Erik Larson - Lethal Passage - The Story of a Gun

Williams went to jail. As far as federal law was concerned, however, Guns Unlimited did nothing wrong when it sold the Cobray to Williams, even under such obviously suspicious circumstances. Williams had shown the appropriate identification and had filled out form 4473 properly, dutifully writing “no” after every background question on the form.

No one thought to investigate Guns Unlimited, not even after the negligence suit filed by the family of Karen Farley yielded a judgment against the dealership early in 1992.

“We’re always looking for, and sensitive to, violations of federal law, regardless of who may be the individual or entity involved,” Rowley told me. “In this case, no, we did not go back and reinvestigate. Nothing that came up during the investigation of Williams pointed to wrongdoing on the part of Guns Unlimited.”

But clear evidence that a dealer willfully, knowingly broke federal firearms laws can be hard to come by, said David Troy, special agent in charge of the Falls Church division and Rowley’s boss.

“We don’t make very many dealer cases,” Troy said. “Not because we can’t catch them. There just aren’t many dealers who are really knowingly and willfully violating the law. But what you do have is this: you have a lot of dealers who are satisfying the letter of the law when they sell the gun, regardless of how suspicious the sale might look to a reasonable person. But they’re not culpable under the law for that sale.”

Troy decries the unimpeded proliferation of guns, but cautions that America’s gun crisis has deeper, more intractable roots. “The fact there are guns out there is not in itself inherently bad, because a lot of people who have guns never do anything wrong with them. The problem is there are so many people out there who want to get a gun and use it in an illegal manner. If there weren’t so damn many firearms out there, it would make things a little bit better. But we’re talking shades of gray, here. If we had only fifty million guns instead of two hundred million, would we have less violent crime in the United States? Probably not. Because fifty million is still a hell of a lot of firearms. The point is, there are so many weapons available in the United States, and so easily obtained through legal or illegal channels, that anyone who wants a firearm can get one. Therefore, you have a hell of a lot of people who are willing to use them in a criminal manner who can get their hands on them without any exertion whatsoever.”

Troy thinks something fundamental changed in American culture to make the nation more tolerant of guns and gun violence. “I don’t know why it’s accepted the way it is. Maybe it’s like anything else. You get used to it over a period of time. If the country went from a thousand homicides to twenty-five thousand in one year, we’d have a revolution on our hands. But it’s gradually built up to where we do have twenty-five thousand homicides every year. It’s taken four or five generations to get there, and people have gotten used to the idea. It’s an alarming thing but it’s not a statistic that makes anyone do anything on a grand scale. It’s a cultural thing, a value system situation.

“Guns have become so common, so acceptable, that kids know them the way you and I used to know cars. When I was a teenager, I could name every car by looking at it. I could say that’s a ’58 Ford, that’s a ’59 Chevy. Kids today can name guns. They know them by looking at them. They can pick them out just like teenagers were able to pick out cars twenty-five years ago.”

Nicholas Elliot possessed this skill. But how did he come by it? How does America’s gun culture foster this awareness and our tolerance of gun violence? Is tolerance even the right word, or have we now, in a sense, cultivated a taste for gunplay and developed the infrastructure to satisfy it?

WHEN NICHOLAS ELLIOT LOADED HIS COBRAY before beginning his shooting spree, he selected one of the six clips he had crammed into his backpack. Each clip was long, slender, and gray, with a powerful spring that forced the stacked cartridges upward after the topmost round was fired and stripped away. The clips, also known as magazines or, in gunspeak, simply “mags,” were designed to inject bullets into the Cobray’s receiver much the way a kid’s Pez dispenser keeps presenting new blocks of candy.

To a cynic, God may have seemed suspiciously absent from Atlantic Shores that morning. The faithful, however, believe that God did indeed intercede, at the point where Nicholas chose that first clip. Forensic investigators later test-fired Nicholas’s gun repeatedly, inserting each of the six magazines. All worked perfectly, except that first one. It misfed cartridges to the gun, but only to a point about halfway down the magazine, the fifteen-round point, where it began feeding bullets correctly. By the time Nicholas broke into Hutch Matteson’s class, he had emptied it of roughly fourteen cartridges, many of them ejected unfired as Nicholas cleared jam after jam.

Cutter was splayed on the floor some three or four feet in front of the rest of the students. He watched in terror as Nicholas aimed the gun in his direction. “It looked like he was pulling the trigger,” Cutter recalled. “I wasn’t sure. And then he was messing with the clip.”

The gun had jammed yet again, and now Nicholas stood before Cutter striking and jiggling the clip, trying to get the weapon to work properly.

Still fumbling with the gun, Nicholas took a step backward. He glanced over his left shoulder.

Hutch Matteson charged him, covering the dozen or so feet at a dead run. Nicholas, busy trying to clear the jam, looked startled. He stared directly at Matteson and in that instant managed to get the gun to work.

“I was probably three to four feet away from him as that shot went off,” Matteson recalled. “There was a tremendous ringing in my ear.”

Matteson closed his eyes, then opened them again and continued his charge. He grabbed Nicholas by the shirt and threw him headfirst into an adjacent wall. Nicholas fell, his gun thudding to the floor. Matteson threw his body onto Nicholas and shoved the Cobray aside.

“I don’t have the gun,” Nicholas cried. “I give up.”

Matteson struck him in the head. He stretched Nicholas’s arms out on the floor, grabbed his wrists, and held him pinned under his weight.

“What in the world would make you want to do anything like this?” Matteson screamed.

“They hate me. They make fun of me. They hit me.”

“Who hit you?”

Nicholas named Billy Cutter.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Matteson said.

As Matteson held Nicholas pinned to the floor, waiting for help, he heard Nicholas list the names of other people he had planned to shoot that morning.

Rev. George Sweet, senior pastor at Atlantic Shores and president of the school, was sitting in his office when he heard someone cry, “He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun.” Suddenly there was a lot of commotion, a lot of shouting in the outer office and in the hall. It took him a few moments to make out the words and to appreciate that something grave had occurred. Until then he had been contemplating nothing more momentous than the staff Christmas party set for that night.

Someone led him to Hutch Matteson’s trailer, where he saw Nicholas pinned to the floor. He then crossed to Sam Marino’s trailer and found him lying, literally, in a pool of blood. “He looked at me,” Sweet recalled, “and he said, ‘I’m going to die.’”

The two began praying together.

Police and medical help arrived quickly. An ambulance took Sam Marino to the hospital. Sweet followed in his car.