Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER TEN} THE ENFORCERS

GUN AFICIONADOS MAY LIKEN THE BUREAU of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to the Gestapo, but in its relationship to America’s gun dealers it behaves more like an indulgent parent. This is partly the result of concrete restrictions imposed on the bureau by budget and statute, partly of an institutional reluctance to offend its primary source of investigative leads and to provoke the always cantankerous gun lobby—a legacy of the bureau’s near demise in the early years of the Reagan administration at the hands of the National Rifle Association and its powerful allies on Capitol Hill.

In a 1981 congressional hearing, the bureau’s then-director, G. R. Dickerson, defended the bureau, proclaiming to the House Judiciary Committee that the bureau had for the prior two years “focused over ninety-two percent of its enforcement resources on the prevention of violent crime and the pursuit of violent criminals.” ATF had used aggressive, proactive tactics to enforce firearms laws, he said, including undercover stings designed to trap dealers into making illegal sales. The NRA and other members of the gun lobby saw nothing positive in these measures and charged ATF with trampling the constitutional rights of ordinary gun owners. The charge fell on sympathetic ears. In 1981, then-president Ronald Reagan announced his plan to make good on a campaign promise to abolish the ATF.

Today a chastened ATF (rescued at the last minute, as I’ll show, by a most improbable angel, the NRA itself) describes its mission in more modest terms. “There’s been a misconception that we’re in the prevention business,” said Jack Killorin, a former law-enforcement agent who now heads the bureau’s public affairs office. (A plaque on the wall behind his desk identifies him as Jack “Ganja” Killorin, commemorating his role in an ATF raid against a drug dealer.) “We’re not in the prevention business. We’re in the business of catching those people who do wrongful acts, and causing them to be punished, and hopefully finding enough of that to create some deterrence.”

Where once the bureau prided itself on running firearms sting operations, it now describes even its battles against illegal traffickers as a means not so much of halting the proliferation of guns, but of protecting and maintaining the paper trail that tracks a gun from manufacturer to distributor to dealer and finally to first purchaser. “Illegal traffickers in weapons inhibit the effectiveness of the tracing function and must be identified and put out of business,” said a 1992 report from ATF’s divisional office in Detroit. “The integrity of the tracing system must be preserved to ensure that valuable leads continue to be provided to law-enforcement agencies.”

As things stand now, federal gun laws foster a built-in disincentive to rigorous investigation. Gun-purchase records, the most crucial element of the tracing network, remain in the hands of the dealers themselves. When riled, dealers can make the workday lives of ATF agents far more difficult. Good industry relations can mean the difference between merely having to call the dealer on the phone or making a personal visit, a significant bureaucratic obstacle for an undermanned agency. “If it were not for cooperative [dealers],” noted a 1992 report from the bureau’s Detroit office, “ATF’s task in locating and removing illegal firearms sources would be dealt a serious blow.”

All this, however, adds up to a reactive orientation that helps bolster the culture of nonresponsibility in the firearms industry, with the unintended effect of leaving all but the most blatantly crooked dealers free to push the limits of the law.

In fairness, ATF stands in an almost untenable position. It must police the nation’s 245,000 licensed firearms dealers—known in the industry as FFLs, or Federal Firearms Licensees—with only four hundred inspectors, each of whom must also conduct inspections of wineries, liquor distributors, distilleries, breweries, tobacco producers, and the country’s 10,500 explosives users and manufacturers. This ratio of inspectors to licensees is an improvement, by the way, over the rough-and-ready 1960s when only five inspectors faced the daunting task of inspecting the records of one hundred thousand gun dealers.

At the same time, the agency finds itself obliged by law to grant a firearms license to virtually anyone who asks for one, provided the applicant has $30 to cover the licensing fee. In 1990, 34,336 red-blooded Americans applied for an FFL. ATF denied licenses to only 75. Another 1,408 withdrew or abandoned their applications, yielding a combined rejection/withdrawal rate of about 4 percent. If the current rate of licensing continues, the number of FFLs will double through the 1990s to well over half a million licensed weapons dealers, even though the fortunes of domestic arms manufacturers are likely to continue their current decline. Increased competition for the shrinking gun-consumer dollar can only increase the already prevalent tendency among dealers to do only the minimum required by law to keep guns out of the wrong hands.

