Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

by Erik Larson

  Far from adapting to the changing mood, the NRA continued its shift to the right. In 1993, a hard-right faction headed by Neal Knox, a former NRA executive who heads his own firearms lobbying group, further consolidated its hold over the NRA’s board and helped win a seat on the board for Harlon Carter’s widow, Maryann Carter. The board already included such hard-liners as Robert K. Brown, cofounder of Paladin Press and publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine, but Maryann Carter’s election symbolized a return to first principles. No gun controls; no compromise. The “New” NRA seemed a reincarnation of the old NRA of Harlon Carter’s day.

  The NRA went on the offensive. It saw in the shifting national mood an opportunity to raise money and membership by sounding an especially urgent alarm. A four-page ad inserted in gun magazines showed President Bill Clinton and Sarah Brady shaking hands and on the verge of an embrace. “If you still need convincing reasons to guard your guns,” the ad said, “here’s a couple.” Striking a familiar note of hysteria, the ad cried: “All conditions are ripe for 1993 to be the worst year for gun owners in American history. No holds are barred. No one’s guns are safe. No one’s hunting is protected. No one’s ammunition is off limits. No one’s firearms freedoms are secure.”

  It is a mistake, however, to think of the NRA as one uniform block of hard-right, pro-gun zealots. A survey by Louis Harris in 1993 found that of those NRA members captured in the sample, 59 percent supported registration of handguns and 49 percent favored limiting handgun purchases to one a month.

  Why this division in attitude between the leadership and the ranks? And how does the NRA manage to avoid blowing apart from internal pressures?

  For one thing, turnover among the rank and file is high. In the 1992 membership drive, for example, the NRA actually recruited more than one million new members, but lost more than half a million. Such turnover helps account for why the hard-core faction is able to retain control, despite a far more moderate member pool. For under the bylaws of the NRA, only members who have maintained their membership for five years in a row, or who have acquired a life membership, are permitted to vote in elections of board members. Thus only a small percentage of members are eligible to vote. And a small percentage of these ever bother to use the privilege. Those who do vote tend to be the most ardent of the NRA’s Constitution-thumpers. They field slates of hard-line candidates in each board election and campaign aggressively to see that these candidates win.

  To mollify the nonvoting ranks, the NRA provides a broad array of practical services. NRA-certified instructors provide shooting courses and teach gun safety to adults and kids. Celebrated hunters tour the nation conducting NRA hunting seminars. The organization runs shooting camps for kids and for advanced shooters hoping for a berth on the U.S. Olympic shooting team. It helps shooting clubs establish skeet ranges and provides grants to affiliated state shooting associations.

  The NRA of political legend is a relatively small group of insiders who control the NRA’s propaganda and lobbying apparatus and adhere to what is at heart a radical, Libertarian political orthodoxy—yet cloak their beliefs in familiar images that evoke mainstream American values and history. Eagles abound in NRA literature. The NRA cap bears an eagle. The NRA’s gun-safety program is named Eddie Eagle. The NRA’s famous bulletins, crafted to rouse the membership to write their legislators in response to some immediate threat, are called Minuteman Alerts. NRA executives lace their remarks and columns with allusions to the American Revolution, patriotism, and frontier history. At the NRA’s 1993 annual meeting in Nashville, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told the crowd, “You know, a couple of hundred years ago a group of citizen-patriots met at a bridge—Concord Bridge. You are no different from them. Because every day somebody still has to go to that bridge and stand there to defend freedom.”

  During the same annual gathering, a John Wayne impersonator, Gene Howard, addressed a separate meeting of the NRA’s board. He wore a red cowboy shirt, brown leather vest, and a blue kerchief—tied at his neck in John Wayne fashion—and recited two of his own poems. One, titled “Do You Want My Gun,” reprised Cold War themes:

  Today the majority of us are not politically correct

  And what do the liberals want us to put in check?

  That’s right, our guns, they want us to turn them in.

