is in defining the vocabulary of the firearms debate and thus, in a sense, winning the debate before it even began.

  The NRA accomplished this bit of intellectual gerrymandering by deftly marketing an ideology that posits any and all firearm regulation as a direct challenge to the U.S. Constitution and, by inference, to America itself. In this ideology, all guns are equal, be they Cobray pistols having no utilitarian value or the Glocks now embraced by so many police departments; guns are to be kept in readiness to repel invaders or—and this is a real prospect to the hard-liners who run the NRA—to resist the U.S. government itself; regulation of firearms is necessarily the first step toward confiscation of all firearms. Soon after I joined the NRA in 1993, I received my official NRA “Member Guide,” which stated the NRA’s position in unequivocal terms: “Any type of licensing and computer registration scheme aimed at law-abiding citizens is a direct violation of Second Amendment rights, serves no law enforcement purpose, and ultimately could result in the prohibition and/or confiscation of legally owned firearms.” In a 1975 fund-raising letter to NRA members, retired general Maxwell E. Rich, executive vice president, warned of the true consequences of gun control: “My friend, they are not talking of ‘Control’; they want complete and total ‘Confiscation.’ This will mean the elimination and removal of all police revolvers, all sporting rifles and target pistols owned by law abiding citizens.” He asked, “What would the crime rate be if the criminal knew our police were unarmed …?”

  At times the NRA has even sought to link support for firearm regulation to Communist sympathies, as in 1973 when the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine described the “Rules for Revolution,” a never-authenticated document purported to set out the principles by which Communist cells could attain world control. The tenth rule, the magazine said, called for “the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the population helpless.”

  On this battlefield anyone who advocates firearms regulation finds himself immediately on the defensive, forced into arcane debate over the exact meaning of the Second Amendment, and branded an enemy of The People.

  An important effect of the NRA’s propaganda was to arm even the least articulate of gun owners with a snappy response that allows them to readily deflect unfriendly challenges from the unpersuaded and at the same time to avoid having to think about what kinds of firearms regulations might indeed ease the national crisis. (To the NRA, of course, guns are not the crisis. People are. More jails and swifter prosecution will solve the problem of gun violence.) In this intellectual desert, the mere act of possessing or manufacturing a gun, even a
Cobray M-11/9, becomes a noble and patriotic undertaking.

  The NRA was not always the paranoid, Constitution-thumping entity it is today. Nor is its current radicalism shared by the great mass of its members, many of whom simply join to take advantage of the organization’s broad array of grass-roots services or merely to get the NRA hat (mine is black with the NRA eagle insignia stitched in gold thread). The NRA is not the monolithic, omnipotent force of popular imagination. It is two organizations, and only by understanding this can one come to understand the fervor with which the association opposes even the simplest efforts at impeding the flow of guns from the good guys to the bad.

  The NRA was founded in New York in 1871 by William Conant Church, a former New York Times war correspondent and soldier, and Gen. George Wingate, with the rather modest goal of sharpening the marksmanship skills of the New York National Guard and Guard units in other states by promoting a system of rifle practice and establishing rifle ranges. It remained a small, struggling organization until 1905, when federal legislation allowed the United States to sell surplus military weapons at cost to rifle clubs and made the NRA responsible for determining which clubs were qualified to acquire the guns. A 1911 amendment allowed the government to donate the guns to such clubs free of charge. Needless to say, NRA membership began to rise.

  The association began attempting to influence legislation in 1934, in response to the increased clamor for firearms regulation that resulted in the National Firearms Act, which banned the sale of unregistered machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. The act was the NRA’s first defeat, but also its first victory. As originally proposed, the act would have regulated the sale of pistols and handguns as well. But the NRA objected and, in its first demonstration of how a relative few ardent loyalists can shape a nation’s laws, launched a lobbying and letter-writing campaign that convinced Congress to limit the retrictions to “gangster” weapons.

  By 1946, the association had all of 155,000 members. In 1956, the NRA amended its New York State charter to include a set of objectives broader than those it had outlined in 1871. Now it sought “to promote social welfare and public safety, law and order, and the national defense; to educate and train citizens of good repute in the safe and efficient handling of small arms,” and, broadly, “to encourage the lawful ownership and use of small arms by citizens of good repute.”

  The NRA was still largely a sportsman’s organization, promoting target shooting, hunting, and hunter’s rights. It might have kept to this moderate course if not for the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, which prompted a horrified and heartbroken nation to call for gun control. The NRA, now galvanized by a threat to its members’ favorite pastimes, began attacking controls and pressuring legislators to oppose them, while sidestepping the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald acquired his rifle by mail through an advertisement in the American Rifleman. Nonetheless, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968.

  The NRA’s hard-liners, who despised the Gun Control Act, began working to ensure that such an infringement of the constitutional right to bear arms would not occur again. And soon the bald, bullet-headed figure of Harlon Carter took the helm. He was the perfect leader for an organization steeped in the myths of the American frontier. As an officer and later chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, he came as close to being an Old West lawman as anyone could in the twentieth century.

  But he also symbolized the darker aspects of America’s enthusiasm for guns. For Carter was a convicted murderer.

  In 1931, when he was seventeen, Carter shot and killed a Mexican boy with his shotgun under circumstances that prompted a jury to convict him of murder. Carter claimed he killed the boy in self-defense, after he brandished a knife. An appellate court overturned the conviction, charging the lower-court judge had improperly instructed the jury as to what constituted a valid claim of self-defense. The charges were never refiled.

