Erik Larson - Lethal Passage - The Story of a Gun

Acquiring the bullets, however, proved no great challenge for Nicholas. His mother bought them. Nicholas had told her that a friend and his father had invited him to go target shooting at a local shooting range, according to Detective Adams. They would pay all the range fees and supply the guns; all Nicholas had to do was provide the cartridges. The cartridges, Nicholas specified, had to be nine-millimeter. Mrs. Elliot was so concerned that he make friends and have a little fun in his life that she obliged. She had no idea he owned his own gun, or that he had other plans for the bullets.

Immediately after the shootings ATF agents arrested Williams and charged him with making a straw-man purchase. He was promptly tried and served thirteen months in prison. During the trial the federal prosecutor asked him, “What would ever possess someone who’s thirty-six, thirty-seven years old to arrange for a fifteen-year-old young man to get a weapon like that?”

What no federal authority ever bothered to ask, however, is what would possess Guns Unlimited to allow this sale to be made, given the apparent level of Nicholas’s involvement.

ON A BRILLIANT MORNING IN JUNE 1992, I paid a visit to Guns Unlimited. I had arranged to meet its manager, Mike Dick, at the store at nine. His full name was J. Michael Dick and he was the son of the store’s founder and owner, James S. Dick, who by then had limited his gun-dealing to sales at weekend gun shows.

My drive had begun an hour earlier in Virginia Beach, on an expressway that took me past metropolitan Norfolk, then plunged under the Elizabeth River. From the highway Norfolk looked prosperous, with a perimeter of high glass buildings, a brand-new hotel, and a festive riverside development similar to Baltimore’s Harborplace. But I had been downtown several times before and knew that urban pressures had turned this portion of Norfolk into a Potemkin village. Two blocks in from the city’s gleaming rim, life seemed to stop. Abandoned buildings, some boarded, some just empty, lined block after block. The streets were clean, however. There were no piles of litter, no plumes of broken glass, and no people, just a clean desolation like that of a city awaiting a hurricane.

As I traveled, the landscape gradually softened. Brittle urban architecture gave way to suburbs, then to cool green countryside. From time to time I spotted the giant cranes of shipyards and cargo wharves along the distant blue band of the Roads. I had expected Carrollton to be a neat little Southern town of stores and a church or two arrayed along a clearly demarcated central avenue. The Carrollton I found, however, consisted primarily of a small shopping plaza on the north side of Route 17.

Guns Unlimited occupied one of the plaza’s seven retail establishments, which were arrayed along a cinder-block rectangle fronted with a hot, white-gravel parking lot. A BP gas station and convenience store occupied the western end of the lot. A poster in the window of the video store immediately to the right of Guns Unlimited advertised a movie called Mobsters ; the poster consisted mainly of eight stylized bullet holes. The only other car in the parking lot was a black-and-white Ford Mustang belonging to the local sheriff’s department. The deputy glanced my way now and then, before wandering into the convenience store. As it happens, he too was waiting for Guns Unlimited to open. He had heard about a new kind of ammunition and wanted to ask about it. He was a frequent browser at the store, the clerks would later tell me—one of that class of shooter who finds guns and everything about them infinitely compelling. He was welcome, they said; it was always nice to have a patrol car parked outside as a deterrent against the daylight gun-shop robberies that as of 1992 had become a frequent and often lethal fact of life in the gun trade.

Mike Dick and his father held two of the nation’s 245,000 firearms-dealer licenses, and two of the 7,500 licenses issued to residents of Virginia alone, where at the time of our meeting gun controls outside the major cities were virtually nonexistent. The lack of regulation probably traced its roots to 1776 when Virginia became the first colony to adopt a bill of rights, which included the declaration that a “well regulated Militia, composed of the body of the People, trained to Arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defense of a free state.” By the time Nicholas acquired his gun, Virginia’s enthusiasm for firearms had turned the state into a massive shopping mall for gun traffickers from the North. A Baltimore police detective described Virginia to me this way: “It’s the only place I know where you can go get gas, diapers, and a gun at the same time.” As one Guns Unlimited clerk put it, during a court deposition, Virginia was “Second Amendment” country.

A thick printout of Virginia’s licensed firearms dealers, which I bought from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ disclosure branch, captured this penchant for mixing gun peddling with other pursuits. The list included Capt. Mike’s Seafood, Ray’s Used Cars, Dale’s Exxon & Grocery, Miss Molly’s Inn, Miracle Chimney Sweep, the Capitol Cafe, Forbes Window Co., Stallard’s Shoe Shop, Jenning’s Music Co., Bucks Barber Shop, Glasgow Video, the Portsmouth-Norfolk chapter of the Izaak Walton League, and Camp Sequoya for Girls in Abingdon. Some of the business names listed in the printout were tantalizing in and of themselves, such as Boys Noisy Toys, The Gunrunner, Gut Pile Guns, and, my favorite, Life Support Systems of Norfolk.

Dick was late, but two of his clerks arrived and invited me and the sheriff’s deputy inside. The shop was small, no larger than a suburban living room, with display cases arranged in a U shape and a central table containing miscellaneous accessories and special “safety” ammunition for use in home defense, including the Glaser “safety” round, a bullet that ruptures on impact and scatters a multitude of tiny steel balls through whomever it strikes. One medical examiner, writing in the Journal of Forensic Sciences , reported on the mysterious X ray he had made of the skull of a suicide victim. Instead of finding one or two bits of metal, he saw dozens scattered through the dead man’s brain like stars. The manufacturer calls the bullet a safety round in the belief that its pellets are less likely to pass through bodies and walls to injure bystanders on the other side. At up to $3 a cartridge, Glaser safety rounds are not for practice.

The store was a fortress. The Dicks had embedded steel “tank traps” in the sidewalk out front, this to prevent the recurrence of what has now become a fairly routine, if hardly subtle, means of burglarizing the gun stores of America: the use of trucks to crash through the front wall of the store. The Dicks learned the value of tank traps a few years ago when a thief backed a dump truck into the display windows of Guns Unlimited, then climbed out and stole dozens of handguns. An alarm system now guarded the place at night. The front door had been reinforced with steel. Steel herringbone grates covered the inside surfaces of the two large plate-glass windows. A big Pepsi machine stood against the grate just inside the door as a barrier to anyone hoping to cut through the glass to reach the door locks. As a last defense, the two clerks wore large-bore handguns strapped to their hips, one a revolver, the other a black auto-loading pistol. One clerk, dressed in black and wearing tinted glasses, told me he and his partner were careful to stand at different points in the shop so that no one could get the drop on them simultaneously. He untacked a brief news clipping from the bulletin board behind him and proudly handed it to me. The item reported how just that week a Portsmouth gun-shop owner had shot and killed a would-be robber. No charges were filed.