From: lvc@cbnews.cb.att.com (Larry Cipriani)
Subject: The Story of a Gun by Erik Larson - part 1 of 8 or so
Organization: Ideology Busters, Inc.
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 03:31:55 GMT
Keywords: atlantic, anti-gun baloney

This was posted to the Internet firearms-politics
mailing list by: Rob <C08926RC@WUVMD.Wustl.Edu>

--

From The Atlantic, January 1993


THE STORY OF A GUN
The Maker, The Dealer, The Murderer: Inside The Out-Of-Control
World Of American Firearms

By Erik Larson

"After 60,000 deaths from firearms use over the past two years, America
is in a gun crisis.  Yet gun laws remain weak, gunmakers continue to
 promote killing power, and gun dealers accept no responsibility for
the criminal use of what they sell"

On December 16, 1988, Nicholas Elliot, barely sixteen, walked into the
Atlantic Shores Christian School, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with a
semi-automatic handgun hidden in his backpack.  By midmorning a forty-
one-year-old teacher had been shot dead, and another teacher, struck by
two nine-millemeter bullets, was extraordinarily lucky to be alive.  Two
other teachers narrowly escaped Nicholas Elliot's bullets.  One found
herself running a zigzag pattern through the school yard as Nicholas
fired round after round at her back.  The other, a man who tackled
Nicholas and in the process saved the lives of a roomful of crying and
praying teenagers, felt a bullet breeze past his head.
   In a nation accustomed to multiple murders, the shootings received
little out-of-state coverage.  But the story of how Nicholas wound up
firing away on the grounds of a peaceful suburban school says a great
deal about America's gun crisis.  Nicholas in effect carried with him
the good wishes of a gun culture whose institutions and mores have
helped make commonplace in America the things he did that morning.
   A none-of-my-business attitude permeates the firearms distribution
chain from production to final sale, allowing gunmakers and gun marketers
to promote the killing power of their weapons while disavowing any
responsibility for their use in crime.  Nicholas carred a gun that
should never by any reasonable standard have been a mass-market product.
He acquired the gun from a federally licensed dealer, using a means
that puts thousands of guns into the hands of illegal users each year,
yet that existing federal gun-trade regulations do much to encourage.
His story describes a de facto conspiracy of gun dealers, manufacturers,
marketers, writers, and federal regulators which makes guns - even more
powerful guns, and laser sights, silencer-ready barrels, folding stocks,
exploding bullets, and flame-thrower shotgun rounds - all too easy to
come by and virtually assures their eventual use in the bedrooms, alleys,
and school yards of America.
                        * * * *
   I am not opposed to guns per se, not even handguns, provided that
the owners acknowledge the responsibility conferred by ownership.  When
I see rural road signs perforated with large-diameter holes, I realize
that this responsibility is not universally acknowledged.  I routinely
ask the parents of my daughters' playmates if they own guns and, if so,
how they store them.  If they store them loaded, even in a locked
cabinet, my children do not play at their homes.  I can appreciate the
lethal appeal of weapons and the fine craftsmanship evident in such
premium handguns as the Colt Python and, yes, the Smith & Wesson Model
29 used by Dirty Harry.  When I go to gun shows, as I do in my new
capacity as a federally licensed firearms dealer, I am drawn, as are
most of the browsers around me, to the guns spread so invitingly across
the exhibitors' tables - especially the notorious weapons, the AK-47s,
Mac-11s, and pistol-grop Mossbergs.  I recognize, too, that membership
in America's gun culture occurs along a continuum, from collectors
who buy non-firing replicas to inner-city gunslingers willing to kill
for a fancy jacket.
   In writing this article I deliberately avoided including the pre-
dictably angry voices of traditional pro- and anti-gun forces, such as
the National Rifle Association and the Violence Policy Center, in
Washington, D.C., which occupy opposing poles in the debate.  Where
my view run counter to those of the NRA is in my belief that people
should be allowed to acquire guns only after going through procedures
at least as rigorous as those involved in getting a driver's license.
As the laws are now written, a blind man can buy a gun.
   America is currently in the midst of a gun crisis that can no
longer be considered just a manifestation of the pioneer spirit;
instead, it has become a costly global embarrassment.  That a crisis
does exist should be well beyond dispute by now, given the bleak
statistics on gunshot death and damage - yet these statistics,
capable of kindling outrage in a stone, have failed to impress America's
gun industry and the gun culture that supports it.
   Over the past two years firearms have killed 60,000 Americans, more
than the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.  Handguns
account for 22,000 deaths a year.  In 1991, well before the Los Angeles
riots, the guns of Los Angeles County alone killed or wounded 8,050 -
thirteen times the number of U.S. casualties in the Persian Gulf War,
according to a survey by the Los Angeles Times.  Handguns terrorize far
more people that they kill: Department of Justice statistics show that
every twenty-four hours handgun-wielding assailants rape thirty-three
women, rob 575 people, and assault another 1,116.
   A relatively new phenomenon, originating in the 1980s, is the
