From: lvc@cbnews.cb.att.com (Larry Cipriani)
Subject: The Story of a Gun by Erik Larson - part 2 of 8 or so
Organization: Ideology Busters, Inc.
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 03:19:22 GMT
Keywords: atlantic, anti-gun baloney

From The Atlantic, January 1993

THE STORY OF A GUN
By Erik Larson

THE GUN
   The Baltimore County police shooting range occupies a wooded compound
just north of Towson, Maryland, where the six-lane strip roads of Baltimore
taper to rolling two-lane highways.  When I visited there recently, I
heard firing the moment I stepped from my car - a sound something like
what you'd get if you put a stethoscope beside a cooking package of
microwave popcorn.  The range was carved from a hillock, leaving a plane
half the size of a football field bordered on one end by an earthen cliff
that keeps stray rounds from bounding north into Baltimore County horse
country.  Supenski arrived carrying a gray attache case, and led me onto
the range.
   Supenski is a big fan of guns and shooting.  "I grew up in the era of
the B westerns," he told me.  "Loved them, still love them.  My single
most prized possession is an original Colt single-action 'cowboy' gun.
Nickel-plated, hand-engraved, ivory stock."
   But he also believes in more stringent controls to force a heightened
level of responsibility in the sale and use of firearms.  This has not
won him many friends among the gunslingers of America.  One pro-gun
group twice threatened to kill him, prompting a mischievous female
assistant to don a bulletproof vest one afternoon before joining him for
lunch.  His is a pragmatic stance.  He worries that irresponsible be-
havior by gun dealers, manufacturers, and the NRA may soon lead to controls
far more restrictive than the simple regulations now sought by proponents
of moderate gun control.
   He considers the Cobray pistol made by S.W.Daniel, and the means by
which Nicholas Elliot came to own it, a case study of irresponsibility
in the gun marketplace, and testified to that effect in the liability
suit.  The Cobray pistol, he argues, serves no useful purpose - certainly
none of the purposes traditionally cited by the gun camp when opposing
new controls.  It's not a hunting gun; most states limit magazine
capacity for hunting to three to five rounds, and the Cobray carries
thirty-two.  Moreover, most states require that hunters use a far higher
caliber.  The gun would never satisfy a target shooter: it is heavy,
clumsy, and prone to rock up and down when fired, and its two-inch barrel
makes it painfully inaccurate.  Nor is it desirable for self-defense.
"About the only thing you can do with it," Supenski says, "is hold it
someplace in front of you, pull the trigger as fast as you can, put as
many bullets out as you can, and hope like hell they'll hit something.
Now, that may be nice on a battlefield.  It isn't so nice in an urban
environment, where that bullet may go through your bedroom into your
child's bedroom or into your neighbor's bedroom, or may go outside and
kill a passerby."
   Supenski opened his attache case.  Inside, against a thick layer of
foam, was a Cobray pistol confiscated during an arrest, and a slender
gray magazine packed with brass none-millemeter cartridges.
   I picked the gun up.  It was a dull black, with none of the gleaming
machine beauty of more expensive weapons.  To picture it, imagine a
black steel ingot with a pistol grip jutting from the center of its
bottom face - not the rear, as in most pistols - and a stubby barrel
protruding from the front.
   It was undeniably if darkly appealing in its lethality.  It was
heavy, about the weight of a newborn baby, and it was cold.  Its grip
had none of the close-fitting contours of more costly guns, like the
Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter that Supenski himself carried.
   I held the Cobray out in front of me with one hand and tried to line
up the sights.  My wrist sagged under its weight.  It looked evil, a
Darth Vader among guns.
   Its reputation matches the look.  A 1989 study by the Cox Newpapers
fount that the pistol ranked fourth among assault guns most often traced
by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.  A study of all guns
confiscated in Detroit from January of 1989 through April of 1990 put
the Cobray first among assault guns, fifth among all models - higher in
the rankings that guns made by Beretta, whose production dwarfs that of
the entire S.W.Daniel company.  The head of the ATF's Atlanta office
estimates that his agents conduct twenty to thirty traces involving
S.W.Daniel guns each month.
   The Cobray and its ancestors became the favorites of drug gangs
