Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun
Erik Larson
Acclaim for
ERIK LARSON’S
LETHAL PASSAGE
“Larson creates one of the most readable anti-gun treatises in years.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Shocking … compelling … Lethal Passage is a perfect blend of reporting and storytelling.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Larson touches on all aspects of the gun issue in this country.… There is a feeling in America that perhaps enough lives finally have been terminated or forever changed by the pull of a trigger. That something real must be done. Erik Larson gives great voice to that feeling.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“By tracing the path of a firearm that is worthless for hunting or target practice, we see how our nation’s laws have fallen out of sync with modern life.… Erik Larson shows us just what fearful legacy our national self-image is leaving our young.”
—Dallas Morning News
ERIK LARSON
LETHAL PASSAGE
Erik Larson writes for the front page of the Wall Street Journal. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of The Naked Consumer. He lives with his wife and their two children in Baltimore, Maryland.
First Vintage Books Edition, January 1995
Copyright © 1994, 1995 by Erik Larson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. First published in hardcover in slightly different form by Crown Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1994.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Crown edition as follows:
Larson, Erik.
Lethal passage: how the travels of a single handgun expose the roots of America’s gun crisis / by Erik Larson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Gun control—United States. 2. Firearms—Social aspects—United States. 3. Murder—Virginia—Virginia Beach—Case studies. 4. Elliot, Nicholas Walden Herman. 5. Murderers—Virginia—Virginia Beach—Biography. I. Title.
HV7436.L37 1994
364.1′523’9875551—dc20 93-34560
eISBN: 978-0-307-80331-3
v3.1
For all children who have
faced a gun
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER TWO NICHOLAS
CHAPTER THREE THE LETHAL LANDSCAPE
CHAPTER FOUR NICHOLAS
CHAPTER FIVE THE GUN
CHAPTER SIX NICHOLAS
CHAPTER SEVEN THE PURCHASE
CHAPTER EIGHT THE DEALER
CHAPTER NINE NICHOLAS
CHAPTER TEN THE ENFORCERS
CHAPTER ELEVEN NICHOLAS
CHAPTER TWELVE THE CULTURE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN NICHOLAS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE NEW TYRANNY
CODA
AFTERWORD TO THE VINTAGE EDITION
SOURCE NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The essential American soul is hard, isolate,
stoic, and a killer.
—D. H. LAWRENCE
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
ON A BITTER, COLD DECEMBER MORNING, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into the Atlantic Shores Christian School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with a semiautomatic handgun and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked into his backpack. His name was Nicholas Elliot. By midmorning, a forty-one-year-old teacher had been shot dead, and another teacher, struck by two nine-millimeter bullets fired at point-blank range, was extraordinarily lucky to be alive. Two other teachers narrowly escaped Nicholas’s bullets. One found herself running a zigzag pattern through the schoolyard as Nicholas fired round after round at her back. The other, a man who tackled Nicholas and saved the lives of a roomful of crying and praying teenagers, felt a bullet breeze past his head.
In a nation accustomed to murder in large multiples, the shootings received little out-of-state coverage. A single homicide barely rates mention beside the events at Stockton and San Ysidro, two names that ring of casual mass violence the way the names of great battlefields ring of valor. But the story of how that gun wound up in Nicholas’s backpack, how the gun came to exist at all, constitutes a cultural detective story that tells a great deal about the roots of America’s gun crisis. Nicholas in effect carried with him the good wishes of an industry and a culture whose institutions and mores have helped make the things he did that morning so commonplace in America.
Nicholas carried a gun—the Cobray M-11/9—that by any reasonable standard should never have become a mass-consumer 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. This dealer was a “good” dealer, yet sold numerous weapons to traffickers and killers, raising a fundamental question of whether the costs imposed on the rest of us even by supposedly honest dealers are simply too high for society to bear. Moreover, Nicholas carried with him a cultural bloodlust fed by marketers and their close allies in the gun press who routinely play to America’s homicide fantasy and stoke our widespread belief in the gun as problem-solver.
None of this, of course, absolves Nicholas of his own responsibility for what occurred at Atlantic Shores, nor does it absolve society at large of its responsibility for the mass disenfranchisement of America’s underclass, in particular young black men. Clearly, individual responsibility and socioeconomic tension are the tectonic plates that shape crime. As one gun buff proposed to me, half in jest, the way to reduce crime is to buy back guns not with cash, as many cities have tried, but with jobs.
What follows, however, is not so much the story of Nicholas Elliot, but rather of his gun and its travels. I set out to trace his weapon from the moment its design was conceived to its use at Atlantic Shores as a way to explore how guns migrate from the so-called legitimate gun-distribution network to the hands of killers, robbers, and inner-city gangsters. Every gun used in crime starts out in that network, but somewhere along the way gets diverted. But where and how? These questions get lost amid the daily reports of shootings and the numbing tallies of lives lost each year. Pick up a copy of a major newspaper and you see story after story about gunshot death and injury, but you rarely read where the gun came from or how it was acquired. The absence is understandable. Although television cop shows would have us believe otherwise, it takes a lot of effort for the police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to trace the origins of a gun, largely because of obstacles deliberately inserted into the process by federal law. When a crime has just occurred—that is, when the news is fresh and most marketable—no one can know for sure exactly how the gun reached the shooter. The shooter himself may not know how many others handled the gun before it came into his possession. Some guns simply cannot be traced. By the time the police do learn where and how a gun originated, the shooting is already old news. Yet by tracing the migration of guns, one comes readily and vividly to understand where the nation’s current patchwork of gun controls have gone astray, and how easily they could be fixed to the increase
d satisfaction of gun owners and gun opponents alike.
I chose a single gun, used in a single homicide—not even a terribly lurid homicide—primarily as a means of cutting through the rhetoric of extremists on both sides of the gun debate. Guns are a subject that too often divides America into warring camps, even though the beliefs of the great, moderate mass of Americans, whom we too readily classify in combat taxonomy as pro-gun and antigun, gun nut and gun hater, simply aren’t that deeply opposed. Somewhere along the line, extremists on both sides succeeded in shaping the debate so that no one has a choice but to leap into a trench and start firing away with whatever ammunition has been piled near at hand, be it distorted statistics or empty slogans. (My favorite: “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”) The two camps have more in common than not: they both want to make sure that guns only wind up in the hands of stalwart, responsible citizens.
Why, then, is it so easy for the bad guys to get guns?
As I followed Nicholas Elliot’s gun, I quickly found that a journey along its path was a journey also through America’s larger gun culture. In the course of one year I injected myself as deeply as possible into that culture. I acquired a federal gun-dealer’s license, not to buy and sell guns but rather to see how easily the license could be acquired and, as a side benefit, to gain access to places and publications that might otherwise be off-limits. Along the way I learned to appreciate the pure hell-raising fun of shooting, and how the fun can obscure the monumental dangers inherent in possessing a gun of any kind. I learned too that the world of guns is marked by peculiar ironies and juxtapositions, and odd little mysteries: people who aren’t quite what they seem, secret agendas, unconscionable gaps in firearms laws. I discovered, for example, a little-known federal program that allows convicted felons, explicitly forbidden by federal law from buying guns, to petition the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to win back permission to do so. I learned too that no federal agency is empowered to oversee the design and manufacture of firearms and investigate safety defects. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall of toy guns, just not real ones.
I visited dozens of gun shows, always a novel experience, given the number of private citizens one encounters walking around with guns slung over their backs and FOR SALE signs stuck in the barrels of weapons they hope to sell. I wanted at first merely to find dealers who were selling the Cobray and its predecessor guns, but I quickly found that gun shows opened a clear window into the gun culture. They demonstrate in a vivid way the sheer volume of guns available for sale in America, and how readily those guns change hands. I interviewed scores of shooting enthusiasts; I spoke too with many individuals who had been shot, either in the course of a crime or by accident. One evening I found myself a guest at a dinner in Smyrna, Georgia, thrown by the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association, where the door prizes were ammo boxes full of .38 Special ammunition and the raffle prizes were guns.
Time and again I encountered a none-of-my-business attitude that permeates the firearms distribution chain from production to end sale, and that allows gunmakers and marketers to promote the killing power of their weapons while disavowing any responsibility for their use in crime.
Mostly, I discovered that the story of Nicholas Elliot’s gun was the story also of the forces that infuse the gun culture. It describes a de facto conspiracy of gun dealers, manufacturers, marketers, gun writers, and federal regulators that makes guns—ever 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 schoolyards of America.
Reach out, the culture cries, and kill someone.
CHAPTER TWO
NICHOLAS
THE NAME VIRGINIA BEACH MAY CONJURE weathered cottages set among rippled dunes, but the city has far more in common with places like Ocean City, Maryland, and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Rental houses, motels, and seasonal apartments jam the Atlantic coastline. Tract developments stretch westward, spaced by mini-malls and shopping plazas of the kind anchored by discount hardware stores. The sprawl of concrete and plywood has erased the city’s borders, leaving a tightly entwined ganglion of six cities, the others being Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Norfolk, Newport News, and Hampton. Together they occupy a swath of metropolitan terrain larger in geographic expanse than Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore combined and share many of the same big-city problems, including widespread drug abuse, gang warfare, troubled schools, and the ever-increasing incidence of gunshot injury and death. Virginia Beach alone is home to 428 federally licensed gun dealers, 30 percent more than Baltimore even though Baltimore’s population is 60 percent larger.
Mapmakers, loath to tease apart the six cities, identify the area collectively as Hampton Roads, the name of the shipping channel that links the James River with Chesapeake Bay and the ocean beyond. The Roads, as local disc jockeys call the region, no doubt ranked high on the former Soviet Union’s list of American targets most worthy of nuclear obliteration. The region in and around Hampton Roads comprises a good chunk of America’s military-industrial complex, including Langley Air Force Base, Fort Eustis, the U.S. Naval Station at Norfolk, the Newport News shipyard, and the U.S. Naval Weapons Station on the York River. Virginia Beach, which occupies the eastern rim of Hampton Roads, is itself home to the Army’s Fort Story, the Camp Pendleton Naval Amphibious Base, and the Oceana Naval Air Station. Life here is textured by the roar of fighter planes and the thumping applause of giant helicopters. Where there is water, there are fighting ships, pale gray in the noon sun, spiky black in backlit silhouette.
The second most influential force here is the Baptist Church. Branches seem to sprout every few blocks or so in simple frame houses and soaring concrete towers. As in many cities now around the country and particularly in the South, the churches in Hampton Roads provide more than spiritual solace. They offer parents a sheltered alternative to the harsh and at times profoundly dangerous conditions that exist now in so many urban public schools. The Atlantic Shores Baptist Church in the Kempsville Road district of Virginia Beach, a suburban expanse of closely packed tract homes, is one of the largest churches in Hampton Roads, with four thousand official members and seventeen hundred who show up at church each Sunday. By the church’s own estimate it has the third-largest congregation in the Roads.
The church itself is a sturdy if austere structure, with a concrete spire that each evening casts a long swordlike shadow deep into the shopping plaza across the street. The church school, the Atlantic Shores Christian School, offers fully accredited elementary, middle, and high-school programs and draws many children of the faculty of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network University, located nearby on the Centerville Turnpike. The school consists of permanent and portable classrooms arrayed around a courtyard. As of December 16, 1988, it had five hundred students, of whom only twenty-three were black, and seemed as sheltered a place as one could possibly find. Shakedowns, beatings, gunplay, the stuff of a contemporary urban public-school education—all this occurred elsewhere. “As far as I know, we’d never even had a fistfight before,” said George Sweet, senior pastor of the church and president of the school.
Every school, of course, has its tensions and petty rivalries among students. Every school has its loners and outcasts who don’t fit the woof and weave of school culture. One such student at Atlantic Shores was Nicholas Elliot—to be exact, Nicholas Walden Herman Elliot—a lean, gangly boy who lived in Norfolk’s Campostella neighborhood. Campostella is a black community of neat, tree-lined streets separated from the bulk of Norfolk by the Elizabeth River. He lived with his mother in a small, green frame house in a block of similarly styled houses.
The fact Nicholas was black would by itself have kept him from readily blending in with the other students at Atlantic Shores, although school officials and students insist the school did its best to make its black student
s feel welcome. In Nicholas’s case, his color amplified a gulf that would have existed anyway. He had dyslexia, a learning disability that is difficult to diagnose yet terribly efficient at undermining the self-esteem of children, who must endure its constant interference in such basic functions as reading and writing. A Virginia Beach psychiatrist, Dr. Erwin D. Sax, examined Nicholas on May 5, 1989, and found he possessed “borderline to low-average” intelligence. Another psychiatrist, Dr. Duncan S. Wallace, would later testify that Nicholas had a mental age of twelve or thirteen and exhibited what he called a schizoid personality disorder: “A lack of feeling, a lack of sensitivity to other people.… It leads you to a very isolated, shy, withdrawn sort of life situation.”
Nicholas had no close friends, just glancing school-hall relationships. Race, according to Nicholas, had indeed proved a powerful dividing line. He told Det. Donald Adams, a Virginia Beach homicide investigator, how the other students would pick on him. “They called me racial names and were like racial to me, and they punched me and hit me.”
The detective, a youthful-looking man of middle height with a mustache and an easy manner, tried hard to make Nicholas feel comfortable during his interrogation. He got him a Sprite to drink. He called his mother and had her join them—a mistake, as it happens, for her anger and sorrow would soon distort the interview and make it virtually impossible for the detective to get a clear sense of what had occurred an hour before. It would be the only detailed, publicly available statement Nicholas would make about what he had done.
The worst antagonist, according to Nicholas, was Billy Cutter. The name is my invention, although Billy’s true identity would not escape any student at Atlantic Shores. Billy was an abrasive white boy who seemed to vex everyone, not just Nicholas. The two shared many of the same classes. At times they seemed to be friends, at times the worst kind of enemies. “Like fire and ice,” as Rev. Mr. Sweet put it.