Depending on one’s stance in the gun debate, the application process is either too stringent or appallingly lax. An applicant doesn’t have to demonstrate any firearms knowledge, not even whether he knows the difference between a revolver and a pistol, a .44 or a .45. It is much harder to get a license to operate a powerboat on the Chesapeake Bay, to become a substitute teacher in New Jersey, or to get a California driver’s license—far, far harder to get a Maryland permit to carry a single handgun or a license to hunt in Maryland’s forests—than it is to get a license that enables you to acquire at wholesale prices thousands of varieties of weapons and have them shipped right to your home. Roughly half the federal firearms licensees don’t maintain a bona fide store, according to ATF, but operate instead out of their homes. Some of these “kitchen-table” dealers sell guns at gun shows, but many don’t deal guns at all; they hold a license simply to buy their guns at cheap wholesale prices. A small but obviously important segment use their licenses to buy guns wholesale for distribution to inner-city arms traffickers.

“We’re not in the business of putting people out of the firearms business,” said Anthony A. Fleming, chief of ATF’s firearms and explosives operations branch, in charge of dealer licensing and inspections. “If people qualify for a firearms license, by law we have to issue them a license.”

But federal law, at least on paper, also insists that anyone who receives a license must actually engage in the business of selling firearms. In practice, however, Fleming concedes there is little ATF can do to compel a licensee to become a legitimate commercial business. “We can’t force him to advertise,” Fleming said. “We can’t say you’ve applied for a license and by the end of two years you have to have at least ten sales. Your retort, immediately, would be, ‘I’m open for business, I’ve got my door open, anybody comes in here I’m ready to sell them a gun.’ There’s nothing we can do about that.”

He added that some licensees who operate from their homes do run sophisticated dealerships. “I’ve seen residential dealers with a better setup and better inventory than a commercial business. And then I’ve gone into commercial places and found only five or six guns in there. You wonder why they’re paying rent. But they’re allowed to have a license and be in the business.”

A look at ATF licensing records can turn up some surprising revelations about who among us are licensed gun dealers. Licensed dealers turn up everywhere, even on the quietest streets in the best neighborhoods. My ATF printout of Maryland dealers identified 334 in Baltimore alone, yet the 1992–93 yellow pages for Greater Baltimore listed only eighteen established dealers and pawnshops. Among the dealers not listed in the phone book were two entities with the intriguing names Make My Day Guns and Shalom Services Company.

A Los Angeles Times reporter, David Freed, acquired the roster of Los Angeles County licensees and found the list included a Chinese baker, a survivalist, a fertility specialist, a school policeman employed by the Los Angeles Unified School District (he listed school offices as his licensed place of business), a man who told Freed he had experienced “multiple personality changes,” and an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (he listed DEA headquarters in Los Angeles). The list also included a former soldier dishonorably discharged from the Army and arrested on burglary and concealed-weapons charges whose licensed premises was a hotel room.

My neighbors may not want to hear this, but on May 15, 1992, I set out to join this none-too-exclusive club and applied for my own Federal Firearms License. The two-page application, ATF form 7, asked which grade license I wanted. There are nine levels, costing from $30 to $3,000, the latter qualifying the holder to import “destructive devices” such as mortars, bazookas, and other weapons with a barrel-bore diameter of half an inch or more. The form asked the same nine questions about my criminal past that appear on form 4473. It also asked what other business would be pursued at my “business location,” in my case, my home. I wrote “communications,” typically a catchall category for journalists, advertisers, writers, and others. It also asked my business hours—I listed ten to five-thirty, Monday through Saturday. The form then asked: “Are the applicant’s business premises open to the general public during these hours?”

I thought about this one. If I ever did get down to actually selling guns, of course I would admit my customers. But they would have to ring the bell first and I would have to be home, but yes—they’d have the run of the place or at least my office, where my FFL is currently openly displayed as per federal regulations. It is taped to my wall, above my official National Rifle Association membership card.

I received my license on June 22, 1992, well within the forty-five days in which ATF is required to accept or deny an application.

No one called to verify my application. No one interviewed me to see if in fact I planned to sell weapons or not. There was no federal requirement that I first check with authorities in Maryland and Baltimore about specific local statutes that might affect my ability to peddle guns in the heart of my manicured, upscale, utterly established Baltimore neighborhood. As far as the federal government was concerned, I was in business and could begin placing orders for as many weapons as I chose. In short, I could supply an urban army with modern, high-powered weapons of state-of-the-art lethality, and ATF wouldn’t know anything about it. The bureau would not know, that is, unless the weapons began turning up during arrests by ATF agents or local police, or unless ATF inspectors conducted a routine compliance audit. Federal law allows ATF to do only one such audit a year of each licensee, unless the agency has a specific investigative reason for doing more.

In one crucial area, federal firearms law explicitly favors gun dealers over consumers. Any consumer who knowingly makes a false statement or representation during a firearms transaction, as Curtis Williams found when he bought a gun for Nicholas Elliot, automatically commits a felony and faces a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to five years. Yet any Federal Firearms Licensee—a dealer, manufacturer, importer, or distributor—who commits the same offense faces a maximum fine of only $1,000 and imprisonment for not more than one year. In short, the consumer commits a felony; the dealer a misdemeanor. The distinction is crucial. A dealer convicted of a mere misdemeanor can still keep his Federal Firearms License; if convicted of a felony, he cannot.

In cases where dealers are suspected of knowingly and willfully selling guns to crooks and traffickers, ATF can be a tenacious, sly, and forceful investigator. The agency is fond of saying that dealers who commit such violations will get caught sooner or later, once the ATF National Tracing Center at Landover, Maryland, detects evidence of their wayward dealings. Indeed, in the 10 percent of crimes where law-enforcement officials actually request a federal trace, the tracing network often proves an effective investigative tool both in solving crimes and for identifying renegade dealers. There is a fundamental problem with this approach, however: by the time the tracing center does get involved, the guns in question have been used in crime, typically serious crime involving assault, homicide, or narcotics peddling. ATF gets another notch in its holster, the illegal dealer is put out of business, but society is left to tend its wounds—grief, disability, surgical bills, lost income, psychic trauma, and the increasingly pervasive feeling that one is not safe in one’s own home.

At times through its history ATF has tried to take a more proactive stance toward regulating the flow of firearms. The agency is immensely proud of the lawmen it counts as its ancestors, in particular Eliot Ness, the legendary commander of “The Untouchables.” Walk into the offices of many senior ATF officials and you’ll find a framed poster from the 1987 movie The Untouchables, which starred Kevin Costner and Sean Connery. The ATF press office provides reporters with a packet of background information on the bureau, including a one-page biography of Ness.

Only by understanding how ATF evolved from a tax-collection agency to the nation’s sole firearms cop can one come to understand the complex relationship between the bureau and the firearms industry, and why no federal entity saw a need to examine Guns Unlimited’s role in the arming of Nicholas Elliot.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms became the nation’s enforcer of federal firearms laws largely by default. ATF traces its roots as far back as 1791, when Congress imposed the first federal tax on distilled spirits, an act that promptly led to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Congress periodically repealed and levied alcohol taxes until 1862, when it created the Office of Internal Revenue and made the tax a formal, permanent part of the government’s income. The office deployed three agents to enforce the law.

On January 16, 1919, the Treasury Department became far more deeply involved in law enforcement when Nebraska cast the last vote necessary to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, banning the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages. The national Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act for Minnesota congressman Andrew J. Volstead, placed responsibility for enforcing the amendment with the commissioner of Internal Revenue because of the department’s prior role as collector of alcohol taxes and enforcer of violations of the alcohol tax laws.

The amendment may have crimped the supply of booze, but it did nothing to diminish America’s thirst. Underworld entrepreneurs throughout the country sought to satisfy demand by building illegal distilleries and saloons. The amendment guaranteed them a large clientele: while it outlawed the production and distribution of booze, it allowed consumers to own, drink, and even buy alcoholic beverages without penalty. Gangs fought each other for control of the underground distilleries and distribution networks and paid a substantial portion of their profits to local officials and police to help protect their interests.

What ATF neglects to tell in its fact sheets and its biographic handout on Eliot Ness is that agents of Treasury’s Prohibition Unit were themselves notoriously corrupt. They received abysmally low salaries, which Robert J. Schoenberg, author of the 1992 biography Mr. Capone, called an “invitation to corruption.” The agents’ behavior heartened the leaders of Chicago’s Prohibition gangs, who found they exhibited, as Schoenberg puts it, “an almost Chicagoan capacity for corruption.”

Eliot Ness urged his supervisors to let him establish a special unit of young agents not yet “bent” by mob money and influence, and in September of 1929 he founded a squad the newspapers would soon begin calling The Untouchables, for their apparent resistance to corruption. Far from shooting it out with bootleggers and walking up mean streets cradling a tommy gun, Ness and his squad used painstaking investigative techniques to pursue the Chicago gangsters, chief among them Alphonse Capone, also known as Scarface. One of their coups was to place a wiretap in a nightclub operated by Al Capone’s brother Raffalo, more commonly known as Ralph.

Like the Wild West heroes who came before him, Ness was largely responsible for his own legend. In a 1957 book called The Untouchables, which became the basis for the TV series starring Robert Stack, Ness played up the dangers of pursuing Al Capone, even though in fact Capone and other gangsters had an overwhelming respect for the damage they would do to their own interests if they ever killed a federal agent. Indeed, Schoenberg writes, Capone explicitly warned his men not to shoot it out with Treasury agents—just to get away, if possible.

The real hero in the pursuit of Al Capone, according to Schoenberg, was an “investigative accountant” named Frank Wilson, an Internal Revenue agent who would later become head of the U.S. Secret Service, another branch of the Treasury Department. Wilson and colleagues doggedly hunted for evidence that Al Capone had failed to pay his income tax. The first step was to prove he even had an income, something Capone had consistently and effectively denied ever receiving. The agents examined some one million checks looking for any hint of money destined for Capone. A breakthrough came when Wilson discovered a ledger confiscated early on in a raid on Capone’s headquarters that had been left to gather dust at the back of a file cabinet at his office.

Prohibition greatly heightened America’s official distaste for guns. Gangsters rubbed each other out on street corners, in front of restaurants, from armored limousines. By the fall of 1925, as mobs in Chicago fought each other for control, the homicide rate in Cook County, Illinois, rose to more than one murder per day, a decidedly modern rate of mutual disposal. For as long as the killing remained in the family, the public was enthralled. Chicago’s gangsters were glamorous celebrities thumbing their noses at a censorious government intent on denying the public its pleasures.

The history of gun violence, however, teaches two important maxims, whose predictive power was demonstrated yet again during the Prohibition wars.

First, violence will always spread beyond boundaries initially found by the public at large to be “acceptable.” That is, gang warfare—or, as today, inner-city feuds between drug dealers—will inevitably expand beyond those boundaries to include bystanders.

Second, guns will always migrate from the hands of their originally intended users to those who value their use in crime. Just as the Ingram, designed for military use, became instead the drug-gang weapon of choice and a ghetto icon, so too the Thompson submachine gun, designed to be a “trench broom” for use in World War I, became instead the favored tool of gangsters throughout the country and an icon of the 1920s. In 1969, long before S.W. Daniel began peddling its Cobray as “the gun that made the eighties roar,” William J. Helmer titled his biography of the Thompson gun The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar. The gangsters’ use of the gun was largely responsible for the passage of the nation’s first-ever federal gun controls in 1934, and thus for expanding the Treasury Department’s law-enforcement responsibilities to include firearms.

The Thompson submachine gun, invented by Gen. John T. Thompson, was built in New York by Auto-Ordnance Corp., founded by Thompson in 1916 with the express purpose of putting the design into production. Like the Ingram, the Thompson submachine gun was initially a failure. The Army did not yet appreciate its value. The gun was too big to be a sidearm, too small for a field rifle, or so went the conventional wisdom of the time. General Thompson, like Gordon Ingram, sought to expand the market for the gun by offering it to consumers, an effort that resulted in some unusual advertising. In a 1922 magazine ad, Auto-Ordnance merged frontier myth with modern firepower, depicting a cowboy in furry chaps and kerchief earnestly firing his tommy gun from the front porch of his ranch house at a group of seven bandits. The text below called the gun “the ideal weapon for the protection of large estates, ranches, plantations, etc.” An article in Army & Navy Journal reported the gun “can be kept in the home as a protection against burglars.”

