by Erik Larson
These purchase provisions also would:
♦ Require license applicants to demonstrate minimum proficiency with a handgun and a rifle. An appropriate firearm would be supplied to them for use during their training course. (Many firing ranges already provide rental guns, even machine guns.) Licensees would have to renew their licenses and undergo a new background check every five years, but the renewal process would be accomplished simply by mailing ATF a form attached to the original license. ATF would charge a licensing fee meant to recoup some of the program costs. The license would, of course, include a photograph of the holder, and such vital statistics as his age, height, weight, and the color of his eyes.
♦ Allow successful applicants to acquire guns in any state and to transport guns to any state. A rigorous licensing program would allow states and cities to lessen their vigilance and thus alleviate a good many of the headaches now endured by hunters, private detectives, and even state and local law-enforcement officers when they travel or relocate from one part of the country to another.
♦ Designate the use or manufacture of a counterfeit license a felony, with a mandatory sentence of five years in federal prison.
♦ Prohibit minors, as now, from acquiring handguns and rifles, and set the minimum age for purchases of both at twenty-one. (Currently federal law allows a minor to acquire a rifle when he turns eighteen. He must be twenty-one to buy a handgun.)
♦ Limit purchases of handguns to one a month. The law, however, would also establish a mechanism for exempting collectors and others with a compelling reason for buying more than one handgun at a time.
♦ Establish a waiting period of ten working days, both to provide a cooling-off period for consumers intent on killing themselves or others in a fit of passion, and to allow ATF to verify that the purchase license is still valid. A fresh criminal-record check would be unnecessary. The law would include a provision for emergency exemptions in situations where a gun buyer can demonstrate an immediate threat to life and limb if he cannot have his gun immediately. The Brady bill’s five-day waiting period will provide a welcome pause in gun transactions, but only for five more years, after which the pause will be eliminated and replaced by an instant criminal background check. This is an optimistic expectation given the complexity of developing any computer system capable of searching the databases of fifty states in any period of time even broadly qualifying as “instant.”
♦ Enact a nationwide version of the parental-liability laws now in force in Florida and California, which hold parents criminally liable if their children wound themselves or others using an improperly stored firearm.
These purchase provisions would, at the very least, compel consumers to recognize the grave dangers and responsibilities inherent in owning a firearm. The buyer-licensing program alone would save lives simply by requiring consumers to learn about the weapons they hope to acquire.
III. DESIGN
The Life and Liberty Preservation Act would include provisions aimed at restricting the firepower of consumer guns, improving the design of guns to make them safer for the people who buy them, and producing for the first time hard statistics on what makes, models, and calibers of guns are most often used in given crimes. These provisions would ban the sale or transfer of silencers, limit the magazine capacity of civilian firearms to ten rounds, and forbid the sale and possession of empty magazines having capacity for more than ten. The law also would take the long-overdue step of increasing the tax fee for transferring machine guns to $500, from the $200 fee established in 1934.
In addition, these design provisions would:
♦ Amend the Consumer Product Safety Act to include firearms and thus grant the Consumer Product Safety Commission authority to monitor firearms accidents and firearms defects, and to order the mandatory recalls of defective or unsafe guns. This measure would go a long way toward at last compelling firearms manufacturers to build safer guns, in particular child-safe guns. At last an official oversight agency could ask that most obvious of questions: If aspirin bottles can be childproof, why not guns?
♦ Require that police departments report to ATF the manufacturer, model, and serial number of every gun they seize in the course of their operations, along with a description of the primary criminal charge that prompted the seizure. Such a massive tracing effort would for the first time provide an accurate count of just how many guns are used in crime each year, and which models the crooks choose most often. The data would be published quarterly and annually in the Federal Register, complete with the name of each manufacturer, the caliber, and the model. The nation’s firearms industry would undoubtedly protest this provision, but it would provide the great benefit of at last establishing in quantifiable, objective terms the direct relationship between the production of guns and their use in crime. It would, for example, provide hard numbers on just how often criminals use assault-style weapons like the Cobray M-11/9.
The Life and Liberty Preservation Act doesn’t have a chance in hell of being passed.
Even the simplest regulations meet outraged opposition from the NRA, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Gun Owners of America. Theirs is a reflexive opposition based on the rather paranoid belief that any step toward firearms regulation must necessarily take us one more step down the road to federal confiscation of America’s guns and, willy-nilly from there, to tyranny and oppression. Yet survey after survey shows that most Americans favor rigorous firearms regulations. The 1993 Harris survey of adults found that 52 percent of us favored an outright ban on ownership of handguns, provided consumers could petition a court for special permission to own one. Sixty-seven percent favored limiting “the purchase of guns by any one person to one a month.” Eighty-two percent favored a federal law requiring that all handguns be registered with federal authorities.
Given all this support, why does America still stand virtually alone in the world as the nation with the fewest and least effective limits on the proliferation of guns?
The answer, I think, is that even those of us who favor strong regulation lack the conviction of those who oppose such laws. The vociferous few dominate the debate and shape the laws to suit their interests while the rest of us stand by and cluck at news of the latest homicidal spree.
