Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

by Erik Larson

  The scenes presented a grossly distorted view of the West, but to reinforce the illusion of authenticity, Cody included such props as real buffalo and a bona fide stagecoach. He even recruited the help of Indians who had fought in the Plains wars and participated in the slaughter of General Custer and his men. Sitting Bull, the Sioux chief, joined the tour in 1885 for a limited engagement.

  The show was immensely popular. In 1885, Cody took his “Wild West” to forty U.S. cities. In 1886, the show reached New York. Staged in Madison Square Garden, the set included a reproduction of the town of Deadwood doomed to be destroyed in each performance by a mock cyclone. In a single week, the show drew two hundred thousand people. The following year, Cody took the show to London, accompanied by ninety-seven Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux Indians (including the Sioux chief Red Shirt), one hundred eighty horses, eighteen buffalo, ten elk, ten mules, and a dozen or so other animals. He also brought Phoebe Anne Moses, a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Tiffin, Ohio, who had begun shooting when only eight years old to help feed her family. She performed as Annie Oakley. At one point during the “Wild West” ’s London engagement, Cody’s Deadwood stage careened about the exhibition stadium carrying three crown princes and five kings, including the Prince of Wales. When the Indians attacked the stage, Buffalo Bill himself came riding to its rescue, as always.

  Richard Slotkin, author of the 1992 book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, contends that from 1885 to 1905, Cody’s “Wild West” “was the most important commercial vehicle for the fabrication and transmission of the Myth of the Frontier. It reached large audiences in every major city and innumerable smaller ones throughout the United States. The period of its European triumph coincided with the period of massive immigration to America. As many immigrants testified, the ‘Wild West’ was the source of some of their most vivid images and expectations of the new land.”

  Undoubtedly, the show also persuaded many Americans and immigrants that the gun was central to the building of America. The proliferation of guns on and among the actors would alone have made the point, but Cody’s showbill addressed the matter directly in a discussion titled “The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization.” “The bullet,” the program declared, “is the pioneer of civilization, for it has gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest, and with the family Bible and school book. Deadly as has been its mission in one sense, it has been merciful in another; for without the rifle ball we of America would not be to-day in the possession of a free and united country, and mighty is our strength.”

  Buffalo Bill and his contemporaries the dime novelists, pulp writers, and overly enthusiastic reporters also assisted in myth manufacturing in a more indirect, but possibly more significant way. They provided the plots that Hollywood would soon use to relay and reinforce the distortions of myth, among them the notion that when all else fails, a gun can save us. From the earliest days of the film industry, movie directors recognized the lasting appeal of the frontier. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery, considered the first western and an important precursor of modern narrative cinema. It was an immediate success, imitations quickly followed, and within five years the western became an established genre. The real frontier, however, was left further and further behind.

  By 1925, William Hart had vividly established the good badman as a film archetype. Next came Tom Mix, who perhaps did the true West the gravest injustice by inventing the fancy cowboy with his tailored clothes, silver-inlaid boots, diamond-studded spurs, and pearl-handled Colt six-guns. No one ever walked into Tombstone, Arizona, in the late nineteenth century wearing such clothes, yet after Mix’s death in a car crash in 1940 a plaque was installed at the crash site that read: “In Memory of Tom Mix, Whose Spirit Left His Body on This Spot and Whose Characterizations and Portrayals in Life Served Better to Fix Memories of the Old West in the Minds of Living Man.”

  The popularity of westerns rose steeply through the 1920s, then alternately rose and fell until the end of World War II when Hollywood revived the genre once again, this time with a vengeance. Fourteen feature-length westerns appeared in 1947; more than twice that number appeared in 1948. Forty-six westerns debuted in 1956 alone. All to some extent reinforced the notion that guns tamed the frontier. Some westerns did so by casting guns as central protagonists, as in Colt .45, Springfield Rifle, Winchester ’73, and of course, The Gun That Won the West.

  Others portrayed gun violence as the only effective course of action against evil, as in George Stevens’s 1953 blockbuster, Shane. In the movie, Alan Ladd plays a gunfighter who rides into the middle of a conflict between homesteaders and the local cattle baron and soon takes the side of the homesteaders. Marian, the lead female character, played by Jean Arthur, loathes violence and guns. But Shane tells her, “A gun is just a tool, Marian. It’s as good or as bad as the man that uses it.” In Shane’s hand, clearly, the gun is a force for good. The underlying message, writes Richard Slotkin, is that “ ‘a good man with a gun’ is in every sense the best of men—an armed redeemer who is the sole vindicator of the liberties of the people,’ the ‘indispensable man’ in the quest for progress.”

  The barrage of Hollywood westerns was soon matched, if not exceeded, by television westerns, which conveyed the same message, but now on a weekly basis. In 1959, the networks broadcast twenty-eight different series westerns, or 570 hours of imaginary frontier history, the equivalent of four hundred movies. And we loved them. In 1959, eight of the ten most highly rated shows were westerns:

  Many of the TV westerns gave guns star billing, among them “Restless Gun,” “The Rifleman,” “Yancy Derringer,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” and “Colt .45,” whose theme song week after week reinforced the mythic role firearms played in establishing the nation:

  There was a gun that won the West,

  There was a man among the rest,

  Faster than any gun or man alive,

  A lightnin’ bolt when he drew his Colt .45.

  One direct impact of all this fabrication was the kindling of a desire among many gun owners to experience the myth in some small way, sometimes with drastic and lethal effect. A growing number of gun owners now strap on low-slung holsters and participate in quick-draw competitions and “Cowboy Shoots.” An advertisement in the July 1993 issue of the NRA’s American Rifleman offered a $169.95 frontier-style holster called The Laredoan. Firearms manufacturers market guns to fill such holsters. In the “Wyatt Earp” TV series, which debuted in 1955, Hugh O’Brian, playing Earp, carried a long-barreled Buntline Colt, named for Ned Buntline, the dime novelist. Colt had halted production of the gun, but demand ignited by the Earp series prompted the company to reintroduce it. In 1982, Colt again merged fact and myth when it produced a “John Wayne-American Legend” commemorative edition of the Colt Peacemaker, complete with a gold-inlaid engraving of the actor’s face. In 1992, Colt introduced a new .44-caliber revolver, the Colt Anaconda. The gun embodied a modern design, but Colt nonetheless linked the gun to the company’s frontier heritage. The headline read: “The Legend Lives, Larger Than Ever.”

  The master at marketing guns that evoke the Old West, however, is Sturm, Ruger & Co. of Southport, Connecticut. In 1953 its founder and chief executive, William Ruger, sensing that the advent of Hollywood and TV westerns signaled a marketing opportunity, introduced a line of single-action revolvers intended to resemble the old Colt Peacemaker, which Colt at the time no longer produced. Ruger sold 1.5 million of the guns. But the company had made them too authentic, to the point of retaining the old Colt’s propensity to fire when dropped. Sturm, Ruger halted production of the guns in 1973 when it introduced a line of similar revolvers equipped with a safety device to prevent such accidents. By mid-1993, however, the old guns had been linked to accidental firings that had injured more than six hundred men, women, and children, killing at least forty.

  One case merged present and past, myth and reality. In the autumn of 1979, a young woman na
med Kelly Nix set out from Phoenix, Arizona, and headed for Tombstone to take part in the city’s annual “Helldorado Days,” a celebration of the city’s history. She was accompanied by her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. They stopped at a motel in Tucson. The boyfriend had brought his Ruger single-action revolver—the early version without the new safety device—and for reasons no one can explain was carrying the gun by the holster belt inside the motel room. The gun fell from its holster just as Nix emerged from the bathroom. The gun fired; the bullet struck her heart and killed her.

  Ruger continues to introduce new guns intended for the same Wild West market. In 1993, for example, Ruger introduced the Ruger Vaquero, a single-action revolver resembling the Colt Peacemaker. Its 1993 catalog said the gun was “sure to be a hit with traditionalists and participants in Old West action shoots.”

  Practicing for these action shoots can be profoundly hazardous. A report in Ruger’s product-liability log captures in a few terse words a lethal side effect of frontier mythology. A Canadian man had shot himself to death with a Ruger frontier-style revolver while twirling the gun and practicing quick draw. The log entry reads: “He was found with a western-style quick-draw holster around his waist and a stopwatch in his hand in front of a full-length mirror.”

  How do we measure the deeper, psychic impact of a century’s worth of myth building? “It is quite impossible to conceive the cultural imagery which ‘Gunsmoke’ and its dozens of imitators have created,” wrote historian Frank Prassel. “Impact must be measured in tens of billions of viewer hours on an international scope, for such series are broadcast throughout the world in many languages. Yet it is here rather than in fact that the American derives his typical impression of the West.”

  Guns and violence were integral components of all film and TV westerns. “ … Since the western offers itself as a myth of American origins,” Richard Slotkin observed, “it implies that its violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced.”

  The seamless barrage of dime novels, movies, and television conflated guns with history. In this milieu, any attempt to regulate the free flow of guns becomes nothing less than an effort to repudiate history. In 1970, historian Richard Hofstadter framed the central enigma of America’s enthusiasm for guns: “In some measure our gun culture owes its origins to the needs of an agrarian society and to the dangers and terrors of the frontier, but for us the central question must be why it has survived into an age in which only about 5 percent of the population makes its living from farming and from which the frontier has long since gone. Why did the United States, alone among modern industrial societies, cling to the idea that the widespread substantially unregulated availability of guns among its city populations is an acceptable and a safe thing?”

  The best answer is a question: How could we possibly have done otherwise?

  Gun manufacturers have little interest in saving lives, although they struggle to convey the image that they are the last defenders of hearth and home, that their guns will stand by you long after marauding gangs force the police into retreat. To imagine such beneficial purpose is to confuse corporate image with corporate imperative. The domestic gun industry, despite its privileged status as the least regulated of consumer-product industries, sold so many guns in America that it saturated the market and now must scramble for ways to open new markets. The industry relies on Paxton Quigley, and other outspoken sales promoters, including gun writers and the leadership of the National Rifle Association, to make guns more palatable to a society that reads daily of gunshot death and injury.

  There is ample proof of the industry’s disregard for the health and safety of its customers. In a time when even children’s vitamins have childproof caps and electric drills have safety triggers, gun manufacturers still do not manufacture child-safe guns. Likewise, most manufacturers still fail to equip their handguns with loading indicators and magazine safeties. Sturm, Ruger & Co. has yet to order a formal recall of its original Peacemaker look-alikes, even though some 1.3 million remain in the hands of consumers. Instead of launching a campaign to buy back the guns, or even to publicize their real dangers, Ruger launched an advertising campaign that bemoaned the national decay of gun-handling practices and told customers the right way to handle the guns. An Alaska jury was so incensed by Ruger’s apparent disregard for safety, it voted a $2.9 million punitive-damages award against the company. The Alaska Supreme Court later limited the award to $500,000.

  There is evidence too that manufacturers don’t see crime as being an entirely negative phenomenon. Why else would the now-defunct Charter Arms Co. engrave the barrels of a brace of husband-and-wife revolvers with the names Bonnie and Clyde?

  The gun industry has long contended that only a small percentage of guns are used in crime, while at the same time resisting efforts to document the true number and to identify the most popular crime guns by maker, model, and caliber. As of 1989, rather late in the computer revolution, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at last became able to provide some rudimentary statistics on which guns turned up most often in federal traces. Reports from the new database have already battered the NRA’s “guns don’t kill” stance, proving beyond doubt that certain guns turn up during the commission of crime far more often than others. The company whose handguns were traced most often from January of 1990 to December of 1991, simply because of the sheer magnitude of its production, was giant Smith & Wesson. However, when the frequency of traces is compared with each company’s production, S.W. Daniel, the company that made Nicholas Elliot’s gun, shows a tracing rate far higher. By 1989 the company had produced some 60,500 handguns and an untold number of accessories, including silencers and machine-gun kits. It fondly advertised Nicholas’s gun, the Cobray M-11/9, as “the gun that made the eighties roar.”