  For as long as we have them socialism cannot win. …

  Curiously, Howard then shifted battlefields and identified the NRA cause as nothing less than a fight to restore religion to America:

  For today freedom of religion is no longer a right,

  But a battle ground for which we must fight.

  So if you ask me for my gun, the answer is no!

  Try to take it, and if there’s a hell, you’ll know.

  Central to the NRA’s rhetoric is opposition to the American media—both the press and the entertainment media—which the leadership perceives as antigun. In his Nashville speech, Wayne La-Pierre called the news media “a force that dwarfs any political power or social tyrant that ever before existed on this planet.” In a column in the June 1993 American Rifleman, NRA president Robert K. Corbin called the offending media “thought police” and warned such media “can unwittingly be manipulated by hidden, far-more-sinister forces.”

  In 1993 the association launched a formal assault on television violence, joining a broad popular attack that culminated early in the year in a network decision to air content warnings before especially violent shows. The NRA’s attack, however, contained a curious twist. In testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, NRA lobbyist Susan R. Lamson complained that violent television shows unfairly stigmatized guns and gun owners. “This steady diet of stereotypes coupled with gratuitous criminal violence provokes a widespread bigotry against law-abiding gun owners and fuels the drive for restrictions that impact the law-abiding.”

  The media—and I include here the gun press—bear at least equal responsibility for nurturing firearms violence in America. Gun writers, TV and movie producers, and the daily press directly and indirectly stoke demand for exotic firearms and accessories and orchestrate the bloodthirsty mood that infuses the gun culture.

  The gun writers know what their readers want. The newsletter Gun Tests routinely rates the penetration power of handguns and ammunition the way Consumer Reports compares new cars. American Handgunner’s 1992 “Combat Annual” reviewed six new high-caliber revolvers, calling them “The Ultimate Manstoppers!” Regular issues of the magazine are full of tales of combat tactics and police shoot-outs, part of a running series by Massad Ayoob, the magazine’s star reporter. “Gory True Story,” teased the cover of the October 1991 issue. “REAL-LIFE TERMINATOR! Soaking up bullet after bullet, a cop-killing PCP freak just won’t die! Massad Ayoob’s chilling account on page 70.”

  Gun writers often skirt the gory reality of gunshot injury by driving euphemism to new heights, deftly avoiding the words kill, murder, and death, using instead such etymological eunuchs as knockdown, stopping power, and—this is my favorite—double-tap, meaning to shoot a guy twice. (Double Tap also happens to be the name of a Virginia Beach gun store, whose sign features a black human silhouette with two red holes over the heart.)

  To the gun press, no firearm is unworthy of praise, not even the Saturday night specials made by the now defunct RG Industries, one of which was used by John Hinckley when he shot James Brady in the head. In its “Combat Annual” American Handgunner included a defense of RG’s guns written by Mark Moritz, special projects editor. Moritz, who noted that his first gun was an RG, tested a .22-caliber RG revolver against an expensive Smith & Wesson .22, comparing their performance in both head and body shots.

  The RG was a little slower.

  However, Moritz wrote, “even out of the box we are only talking about two-tenths of a second for multiple headshots at the relatively long range of seven yards.”

  Moritz won’t win any awards for sensitivity in journalism. Early on in the story, in an angry de
nunciation of the “slimebucket” lawyers who sued RG Industries out of business after the Reagan-Brady shootings, he wrote: “When John Hinckley shot James Brady, with an RG .22 revolver, his wife, Sarah, head spokesnut at Handgun Control, Inc., sued RG. She was offended that her husband was shot with a cheap, low-powered gun. I guess she wanted him to be shot with an expensive, high-powered gun.”

  A writer for American Survival Guide even had nice things to say about S.W. Daniel’s Ladies’ Home Companion shotgun, the gun the Maryland state police ballistics expert refused even to test-fire. “When we first came across the Ladies’ Home Companion at a large gun show earlier this year, we found it a highly interesting and unique firearm,” the author wrote. He never commented on the inappropriate name of the weapon. The gun’s heavy trigger pull, he wrote, “makes the LHC a very safe gun.”