Robert Sherrill in his 1973 book, The Saturday Night Special, suggested that all this mayhem might satisfy something deep within the American soul. “We enjoy it more than we will admit,” he wrote. “We experience the assassination of a Kennedy with all the wailing gusto that an Irish wake deserves. We are honest enough to admit, by implication at least, that gunplay involving some of our lesser celebrities doesn’t always, or uniformly, make us feel nearly so depressed.… We are like the old Wobbly who, shortly after Huey Long’s assassination, told a colleague, ‘I deplore the use of murder in politics, but I wouldn’t give two cents to bring the sonofabitch back to life.’ ”
The assassinations of the sixties were a unique and in a sense nonthreatening form of gun violence. We in the TV audience could congratulate ourselves on being safe because we, after all, were not in politics. Even the race riots in the last third of the decade seemed containable phenomena. Most of America watched from secure living rooms with a collective shaking of heads. I can remember watching the news in the weeks before one of my family’s annual trips to visit relatives in South Dakota. Although I did briefly wonder whether the world could remain intact, I assured myself there would be no riots in the town of Arlington, South Dakota, where my grandparents lived behind still-unlocked doors. I trusted the turnpike system to neatly whisk me past the smoldering remains of Newark and Detroit. Many Americans did buy guns in those years, enough to produce that largest-ever increase in gun sales, but the fact is, most of us fortunate enough to live outside the ghetto were as safe as rain. Many of us, no doubt, even saw a positive side to letting those people duke it out among themselves. This sense of remove from the battlefield has long been one of the fundamental obstacles to reasonable, effective gun legisl
ation; it explains why our able representatives on Capitol Hill only feel empowered to crimp the free flow of guns when some hitherto unimaginable act of carnage demonstrates beyond doubt that violence knows no geographic or racial border.
Many of our most ardent supporters of firearms regulation became so a bit late, after the grotesque tragedy of gunshot violence had already speared their lives. Pete Shields founded Handgun Control Inc. after his son was shot dead in the infamous Zebra killings in San Francisco. Sarah Brady joined the cause after her son picked up a family friend’s revolver. A Sandston, Virginia, woman, Beryl Phillips-Taylor, began her crusade when she received a mailing from the NRA addressed to her son, who had been shot dead by a classmate two years before. “Hell flew in me,” she told a Baltimore Sun reporter. “There is a misconception by the general population that murder happens to others. The truth is that murder has no barriers. It can happen to your child just as easily as it happened to mine.”
Today more Americans of all races, classes, and ages are being touched by gun violence than ever before. The gunplay, indeed, seems to come closer and closer to home. In the course of my pursuit of Nicholas Elliot’s gun, I learned that the brother of an old high-school friend had been shot dead following an argument. On hearing this I remembered an afternoon in my teen years when this friend led me to his father’s bedroom and pulled a large auto-loading pistol from under the mattress, just to show me. I felt a mix of excitement and terror and asked him to please put it back. Another friend, an avid shooter, told me over lunch how as a college student he along with two friends had been kidnapped at gunpoint, but managed to escape. In June 1993, when Gian Luigi made his assault on a San Francisco law firm, a friend of mine was hard at work in his office a few floors above. In March 1992 a wealthy young bachelor who lived a few doors from my house was murdered in his company parking lot, shot once in the back of his head apparently by a car thief who wanted his $85,000 BMW. On the day the man’s mother put her dead son’s house on the market, the for-sale sign was emblazoned with cheery balloons and an extra signboard that called the place an “American Dream Home.”
The spreading violence evokes the forecasts made by AIDS researchers in the early days of the epidemic. As the disease gained momentum, forward-looking doctors warned that a time was fast approaching when the disease would cease to be a “gay” crisis; that every American, regardless of race, income, or sexual inclination, would soon know someone who was dying of the disease. The same, I think, can now be said of gun violence.
So what are we to expect in coming years if we continue on our current course? Will things get better on their own, and this era take its place beside the great hard times of history? Or will conditions simply worsen? Many of us already send our kids to child self-defense courses. When, I wonder, will some enterprising company introduce the first bulletproof vest for kids?
Prophecy is a dangerous pursuit, but some trends seem certain to continue gaining momentum for a good while to come. We will see, for example, a proliferation of more advanced and lethal variations on legal weaponry, such as guns with built-in laser sights and ever-more-powerful handguns, including more models built to fire .50-caliber bullets, the largest caliber allowed for unrestricted sale.
We will witness, and soon, firearms massacres conducted in realms we now naively consider off-limits to even our most craven killers. Schools are now accepted killing grounds—what Nicholas Elliot did is old hat. Post-office massacres do not surprise us either. The link between postal workers and random gun violence is now well-established in contemporary mythology, causing us all to contemplate that trip to the post office just a little more carefully than we did in the past. Law firms have been done. So have playgrounds and public pools.
What remains? Well, churches certainly. Funerals. Grocery stores. Museums. Baseball games. Hospitals—well, perhaps not hospitals. Most major urban hospitals have already felt the unaccustomed sting of violence in their sterile corridors and have already stepped up security.