nationwide in the 1980s.  A variant on it was used by the Order, a neo-
Nazi group, to kill the Denver talk-show host Alan Berg.  Joseph T.
Wesbecker, the man who walked into a Louisville, Kentucky, printing
plant in 1989 and murdered eight people with an AK-47, had packed two
Cobrays in the gym bag he carried with him to the plant.
   In February of 1990 the gun came up for review by Maryland's Handgun
Roster Board, a body created by legislation whose purpose is to restrict
the sale of "Saturday-night specials."  Cornelius J. Behan, the chief of
the Baltimore County police and a member of the board, found himself forced
by the law's strict guidelines to vote to approve the gun for sale in
Maryland, but he told the board, "It's a terrible killing instrument."
   The gun's direct lineage begins in the 1960s, when Gordon Ingram, an
engineer and gunsmith, set out to design a submachine gun specifically
for use by Latin American Guerillas.  One of Ingram's friends, a Peruvian
emigre hard at work illegally making submachine guns for anti-Castro
exiles training in Costa Rica, told Ingram, in the words of Thomas Nelson,
a respected machine-gun historian, that what his guerilla clients most
wanted in a combat weapon was "small size, to facilitate concealment;
sound suppression, to deter detection; and low cost."
   A note here on terminology: A machine gun fires rifle-caliber bullets;
a submachine gun fires pistol-calibers.  Both are fully automatic, or
"full-auto," weapons, meaning that they continue to fire for as long as
you pull the trigger.  A semi-automatic fires one round per pull.  That
the term "automatic" is sometimes applied to a pistol like the Colt Army
.45 confuses the issue.  In this usage is is short for "automatic reloading,"
which means the gun uses the explosive force of each cartridge to load
and cock itself after each shot.  Such pistols are in fact semi-automatics.
   Ingram succeeded in developing a combat weapon, his M-10, with an
astonishing rate of fire of more than 1,000 rounds per minute, or sixteen
per second - too fast to control, according to technical experts at the
ATF, and thus of little value for anything but mow-'em-down military use.
Ingram and a partner, Mitchel L. WerBell III, a soldier of fortune who
founded a paramilitary training camp outside Atlanta, formed a new
company, Military Armament Corporation, to bring the gun to market.  They
developed plans to build two models of Ingram's gun: for military markets,
the full-auto submachine gun, whose sale would be tightly controlled by
the National Firearms Act, which requires that anyone wishing to buy a
machine gun first submit to an extensive background check; and for
consumers, a semi-automatic version.
   The gun's formal name became the MAC-10, although gun aficionados
would soon come to know it simply as "the Ingram."  It attracted minimal
interest from the U.S. military, but its speed and evil good looks captured
the imagination of Hollywood.  In 1974, in the movie McQ, John Wayne himself
gave the company a welcome burst of publicity, in the process turning the
gun from an obscure novelty into a weapon coveted by gangs and drug rings
across the nation.  Big Lon McQ, a Seattle police detective played by
Wayne, visits the shop of a gun dealer he knows, and is invited to "squeeze
off a burst" with a brand-new weapon.  With obvious reverence the dealer
calls it "the Ingram."
   McQ blasts away, rupturing a trash can filled with water.  The camera
cuts to McQ'S face, his expression one of bemused awe.  McQ looks down
at the gun.  He looks back at the pail.
   "How about that?" the dealer says.  "Those thirty-two slugs came out
in a second and a half."
   Ruggedly, slowly, McQ says, "Yeah."
   "You ever see anything like it?" the dealer asks.
   Just in case anyone in the audience had any doubt about where to buy
this wondrous weapon, Warner Brothers provided a full-screen credit that
read "Special Weapon: Military Armament Corp."
   This enthusiastic bit of advertising wasn't enough to save the company,
however.  It filed for Chapter 11 protection under federal bankruptcy laws
in mid-1975, without ever having produced a consumer Ingram.  Its guns
and other assets were sold at auction, mostly to a group of three investors
who had formed another Atlanta company, RPB Industries.  They, too, planned
to bring Ingram's weapons to full-scale production, but in 1978 sold out
to yet another group of investors, this one headed by Wayne Daniel, the
son of a Georgia minister.

-- 
Larry Cipriani, att!cbvox1!lvc or lvc@cbvox1.att.com
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns