Erik Larson - Lethal Passage - The Story of a Gun

The growing list of arrested S.W. Daniel customers included a San Jose man who made machine guns and silencers and distributed them in Mexico; an Aurora, Illinois, man found during a search to possess an arsenal of more than thirty weapons and a large supply of cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines; two Tucson narcotics dealers who had sold two machine guns and three silencers to an ATF agent posing as a Mexican narcotics smuggler; and a federally licensed firearms dealer in Florida found during a search to possess one and a half pounds of uncut cocaine and ninety-four blank Granadian passports. The dealer told the ATF agents a child had found the passports “in the road.” When the agents asked the dealer to open a safe in his closet, he hesitated and asked, “What if there’s something in here other than guns that I don’t want you to find?”

Agents found the cocaine.

“There are literally thousands of persons now in the United States and probably outside the United States who have a fully operable silencer which is not registered to them and which is possessed unlawfully,” wrote Brian C. Leighton, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to prosecute the Daniels, in a pretrial statement. “It was incredibly easy for these people to receive the silencer; they merely had to order the internal-parts kit from SWD and order a tube from one of the many tube distributors—all of whom advertised in Shotgun News .” These were “assassin-type weapons,” he said, and posed “a definite danger to the community.”

As the case approached the trial phase, however, the government found itself compelled to abandon its conspiracy strategy and admit that no law forbade the sale of silencer components or the machine-gun parts as sold by S.W. Daniel. Indeed, federal law expressly excluded silencer parts from ATF regulation. The Daniels pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to pay taxes in the sale of two firearms. They were sentenced to six months’ probation and forced to pay $900 in taxes and fines, but because they had escaped felony charges, they were allowed to retain their Federal Firearms License.

The investigation had not cowed the Daniels. On May 1, 1985, Shotgun News ran an ad placed by Wayne Daniel titled, “Now It’s Happening in AMERICA,” and featuring a large photograph of Hitler and Mussolini. The ad recounted the ATF raid on S.W. Daniel and listed the names and home cities of the agents involved. Wayne referred to them as the “Gestapo” and likened their search to a Nazi search for Polish gun owners in 1939. “The uniforms of this new ‘Gestapo’ may not be taylored [ sic ] and bear the eagle and swastika on the sleeve, rather they choose to wear a business suit or sport jacket and slacks from the racks of a cut-rate department store—but their purpose is the same, they want total control and YOU, as an American citizen, DISARMED!”

The agents named in the ad, among them Earl Taylor, demanded that Daniel retract the advertisement. He refused.

In a handwritten letter he replied: “I am at a complete loss of words perhaps from bending over laughing. No malice was intended by the ad…. It is my opinion that nothing in the ad is anything but the truth, as you know nothing is libelous or slanderous if the truth is published with no malice.”

The agents filed a private libel suit against Wayne Daniel and Snell Publishing, the publisher of Shotgun News. “It wasn’t the fact that he was attacking ATF, because ATF was accustomed to being attacked,” Taylor told me. “It was the fact that he mentioned the ATF agents by name. I was offended by it and so were most of the other agents.”

None of the agents hoped to get rich from the suit, Taylor said. They knew that at the time Wayne Daniel had few personal assets. “It was, by God, to let them know that they couldn’t do that to law-enforcement officers who were doing their mandated duty.”

The court ruled in the agents’ favor and ordered Wayne Daniel to pay each agent $1,000 in damages, a symbolic victory. The court found Snell not liable.

Undaunted, the Daniels branched out into other firearms. They introduced a pistol-grip shotgun with a high-capacity drum magazine and a forward grip and called it the Street-Sweeper, best described as resembling a shotgun version of a tommy gun. “Delivers Twelve Rounds In Less Than Three Seconds!!!!” one ad proclaimed in Shotgun News . “Time for spring cleaning,” the ad continued. “Why try clean-ups with inadequate equipment?? Buy the machine designed to clean thoroughly on the first pass.”

The company’s latest innovation is the Ladies’ Home Companion, apparently intended for use by women to protect themselves and their homes. A variation on the Street-Sweeper, it is just under two feet long, has a twelve-shot revolving drum, and fires a heavy rifle-caliber .45–70 “government” cartridge that causes explosive recoil—yet the gun has only a rear pistol grip and no other handle. A gun dealer submitted the weapon to the Maryland Handgun Roster Board for consideration as a “revolver.” The trigger requires thirty to forty pounds of pressure, according to tests by Don Flohr, a Maryland State Police firearms expert who tests weapons for the board. S.W. Daniel advertised the gun as being “ideal for use in confined spaces,” yet Flohr refused to test-fire it for fear of damaging the backstop to the state’s indoor pistol range. With the degree of understatement common to forensic investigators, Flohr noted that anyone shooting this gun “may be somewhat disturbed by the force of escaping gases, noise, and recoil experienced.”

The board ruled the gun had no valid use, thus making it one of the precious few handguns awful enough to be banned for sale in Maryland. An official with the Maryland board described the gun as “a sick joke.”

I would have liked to ask Sylvia and Wayne why they seemed hell-bent on skirting firearms laws, but neither returned the many calls I made—and the faxes and overnight letters I mailed—to their Atlanta headquarters. I asked Earl Taylor whether the Daniels were driven in their corporate antics by some kind of Second Amendment fundamentalism.

“Shit no,” he said. “I think Wayne’s strictly in it for the money. That doesn’t make him a bad guy—he’s a sharp businessman. And Sylvia’s a sharp businesslady.”

Sylvia in particular makes an appealing character for America’s gun lovers—“those assholes” in the NRA, as Taylor put it. “Here’s a woman who’s a manufacturer of a submachine gun. She brings lawsuits against the government all the time for mistreating us gun owners. She’s just a person they can identify with.”

In Towson, Colonel Supenski had me slip on pistol earmuffs and safety glasses, then handed back the Cobray, now fully loaded with a thirty-two-round clip. He invited me to fire away.

I fired slowly at first, trying to accustom myself to the trigger action and the roll of the weapon. The trigger action was uneven, but quick. I fired with abandon, trying to aim at a series of steel man-shaped targets named Pepper Poppers after their inventor. The targets are designed to fall backward when struck by a bullet. The cliff came alive as if a tribe of beetles had suddenly decided to decamp. I downed all four targets and then turned the gun on a loose piece of wood embedded in the earth behind them. Shards blew off in all directions. Shell casings rocketed past me, one striking the rim of my safety glasses and bouncing off my eyebrow. In a matter of seconds I’d used up all thirty-two rounds.

Watching the dirt fly, one can be lulled into believing this is, after all, just fun and games. I wanted to fire off another clip; hell, I wanted to “rock and roll,” the gun culture’s euphemism for firing a machine gun in full auto. This was fun. Remote destruction is a dynamite rush.