We can in the next few years expect to see metal detectors turning up at the entrance doors of an ever-wider array of institutions, such as malls, emergency rooms, elementary schools, and fast-food shops located in perilous neighborhoods. This last may be of limited value, however. Another neighbor of mine was held up at the drive-through window of a Wendy’s restaurant located a few blocks from our homes. She had been hungry when she drove up to the window. When a robber pointed a gun at her head as she waited in line, her appetite disappeared.
The question is, when will we as a culture get the point?
In discussing this book with my editor and her marketing associates, we all came to the same conclusion. This book would never lack for a promotional tie to a national news event because a new massacre was bound to occur within the viable lifetime of the book, and this massacre would be more horrifying than the last.
When will we as a culture stop seeing gun ownership as a God-granted right, so precious as to be nurtured and preserved at the cost of thirty thousand corpses a year; when will we at last demand that all those armed patriots out there first demonstrate a little responsibility and recognize that while they are in the woods waiting for that eight-point buck to wander within range, a newly released felon in Nebraska is buying a gun to blow his ex-girlfriend away, a kid in East Baltimore is tucking a .45 into his belt to defend his lunch money, a toddler in Chicago is aiming the family gun at his baby brother, and a drunken husband in Beverly Hills is climbing the stairs to teach his wife a lesson she will not soon forget?
We can solve the problem of firearms violence. The National Rifle Association and its homicidal allies in Washington would have us believe otherwise, but we can solve this. We have solved other equally intractable, even comparably lethal, problems. We have awakened to the dangers of smoking to the point where smokers are now an embattled minority. We have virtually eliminated polio, smallpox, and the German measles. We have controlled highway litter and sharply reduced the presence of lead in our lives—atmospheric lead, that is. Anyone who has been to a recycling depot lately and seen young and old dutifully sorting colored glass from clear cannot help but marvel at how much we as a culture have changed our wasteful ways.
The nation’s success in reducing the death rate from traffic accidents provides the best model of what could be done with guns. Through a combination of lower speed limits, increased enforcement of drunk-driving laws, public service advertising campaigns, strict regulation of car safety, and nationwide monitoring of the causes and characteristics of traffic accidents, the death rate has declined to the point where public health researchers expected it to fall, by the turn of the century, below the death rate from firearms.
America’s gun crisis cannot be solved just by limiting the proliferation of guns and mandating responsibility on the part of gun owners. Solving the problem requires far more fundamental change. Where now our cities consider it an accomplishment simply to keep school-kids from getting killed, we must have excellent schools that cause hope to blossom. A true, full-scale National Service program might be a good start, offering interesting and creative jobs in far-flung portions of the country. Safe, clean housing for America’s poor would be nice too, in place of the somber, stinking temples of despair that ring most of our biggest cities. Vital too is federal recognition that times have indeed changed, that women do raise families all by themselves, that many couples need two incomes just to survive, and thus that access to good, safe, nurturing day care ought to be near the top of the nation’s domestic agenda, rather than at the bottom. All these are, or should be, obvious requirements. And these are just the minimum. We will have to fix much more in America if we are to slow the rise and expansion of gun violence.
The place to start is with guns themselves, and the time is now. There will be no better time. There will be far worse times.
Unfortunately, as the history of federal gun legislation so clearly demonstrates, a dramatic worsening may be necessary. The tommy-gun ma
ssacres brought the first federal controls; the riots and assassinations of the sixties brought the second. What will bring the third, in a country so stunned by violence that we now expect and accept armed rampages as if they were natural phenomena like hurricanes and tornadoes? “Maybe that’s the answer,” said David Troy, the special agent responsible for ATF law-enforcement in Virginia. “Right now you have people who are involved in violent crime and firearms violence who were never touched by it before. Maybe there is a watershed coming in the United States. We haven’t gotten there yet.”
More firearms atrocities will occur. In America today, this is a given. The greater atrocity, however, is to stand back and allow the gunslingers of America free play while the rest of us cower under the new tyranny of the gun.
CODA
AT THE TIME OF NICHOLAS ELLIOT’S rampage, business was brisk for James Dick and Guns Unlimited. This was before the Gulf War exodus of his customer base and the general slackening of firearms sales that later forced Dick to file for bankruptcy. Business was so brisk that within a year of the shootings Dick decided to expand the Guns Unlimited empire and open his third store.
One must be cool indeed to be a gun dealer. The site Dick chose was a small shopping plaza on Kempsville Road in Virginia Beach.
The Atlantic Shores Christian School was across the street.
AFTERWORD TO THE
VINTAGE EDITION
IN SEPTEMBER 1993, when I completed the original manuscript for this book, I was certain significant reform of America’s firearms regulations was a long way off and that a package like my Life and Liberty Preservation Act had little chance—to be more precise, “no chance in hell”—of being enacted. But much has changed, and I have since come to believe that progress toward rational regulation may in fact be inexorable now that America seems at last to have awakened to the obvious and mounting social costs of allowing the unimpeded flow of arms to kids, crack addicts, felons, and fugitives.