Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

by Erik Larson

  In his introduction to the report, La Forest asked: “What would the results indicate if we had the capability of successfully tracing 10,000 to 15,000 weapons seized by all law enforcement agencies in this metropolitan area?”

  What the report also demonstrates is the great value of cumulative information on the guns used in crime and the dealers who sold them. But such information is hard to come by. Until 1989, ATF couldn’t even do a computer search to detail which guns were traced most. Early in 1989, two reporters from the Cox Newspaper chain found that the ATF tracing center in Landover, Maryland, possessed all the information necessary to produce such an analysis, but in hard copy. The reporters gained access to this rich seam of data under the Freedom of Information Act, then hired their own team of clerks, armed them with computers, and moved them into the center where the reporters built their own database. ATF allowed such access on the condition the team use a special computer template that prohibited its hired clerks from punching in the names and addresses of the consumers who owned the guns.

  The database provided immediate revelations. For one thing, it put the lie to the NRA claim that assault weapons were not often used in crime. The study revealed a startling increase in the use of assault guns from 1986 to 1989 and found that for traces made between January 1, 1988, and March 27, 1989, assault weapons accounted for 8.1 percent of homicide traces and 30 percent of traces stemming from organized crime investigations (including arrests involving drug cartels, arms traffickers, and terrorist groups). The fourth most commonly traced assault weapon was the S.W. Daniel Cobray.

  ATF wasn’t able to provide such information on its own until late in 1989, when its own automated trace system began operating; as of June 1992 the agency was still struggling to rid the system of kinks.

  No matter how efficient ATF’s database becomes, however, it will offer only limited help in understanding the use and migration of weapons nationwide. The bureau traces only about 10 percent of guns used in crime. In fiscal 1990 and 1991 the Los Angeles police department and Los Angeles County sheriff asked ATF to conduct only 117 traces, even though in 1991 alone the city had 2,062 homicides. In most investigations involving a crime committed with a gun, police simply do not request a trace. “If they’ve got an armed robber and they’ve also got the gun, they don’t care about the gun,” La Forest said. “When they go to court, they say, ‘This is the gun the guy had.’ The question we want to ask is, ‘Where’d he get the gun?’ ”

  When police or even ATF’s own agents do request gun traces, they often fail to provide the Landover tracing center with precise information. Inaccurate descriptions of seized weapons are common. The problem is especially acute for the Cobray and its look-alike ancestors, the MAC, RPB, and Ingram; it’s not uncommon for a police department to list a seized Cobray as a MAC-10 or even an Uzi. Moreover, the agency requesting the trace often fails to provide accurate information about the crime in which the gun was used. Detroit’s La Forest, for example, believes that easily half the Detroit guns identified as having been confiscated for “weapons violations” were actually seized during narcotics arrests. The weapons charges, he said, are merely the quickest and easiest to record in the bureaucratic process of logging evidence that immediately follows an arrest.

  Taken together, the lack of comprehensive data about crime guns, ATF’s ticklish political position, and explicit restrictions on the bureau’s inspections and investigations, all help maintain the unimpeded diversion of guns from legitimate channels to the bad guys. Each in its own way nudged Nicholas Elliot’s Cobray along its deadly path.

  Raymond Rowley, an agent in ATF’s Norfolk office, initiated the bureau’s search for the source of Nicholas’s gun. He heard about the shooting on the news and quickly volunteered his help to Det. Donald Adams, the Virginia Beach homicide detective in charge of the case. Rowley ordered an “Urgent” trace, the highest of three request levels and one that typically yields a response within a matter of hours. The ATF’s Urgent trace of the revolver used by John Hinckley to shoot Ronald Reagan took all of sixteen minutes.

  The serial number from Nicholas’s Cobray was relayed to the special agent in charge in Atlanta, Tom Stokes, who then telephoned S.W. Daniel. No one answered. It was Friday; the company operated only Monday through Thursday. But Stokes eventually managed to speak by phone with Sylvia Daniel, who, in a departure from the usual frosty relations between her company and the bureau, agreed to stop by her office on the way to the S.W. Daniel Christmas party and search the serial number herself.