appearance of young children on the list of urban gunshot casualties.
In 1987 a team of researchers from the UCLA School of Medicine and
King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles found that King/Drew hadn't
admitted a single child under ten for gunshot wounds before 1980.  From
1980 to 1987 the center admitted thirty-four.  The study, published in
the American Journal of Diseases of Children, included a macabre table
of wounds and complications which hinted at the true horror of gunshot
injuries. - a horror spared us in daily news coverage, which devotes
little space to the merely wounded.  A five-year-old lost a hand.  A
three-year-old, shot in the rectum, endured a colostomy.  Other children
on the list lost fingers, eyes, and brain tissue; at least one - an
eight-year-old girl - was consigned to an institution for the rest of
her life.  These children were shot by grandfathers, cousins, friends,
robbers, snipers, and - in a particularly cruel twist - by gang members
seeking only to exact revenge on an elder sibling.
   Despite the carnage, guns continue to proliferate.  The nation began
arming itself in earnest in the roaring sixties, amid race riots and
assassinations.  From 1967 to 1968, the two most tumultuous years, the
number of handguns made available for sale to civilians in the United
States rose by 50 percent - some 802,000 pistols and revolvers - to
2.4 million, the greatest single annual leap in American history.  As
of 1989 there were 66.7 million handguns (and 200 million firearms of
all kinds) in circulation in the United States.
   If these guns were controlled by a legion of sober adults, we'd have
far less to worry about.  One study of 11,000 teenagers in ten states
found that 41 percent of the boys and 21 percent of the girls said they
could obtain a handgun whenever they wished.  A University of North
Carolina study of adolescents in suburban and rural communities in the
Southeast found that nine percent of the boys actually owned a handgun,
despite federal laws prohibiting anyone under twenty-one from buying one.
Boys typically received their first firearm - usually a shotgun or a
rifle, but seven percent of the time a handgun - at the age of twelve
and a half, but more than a fifth of this juvenile militia received
their first guns around the age of ten.
   Increasingly, you don't need to own a gun or be the intended target
of someone else's gun to get shot.  As guns have proliferated, the rate
at which bystanders are wounded and killed has soared.  In 1985 stray
bullets killed four New Yorkers; in 1990 they killed forty.
   Gun merchants and hobbyists steadfastly protest that guns aren't the
problem and that even if they were, gun ownership is explicitly endorsed
by the Second Amendment to the Constitution - the much cited right-to-
bear-arms clause - and is therefore as much a part of the American way
as, say, voting.  A comparison of international homicide statistics
proves that guns do indeed set America apart from the rest of the
developed world.
   In 1987 America's civilian guns were used to murder 3,187 young men
aged fifteen to twenty-four, accounting for three fourths of the annual
homicide rate of 21.9 per 100,000 people.
   In Canada only seventeen young men were murdered with firearms, for
an overal rate of 2.9 per 100,000.
   In Japan, with 0.5 homicides per 100,000 people, gunshot homicides
totaled eight - as many as New York City police officers encounter on
a single robust weekend.
   Mounting evidence suggests that the mere presence of a gun can lead
to injury or death.  An especially damning kind of data is just now
becoming available and is certain to make its way into some of the growing
number of lawsuits that seek to make the gun industry accountable for
firearms injuries and deaths.  In 1989, rather late in the computer
revolution, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) was finally
able to say which gun manufacturers turned up most often in trace requests.
The company whose handguns were traced most often from January of 1990
to December of 1991 was the giant Smith & Wesson.
   However, when the frequency of traces is considered in proportion to
each company's production, a tiny Atlanta company, S.W.Daniel, Inc., shows
a tracing rate far higher.  By 1989 S.W.Daniel had produced some 60,500
handguns and an untold number of accessories, including silencers and
machine-gun kits.  Among the guns it produced was Nicholas Elliot's
weapon, the Cobray M-11/9, which it fondly advertised as "The gun that
made the 80s roar."
   Condemned by the police, reviled even by those who sell it, the gun
has been remarkably controversial ever since its creation as a cheap,
reliable submachine gun meant specifically for close military combat.
How that gun went on to become a readily available consumer product -
something S.W.Daniel once even gave away free in a monthly contest -
provides a clear example of the culture of nonresponsibility prevailing
in America's firearms industry; it is but one example of how this com-
mercial ethos governed the gun's progress from conception to its use as
a murder weapon in a Virginia Beach classroom.
   "The reality that bothers me is there is no self-control, no self-
policing, in the gun industry iteslf," says Colonel Leonard Supenski, of
the Baltimore County Police Department, a nationally recognized firearms
expert who early last year testified in a pathbreaking liability suit
stemming from Nicholas Elliot's rampage.  "The premise seems to be that
if they've got the right to do something, then that's the right thing
to do."

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