  Condemned by police, ridiculed even by those who sell it, the gun has been inordinately controversial ever since its initial design by Gordon Ingram, a California engineer and gunsmith who sought to make a cheap, reliable submachine gun for close military combat. How that gun went on to become a readily available mass-consumer product—something S.W. Daniel once even gave away free in a monthly contest—provides a clear example of the culture of nonresponsibility at work in America’s firearms industry. It is but one example of how this commercial ethos governed the gun’s progress from conception to its use as a murder weapon in a Virginia Beach classroom.

  “We’ve got technology running amok,” said Col. Leonard Supenski, the Baltimore County firearms expert. “No gun manufacturer ever decided in its R-and-D process that the product it was developing might not have any useful purpose for society and might in fact harm society. When Gordon Ingram began production and eventually tried to get into the commercial market, I’m sure the thought never entered his mind. The people at SWD don’t give a damn who gets those guns.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NICHOLAS

  ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1988, NICHOLAS Elliot awoke feeling ill. He had an ear infection and was taking medication for it, but that did not account for his malaise. He had made big plans for the day, and suddenly those plans seemed too big. The anxiety sickened him. “I didn’t feel like going to school,” he told Detective Adams. “But I knew I would get in trouble if I didn’t, so I went.… I was just so sick.”

  He planned to bring his gun to school for the express purpose of scaring Billy Cutter, his tormentor, and at last getting some respect. He had bought the gun two months before, a Cobray M-11/9 semiautomatic pistol capable of firing thirty-two rounds before requiring the shooter to reload. His mother did not know about his acquisition. Nicholas told Adams he had hidden the gun in a bird cage, but Adams believed he probably kept it in his attic.

  “I was scared,” Nicholas told the detective, “because I didn’t know how I would feel with a gun at school.”

  He packed his backpack and caught his usual
bus. He attended the first of his classes. “I was looking for him from the beginning,” Nicholas said. “I wasn’t angry … I wanted to scare him, to make him see how much of a wimp he was in front of everyone.”

  During Nicholas’s ride to school, the knowledge of what he carried in his backpack and what he could do with it deeply frightened him. “I was scared,” he said. “I was looking for Billy, but I also was scared.”

  At one point, he considered abandoning his mission. He could not find the boy and was surprised at the fear he felt walking around school with a gun. “I was kind of thinking about just hiding the gun and getting it later on … take it home and just leave it.”

  “Just forget the whole thing?” Adams prompted.

  “Well, sort of, yeah, I mean, I wasn’t planning to shoot them.”

  Briefly he had imagined an alternative means of getting back at Billy Cutter. “I was thinking about having someone do something to him. Well, like, you know, beat him up and teach him not to pick on people. Just do something to him, you know. I wanted to scare him. That’s what I really wanted to do.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE GUN

  THE BALTIMORE COUNTY POLICE SHOOTING RANGE occupies a wooded area just north of Towson, Maryland, where the broad six-lane strip roads of Baltimore city taper to rolling two-lane highways. I heard the range the moment I stepped from my car, the sound like something you would get if you put a microphone beside a package of microwave popcorn in midpop. The range was a flat plane carved from a hillside so as to leave an earthen cliff at one end, which serves as a backstop to keep stray rounds from bounding north into Baltimore County horse country. Colonel Supenski arrived carrying a gray attaché case and led me onto the range where a group of county corrections officers was undergoing pistol training. He asked their instructor to have the group stand down for a few minutes, even though he and I were headed for the far end of the range roughly one hundred yards away. His caution was a measure of the deep respect police officers have for the quirky dangers of bullets and guns. During my pursuit of Nicholas Elliot’s gun, I often observed a subtle dance that law-enforcement people do whenever an amateur in their midst handles a gun, whether the gun is loaded or not. As the gun shifts, they shift, but ever so slightly in an instinctive, drilled-in twitch meant to ensure that if an imaginary line were drawn outward from the muzzle, it would never intersect their bodies.