  The number led to a distributor, who in turn said he had shipped the pistol to Guns Unlimited. By eleven o’clock that night, Rowley, another agent, and Detective Adams were at Curtis Williams’s door.

  Williams went to jail. As far as federal law was concerned, however, Guns Unlimited did nothing wrong when it sold the Cobray to Williams, even under such obviously suspicious circumstances. Williams had shown the appropriate identification and had filled out form 4473 properly, dutifully writing “no” after every background question on the form.

  No one thought to investigate Guns Unlimited, not even after the negligence suit filed by the family of Karen Farley yielded a judgment against the dealership early in 1992.

  “We’re always looking for, and sensitive to, violations of federal law, regardless of who may be the individual or entity involved,” Rowley told me. “In this case, no, we did not go back and reinvestigate. Nothing that came up during the investigation of Williams pointed to wrongdoing on the part of Guns Unlimited.”

  But clear evidence that a dealer willfully, knowingly broke federal firearms laws can be hard to come by, said David Troy, special agent in charge of the Falls Church division and Rowley’s boss.

  “We don’t make very many dealer cases,” Troy said. “Not because we can’t catch them. There just aren’t many dealers who are really knowingly and willfully violating the law. But what you do have is this: you have a lot of dealers who are satisfying the letter of the law when they sell the gun, regardless of how suspicious the sale might look to a reasonable person. But they’re not culpable under the law for that sale.”

  Troy decries the unimpeded proliferation of guns, but cautions that America’s gun crisis has deeper, more intractable roots. “The fact there are guns out there is not in itself inherently bad, because a lot of people who have guns never do anything wrong with them. The problem is there are so many people out there who want to get a gun and use it in an illegal manner. If there weren’t so damn many firearms out there, it would make things a little bit better. But we’re talking shades of gray, here. If we had only fifty million guns instead of two hundred million, would we have less violent crime in the United States? Probably not. Because fifty million is still a hell of a lot of firearms. The point is, there are so many weapons available in the United States, and so easily obtained through legal or illegal channels, that anyone who wants a firearm can get one. Therefore, you have a hell of a lot of people who are willing to use them in a criminal manner who can get their hands on them without any exertion whatsoever.”

  Troy thinks something fundamental changed in American culture to make the nation more tolerant of guns and gun violence. “I don’t know why it’s accepted the way it is. Maybe it’s like anything else. You get used to it over a period of time. If the country went from a thousand homicides to twenty-five thousand in one year, we’d have a revolution on our hands. But it’s gradually built up to where we do have twenty-five thousand homicides every year. It’s taken four or five generations to get there, and people have gotten used to the idea. It’s an alarming thing but it’s not a statistic that makes anyone do anything on a grand scale. It’s a cultural thing, a value system situation.

  “Guns have become so common, so acceptable, that kids know them the way you and I used to know cars. When I was a teenager, I could name every car by looking at it. I could say that’s a ’58 Ford, that’s a ’59 Chevy. Kids today can name guns. They know them by loo
king at them. They can pick them out just like teenagers were able to pick out cars twenty-five years ago.”

  Nicholas Elliot possessed this skill. But how did he come by it? How does America’s gun culture foster this awareness and our tolerance of gun violence? Is tolerance even the right word, or have we now, in a sense, cultivated a taste for gunplay and developed the infrastructure to satisfy it?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NICHOLAS

  WHEN NICHOLAS ELLIOT LOADED HIS COBRAY before beginning his shooting spree, he selected one of the six clips he had crammed into his backpack. Each clip was long, slender, and gray, with a powerful spring that forced the stacked cartridges upward after the topmost round was fired and stripped away. The clips, also known as magazines or, in gunspeak, simply “mags,” were designed to inject bullets into the Cobray’s receiver much the way a kid’s Pez dispenser keeps presenting new blocks of candy.