Critics, however, described the gun in terms strikingly similar to those used by Col. Leonard Supenski in his critique of S.W. Daniel’s Cobray pistol. In 1923, a British firearms expert described the tommy gun as “an arm that is useless for sport, cumbrous for self-defense, and could not serve any honest purpose, but which in the hands of political fanatics might provoke disaster.”

The gun did not initially win many military contracts, but it captured the imagination of the Chicago gangs. The first recorded use of a tommy gun in crime occurred in Chicago on September 25, 1925, when Frank McErlane, a Chicago bootlegger, set out to assassinate a competitor named Spike O’Donnell. Police were stymied by the volume and the orderly arrangement of bullet holes left in a storefront by the attack. McErlane used the gun again just over a week later when he blasted the headquarters of another bootlegger. Here too no one was killed. A few months later, on February 9, 1926, McErlane used the gun again; this time the weapon made front-page headlines. The banner headline in the next morning’s Chicago Tribune read, “Machine Gun Gang Shoots 2.”

That day, Al Capone went to a Chicago hardware store and ordered three.

Capone first used his tommy guns on April 27, 1926, in an attack that would soon become a staple of the gangster-film genre. He and associates set out to kill a bootlegger named James Doherty. Lumbering along in a black, armored Cadillac limousine, Capone caught up with Doherty as he and two other men stepped from a Lincoln and made their way toward one of the many illegal saloons then operating in Chicago. Capone and his gunmen opened fire, killing all three men. They didn’t realize it until later, but they had killed an unintended victim. It was a mistake that would, five years later, prove an important contributor to Capone’s conviction for tax evasion.

One of the dead men proved to be a twenty-six-year-old Illinois state prosecutor named William McSwiggin, known as the “hanging prosecutor” for his aggressive pursuit of gangsters. In response, police raided Capone’s headquarters, seizing the ledgers that Internal Revenue agent Frank Wilson would later discover at the back of a file cabinet and that would provide the first solid evidence of Capone’s income.

The attack triggered an arms race. Capone’s enemy, Hymie Weiss, whose gang controlled the North Side of Chicago, acquired Thompsons and, on September 20, 1926, launched a retaliatory attack against Capone, the most spectacular—if ineffective—attack of the Prohibition era, dubbed the “Siege of Cicero.”

Capone’s headquarters were situated in the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois, some two blocks from the Chicago line. Shortly after one P.M. on September 20, 1926, Capone and his associates were seated in the Hawthorne’s first-floor restaurant, which was packed with other diners. They heard the telltale chatter of a machine gun somewhere down the street, but none of the screams and sounds of shattering glass that tended to accompany that kind of attack. Intrigued, they went to the windows of the restaurant—exactly what Hymie Weiss’s men had intended. That first machine gun was a lure; it was loaded with blanks.

A Capone bodyguard quickly recognized the trap and forced Capone down. As everyone in the restaurant hit the floor, a convoy of ten limousines and touring cars slowly made its way up the street, machine guns and shotguns firing from every window, pumping some one thousand rounds into the room.

No one in the room was hit. Outside, two members of a Louisiana family—the mother and her five-year-old son—were slightly wounded. A minor member of Capone’s gang who had been standing outside the restaurant was nicked by a bullet.

The Thompson submachine gun quickly migrated from Chicago. It turned up next during a gang war in southern Illinois, which even featured dynamite dropped from a biplane. (The bombs never went off.) Philadelphia experienced its first tommy-gun attack on February 25, 1927, New York on July 28, 1928.

The violence became more grotesque, less the “innocent” battlings of bad guys against bad guys.

On February 14, 1929, a Cadillac with a siren and gong pulled up in front of the S.M.C. Cartage Company in Chicago. Two men in police uniforms and two in civilian clothes—one wearing a chinchilla coat—stepped from the car. The officers entered the building and announced a raid, ordering the seven men inside to put their hands up and face the wall. Six of the men had ties to a gang led by George “Bugs” Moran; the seventh was a young optician named Reinhart H. Schwimmer, who had become enthralled with the mob and had stopped by that day for coffee.