  After Carter and his allies seized control of the NRA in the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt, the NRA heeled sharply to the right. It shifted emphasis from promoting the shooting sports to battling firearm regulations, a shift made official in 1977 when the association amended its New York State charter to include the goal of promoting “the right of the individual of good repute to keep and bear arms as a common law and constitutional right both of the individual citizen and of the collective militia.”

  A study conducted a few years earlier by the Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, California, for Remington Arms Company, warned that the NRA’s “right-wingers are becoming increasingly isolated from the society of today.” The report continued: “Dismissing unpleasant information about guns in society and denying integrity to those who are concerned about guns, they manage to survive in a bunker decorated with white hats and black hats, in a make-believe world of American ‘sacred rights,’ ancient skills, and coonskins.”

  Nonetheless, by 1978 the NRA claimed 1.2 million members. By 1983, its membership had increased to more than 2.6 million and was growing at three thousand a week.

  But the NRA had moved so far to the right, had become so ardent in its opposition to any and all firearms regulation, that it soon began to lose some of its closest friends outside the organization. Most important, it alienated the law-enforcement community. In the late 1980s it opposed legislation aimed at outlawing armor-piercing ammunition and at banning such assault weapons as the MAC-10 and the Cobray. When police agencies dared criticize the NRA, their officials came under withering return fire. One of those attacked was Joseph McNamara, the widely respected chief of police in San Jose, California. (As of 1993 he was a fellow at the Hoover Institution studying ways to halt illegal drug distribution and was working on his next police novel.) In a 1987 advertisement for Handgun Control Inc., McNamara charged that the NRA leadership “has repeatedly ignored the objections of professional law enforcement,” thus making police work “more difficult—and more dangerous.” The NRA, in its own advertisements, accused McNamara of favoring legalization of drugs, a course he had never endorsed. At one point, someone sent him a bull’s-eye target bearing his image. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “That target was shot full of holes.”

  Until the NRA began its attacks, most law-enforcement agencies considered the NRA their ally, McNamara said. Their allegiance, he said, reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the NRA’s attitudes and mission. “The NRA had gotten by for a lot of years on an image that wasn’t really accurate, that they were supportive of law enforcement.” The attacks on police chiefs, he said, “educated law enforcement as to their true colors.”

  Then the unthinkable occurred: the NRA began losing membership. From 1989 to 1991, its membership shrank from almost 3 million to about 2.5 million. Newspapers across the country began running stories that the NRA had lost its punch. The embattled association launched a campaign to restore the popular conception of its influence, drawing on frontier imagery to help. The annual meeting that was to mark its comeback was deliberately staged in San Antonio, home of The Alamo. The historic site, according to Osha Davidson, author of Under Fire, “was the touchstone of all those American values the gun group liked to claim as its own: an uncompromising attitude, unabashed love for this country, and a readiness to fight her enemies—no matter what the odds.”

  The NRA stepped up spending to bolster its influence, calling itself “The New NRA.” Its political action committee—the NRA Political Victory Fund—spent $1.7 million on the presidential and congressional campaigns of 1992, more than twice as much as the $772,756 it spent in 1988. Between the 1990 and 1992 election cycles, the Victory Fund increased its spending more than any other registered PAC. The NRA also stepped up its lobbying expenditures. In 1992 it spent $28.9 million, 43 percent more than in 1988.

  The centerpiece of its image-burnishing campaign, however, was a membership drive of unprecedented expense. The best way to refute reports of the NRA’s demise was to boost membership to record levels. The NRA set out to do so, and to spare no expense. In 1992 alone, PM Consulting,
the direct-mail company chosen to manage the drive, spent $25 million—$10 million more than budgeted. The NRA lured members with all manner of appeals and devices, including no-fee credit cards, gun-safety videos for kids, even a “Sportsman’s Dream Gun Sweepstakes,” in which the grand-prize winner stood to receive ten different hunting rifles and ten all-expenses-paid hunting trips. For the first time, the NRA enlisted the help of firearms dealers, offering them a substantial share of the $25 new-member fee for each recruit they managed to sign. For-profit gun shows waived their admission fees for anyone who joined the NRA on the spot.

  The drive worked. In 1992, the NRA had a net gain of 616,000 members. As of October 1993, its membership had risen to a record high of nearly 3.3 million. The NRA was indeed bigger than ever before, but its campaign to boost membership and bolster its member programs had resulted in a 1992 operating deficit of $31.6 million, larger than ever in its history.

  Despite all this spending and the surge in membership, by the middle of 1993 the NRA still seemed to have lost important ground. The association remained estranged from the nation’s law-enforcement community. And it faced a series of unaccustomed setbacks. In 1993, Virginia passed its one-gun-a-month law, despite the $500,000 the NRA spent to defeat the legislation. Connecticut passed an assault-gun bill that outlawed the sale of certain assault guns, including the AR-15 made by Colt’s Manufacturing, headquartered in Connecticut’s own “Gun Valley.” New Jersey passed an assault-gun bill. The New York assembly did likewise. Politicians and pundits began talking of a “sea change,” a new distaste for gun violence as pervasive as the antigun mood of the late 1960s. One New York assemblywoman, Naomi Matusow, won her seat in 1992 after campaigning with an explicitly anti-NRA slate. “It may just be,” she said, “that the NRA had cast a longer shadow than the reality.”