  To a cynic, God may have seemed suspiciously absent from Atlantic Shores that morning. The faithful, however, believe that God did indeed intercede, at the point where Nicholas chose that first clip. Forensic investigators later test-fired Nicholas’s gun repeatedly, inserting each of the six magazines. All worked perfectly, except that first one. It misfed cartridges to the gun, but only to a point about halfway down the magazine, the fifteen-round point, where it began feeding bullets correctly. By the time Nicholas broke into Hutch Matteson’s class, he had emptied it of roughly fourteen cartridges, many of them ejected unfired as Nicholas cleared jam after jam.

  Cutter was splayed on the floor some three or four feet in front of the rest of the students. He watched in terror as Nicholas aimed the gun in his direction. “It looked like he was pulling the trigger,” Cutter recalled. “I wasn’t sure. And then he was messing with the clip.”

  The gun had jammed yet again, and now Nicholas stood before Cutter striking and jiggling the clip, trying to get the weapon to work properly.

  Still fumbling with the gun, Nicholas took a step backward. He glanced over his left shoulder.

  Hutch Matteson charged him, covering the dozen or so feet at a dead run. Nicholas, busy trying to clear the jam, looked startled. He stared directly at Matteson and in that instant managed to get the gun to work.

  “I was probably three to four feet away from him as that shot went off,” Matteson recalled. “There was a tremendous ringing in my ear.”

  Matteson closed his eyes, then opened them again and continued his charge. He grabbed Nicholas by the shirt and threw him headfirst into an adjacent wall. Nicholas fell, his gun thudding to the floor. Matteson threw his body onto Nicholas and shoved the Cobray aside.

  “I don’t have the gun,” Nicholas cried. “I give up.”

  Matteson struck him in the head. He stretched Nicholas’s arms out on the floor, grabbed his wrists, and held him pinned under his weight.

  “What in the world would make you want to do anything like this?” Matteson screamed.

  “They hate me. They make fun of me. They hit me.”

  “Who hit you?”

  Nicholas named Billy Cutter.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Matteson said.

  As Matteson held Nicholas pinned to the floor, waiting for help, he heard Nicholas list the names of other people he had planned to shoot that morning.

  Rev. George Sweet, senior pastor at Atlantic Shores and president of the school, was sitting in his office when he heard someone cry, “He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun.” Suddenly there was a lot of commotion, a lot of shouting in the outer office and in the hall. It took him a few moments to make out the words and to appreciate that something grave had occurred. Until then he had been contemplating nothing more momentous than the staff Christmas party set for that night.

  Someone led him to Hutch Matteson’s trailer, where he saw Nicholas pinned to the floor. He then crossed to Sam Marino’s trailer and found him lying, literally, in a pool of blood. “He looked at me,” Sweet recalled, “and he said, ‘I’m going to die.’ ”

  The two began praying together.

  Police and medical help arrived quickly. An ambulance took Sam Marino to the hospital. Sweet followed in his car.

  Marino’s wounds were serious, but Sweet knew things could have been so much worse. At least no one had been killed. But just to make sure everyone else was indeed all right, the faculty at Atlantic Shores gathered staff and students together in the church auditorium to conduct a head count. Many students still had not realized a shooting had occurred, including Will and Lora Farley, whose mother, Karen, was the school’s business teacher.

  “I was like wondering where my mom was,” Lora recalled a long while later as she sat facing a courtroom that had suddenly gone dead quiet. “We weren’t really concerned or anything, but when I first entered the auditorium, this girl said to me—me and my friends were laughing and stuff because we didn’t really think anything was going on—and this girl said to me, ‘Someone has been shot,’ but it wasn’t my mom. It was another teacher, and I was like—I couldn’t understand. I was like, ‘Somebody has been shot at school?’

  “We prayed and stuff that everything would be all right, and then we just like left it up to the Lord. We just sat there really being quiet and stuff. I asked Will—I said, ‘Have you seen Mom?’

  “And he said, ‘No.’ ”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE CULTURE

  NICHOLAS ELLIOT HAD COME TO SCHOOL that Friday prepared for combat. He had filled his backpack with his gun, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a variety of battle accessories. The most striking thing about his cargo, however, was not the inherent firepower—although it was prodigious—but rather the weapons savvy evident in what this sixteen-year-old boy had done to the gun and its ammunition in an apparent effort to make them even more efficient at killing.