  The Cobray M-11/9, Nicholas Elliot’s gun, gets its share of praise too. The Gun Digest Book of Assault Weapons included a chapter on the pistol and its heritage. The author described it as “a plinker’s delight and the bane of all tin cans, milk jugs, clay pigeons and other inanimate objects.” He saw its primary practical value as being home defense. “Appearance alone should cause most burglars and intruders to consider instant surrender if brought before its muzzle.”

  In the closing paragraphs, the writer waxed nostalgic: “It is nice to know the Ingram family of submachine guns still is living and well. Because of their use on television and in the movies, they are justifiably famous.”

  America’s entertainment media provide the last ingredients to the perverse and lethal roux that sustains our gun culture. Today’s TV producers and movie directors have not only adopted and amplified the elemental messages of frontier myth—in particular the notion that only a gun can set you free—but so deified guns as to promote the use and proliferation of specific kinds of weapons. Just as McQ promoted the Ingram, so too Dirty Harry promoted the Smith & Wesson Model 29, and “Miami Vice”—in addition to also promoting the Ingram line—such assault weapons as the Uzi and Bren 10. Dr. Park Dietz, the La Jolla forensic psychiatrist, studied the effect of “Miami Vice” on gun prices and demand and found that the appearance of the Bren 10 in the hands of Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) in the early episodes of the show immediately boosted demand for the weapon. Dietz has argued that “Miami Vice” by itself “was the major determinant of assault-gun fashion for the 1980s.”

  Dr. Dietz told me he believes America’s news and entertainment media—its action movies, “reality” shows, news broadcasts, novels, and newspapers—play a far greater role in stimulating the country’s bloodlust than any other source, including underculture publishers like Paladin Press. “Nothing evil or disgusting known to man lacks a guidebook,” he told me. “But it’s not only Paladin producing them. Today Hollywood studios market more widely a more graphic version for the illiterate than Paladin would be capable of generating or selling. Whereas ten years ago someone wanting to know how to more effectively rob a bank or kill with poison or booby-trap a crack house would have to consult a more experienced offender or go to a library or bookstore, today they need merely turn on HBO. And so a lower intellectual grade of offender has been given access to what only those who could read or communicate had available in the past. That’s not Paladin’s doing. That’s Hollywood’s doing.”

  Clearly, the role of movies and television in stimulating violence can never be quantified. Their impact, however, seems obvious. Consider how the phrase “Make my day” migrated from the movie Dirty Harry to car bumpers from coast to coast, even to a presidential speech, and, in slightly altered form, to the dialogue in a Disney “Duck Tales” cartoon. Recall too how sales of the Ingram submachine guns boomed after McQ, how Dirty Harry jolted sales of the Smith & Wesson Model 29. Add to this the American Psychological Association’s estimate that by the time a child finishes elementary school he will have watched eight thousand murders on television.

  Early in 1993 I again visited the Frederick County gun show and, while loitering at a booth offering sawed-off shotguns, silencers, and submachine guns (including a MAC-10 for $595), listened in as a young boy peppered the dealer with questions. The image was pure Rockwell, but with a rather dark contemporary twist. The boy wore a baseball cap with the beak lifted high off his forehead. He had freckles and ruddy cheeks, and glasses that had slipped a bit down his nose. His jacket was new, and too big. Instead of trying out the stethoscope of some kindly Rockwellian doctor, he caressed the smooth metal finish of a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. He paused before a Barrett Firearms .50-caliber sniper rifle, which reared above the table on its bipod barrel rest. This was the gun Jim Moore had offered to show me in Las Vegas.

  “Is this the same gun they used in the movie?” the boy asked the dealer.

  “Right,” the dealer said. “The Navy SEALs.”

  The boy touched the rifle. “He used this to shoot through a building,” the boy said with the kind of reverence once reserved for home-run baseballs.

  “You shoot this at a building, it’ll take off a pretty good piece,” the dealer agreed.

  The boy pointed at the powerful scope mounted on the rifle. “And he used this to see through the building.”

  The dealer kept a straight face.

  The power of the entertainment media in fostering the appeal of guns became especially clear to me one afternoon when I and my daughters visited a video store in hopes of renting Peter Pan. My two-and-a-half-year-old was immediately distracted by an almost life-size cardboard cutout of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in their Lethal Weapon roles, with Mel Gibson’s arm and his trademark Beretta extended into space. My daughter closed her hands around the Beretta, then pulled away, making her hands into the shape of a gun. She held them out before her in a position astonishingly like the isosceles combat stance used by police and their TV counterparts and, while imitating as best she could the sound of a gun, fired two pretend shots at her older sister. This was sibling rivalry, American style.

  Our movies and TV shows do far more damage than simply boosting the appeal of weapons, however. They teach a uniquely American lesson: when a real man has a problem, he gets his gun. He slaps in a clip, he squints grimly into the hot noon sun, then does what he’s gotta do. The training begins early. In the summer of ’92, for example, I watched a TV commercial for the Super Soaker water gun, then the rage among pint-size assassins. The commercial offered a chilling parallel to the kind of real-life revenge killings carried out every day in the streets of America’s inner cities:

  Two nerdy boys show up for a pool party at the home of a snooty preppy girl named Buffy. She shuts the door in their faces.

  They return, however, this time dressed in black suit jackets, white shirts, black ties, black fedoras, and of course dark glasses, exactly like the Blues Brothers as portrayed by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, except that in place of black slacks the boys wear gaudy swim trunks. One boy solemnly opens a briefcase. His friend reaches in and pulls out the Super Soaker. “Oh, Buffeeee,” he calls in a mocking, nasal voice. She turns. He fires. Buffy is so shocked she spills her glass of punch over her face and torso.

  The punch, of course, is dark red.

  It was this lesson, above all, that Nicholas Elliot absorbed: when all else fails, maybe a gun can solve your problem.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  NICHOLAS

  TWO DIFFERENT TEACHERS TOLD LORA FARLEY that her mother, Karen, was either tending to a wounded teacher or comforting a teacher who had been chased. Both scenarios seemed plausible to her. That’s the kind of woman her mother was, always giving and always getting involved. “I was like, ‘Well, that sounds right too. I can see her doing both of them, but I don’t know how she could do it at the same time.’ ”

  Soon afterward, a teacher asked Will and Lora to come out into the hall.

  “And one of my teachers was standing there and she was staring off … like out into where all the trailers were. She like gave me a hug and then they said, ‘Take
them back in the auditorium.’

  “So we went back in the auditorium, and then about ten or twenty minutes later, they came and got us and they took us into Pastor Sweet’s office, and my pastor was there.” (The Farleys were members of a different church but sent their kids to Atlantic Shores.) “They never said that, you know, your mom has been shot or your mom is dead. They just—my pastor was crying, and then, I mean, we just sort of knew what had happened.”

  Sweet was at the hospital waiting as Sam Marino underwent emergency surgery. One of his assistants telephoned him there. “George, you need to get back here right away.”

  “Why?”

  “They found Karen Farley and she’s dead.”

  “She came at you?” Det. Donald Adams asked Nicholas as their conversation proceeded.

  Nicholas nodded.

  “Did she say something to you about the gun?”

  “She did say something, but I didn’t really hear her.”

  “Then what did you do? You didn’t want her to take the gun, so what did you do?”

  “It went off again.”

  “Do you know how many times?”

  “Once, I think. I’m pretty sure once.”

  Adams spent the next few moments trying to pin Nicholas down on exactly what had occurred and in what order. Periodically his mother inserted questions and urged Nicholas to tell the truth.

  “I know I went in there and she wanted the gun,” Nicholas said. “… She was saying something, but I didn’t hear her. She was coming at me and the gun went off.”

  Mrs. Elliot asked impatiently, “You didn’t hear what she was saying?”