  He did not carry his six clips haphazardly, but had “jungle-clipped” them using tape to bind them in pairs in such a way that the instant he expended one clip he could simply turn the pair over and jam in the other end. Each assembly was capable of providing him with sixty-four rounds of virtually continuous fire, which, barring jams, he could have pumped from the gun at a rate approaching that of a light machine gun. He had used a length of rope to fashion a combat sling for his Cobray similar in concept to slings attached to the compact Uzis and Heckler & Koch submachine guns used by antiterrorist squads to help them better control their weapons during combat. He carried a crude silencer made from a pipe wrapped in fabric, and a “brass catcher” he had made from cloth and tape, to be attached to his gun to catch ejected cartridge cases. “A gun enthusiast might use a brass catcher to catch the brass for reloading,” said Donald Adams, the Virginia Beach homicide detective. “A murderer or a person about to commit a crime might use one to collect the evidence.”

  His six clips gave him a total of 192 cartridges ready to fire, but he came prepared for the possibility that he might use up all those rounds and need more. He carried hundreds of extra cartridges, including several boxes containing thirty-two rounds each—exactly enough to refill an expended clip. To speed refilling, Nicholas had inserted a thin, white string through the base of each magazine to produce a primitive speed loader. When tugged, Adams told me, the string would pull down the spring-driven feeder inside the magazine, thus easing the resistance. “He could hold the string down by clamping it under his foot,” Adams explained. Nicholas could then insert each cartridge into the magazine more quickly and with less strain. Adams could not at first figure out what kind of string Nicholas had used. It was thicker than fishing line and very strong. After a while he decided he knew what it was: dental floss.

  Finally, Nicholas modified even the bullets themselves. He filed a groove into the tip of at least one bullet apparently in the hopes of turning it into what Adams called a “dumdum,” a bullet that breaks apart on impact, thereby in theory becoming considerably more deadly. Nicholas modified other bullets by drilling from the tip downward to form “hollow points
.” On impact, hollow-point bullets spread into lethal mushrooms that produce bigger holes and more potent neural disruption than solid rounds. Commercially made hollow-points are the bullets of choice among law-enforcement officers because they produce a lot of damage in the human body but are less likely than solid-point bullets to pass through the intended target and endanger someone else.

  “This guy,” Adams said, “was ready for war.”

  Adams knew where Nicholas got the bullets. The fact his mother bought them was troubling enough. But where does a sixteen-year-old boy learn to modify bullets? Where does he learn to devise combat slings, silencers, and even brass catchers?

  No one can know exactly how he learned it all because Nicholas won’t say. But the fact that a child can acquire so much lethal knowledge should surprise no one who is acquainted with America’s gun culture and the manufacturers, marketers, writers, and others in the so-called gun aftermarket who make knowledge about how to succeed at murder so readily available to anyone willing to thumb to the back of a gun magazine or take a weekend stroll through the nearest gun show.

  Homicide, or rather the homicide fantasy, is the engine that drives America’s fascination with guns. Target shooters spend hour after hour firing into human silhouettes. Practical shooting competitions held nationwide test civilian competitors’ ability to hit targets after leaping from a car. Occasionally such meets conclude in an explosive finale, with entrants firing away at a distant target consisting of dynamite and a gasoline-filled barrel. In this milieu, guns used in grisly crimes actually wind up gaining popularity. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, sales of the otherwise undistinguished Mannlicher-Carcano rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald soared. Hundreds “were immediately bought by souvenir-seekers who wanted to get the feel of the weapon that had brought down the president,” wrote Robert Sherrill in The Saturday Night Special Even the murder of schoolchildren boosts sales. After Patrick Edward Purdy opened fire on a schoolyard in Stockton with his AKS, a semiautomatic version of the now-infamous AK-47, sales of the gun and its knockoffs boomed. Prices quadrupled, to $1,500. Guns Unlimited felt the surge in demand. “I didn’t sell an AK until Stockton in California; then everybody wanted one,” said James S. Dick, the owner of Guns Unlimited, in a deposition.