The two civilians, each carrying a Thompson, entered next and began firing, instantly cutting down the seven men. For good measure, one of the gunmen then fired from ground level into the tops of their heads. The two gunmen then put their own hands up and were marched back to the car by the two men dressed as policemen.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre marked a change in the public’s willingness to accept gang violence. The brutality of the crime, the fact the men were shot in the back, somehow seemed a violation of criminal etiquette.

As other massacres followed, the revulsion grew. On July 28, 1931, gangster Vincent Coll tried to kill one of Dutch Schultz’s men as he sat in front of a social club on E. 107th Street in New York. The target escaped unharmed, but the attack, quickly dubbed the Baby Massacre, left five children wounded. One, a baby in a baby carriage, later died. Coll may or may not have used a tommy gun, but the gun took the blame anyway.

Within a month, two other New York gun battles killed two girls, one eighteen, the other only five. In the latter, gunfire also killed two policemen and three of the assailants and wounded twelve other people.

Crime seemed poised to overwhelm the country. In 1932, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and murdered. (Capone offered $10,000 for information on who did it.) Killers of all kinds—John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine-Gun Kelly (who contrary to myth never fired a gun in the course of a crime), Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Baby Face Nelson, and “Ma” Barker—rampaged over the countryside. Bonnie Parker, once again demonstrating that penchant of our heroes of violence for promoting their own legends, wrote poetry about her exploits with Clyde. One, titled “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” and released to newspapers by Bonnie’s mother, linked the pair to the mythic outlaws of the Wild West:

Soon after the poem was published, police at last caught up with Bonnie and Clyde and killed them both.

One result of all this mayhem was a host of gangster movies, beginning with the 1930 hit Little Caesar. In 1931 alone, Hollywood made fifty gangster films. And once again myth and reality converged. On October 14, 1931, Edward G. Robinson, who starred in Little Caesar, sat in on Al Capone’s tax evasion trial, which would end three days later and result ultimately in his being sent to a brand-new prison built on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

A more significant result, however, was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which regulated the sale and manufacture of machine guns and other “gangster-type” weapons, such as silencers and sawed-off shotguns, and gave responsibility for enforcement to the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Internal Revenue Service. You could still buy a machine gun, but now you had to register the gun and pay a $200 tax. At the time, this was real money, more than the retail price of a Thompson, which Auto-Ordnance had reduced to $175 in its continuing quest for orders from the U.S. military. The tax remains $200 today, no longer quite the disincentive the law’s crafters meant it to be.

In 1938, Congress passed the next round of federal controls with the Federal Firearms Act, which required the licensing of gun dealers and set the cost of a license at a whopping one dollar. (The National Rifle Association had argued even this was too high and should have been something nominal, say fifteen cents or a quarter.)

The next great spasm of domestic violence took place in the 1960s, with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Charles Whitman’s shooting spree from the top of the University of Texas tower, which killed fourteen people; and the overall unrest that tore the nation’s cities apart in the late 1960s. This time the result was a more comprehensive set of firearms laws, called the Gun Control Act of 1968. It boosted dealer fees to $10 and required that they keep detailed records of incoming and outgoing guns. It also forbade the sale of rifles, shotguns, and handguns to felons and others deemed unfit to own guns. And taking its cue from Lee Harvey Oswald’s mail-order purchase of the rifle he used to kill the president, the law banned mail-order sales of guns directly to individuals. Congress assigned enforcement of the act to the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS, which became the Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms Division.

Law-enforcement agents within the ATFD welcomed their new responsibilities. They were accomplished lawmen with a lot of nitty-gritty, dangerous experience in battling the moonshiners of the South. But officially they were employees of the Internal Revenue Service, the nation’s tax collector. The images clashed. “When our law-enforcement officers were asked who they were, they would say Treasury agents,” said Rex D. Davis, a former director of ATF who at the time was an assistant regional commissioner of the ATFD. In outlying field offices, the agents placed signs on their doors that said Treasury Department. “Our guys didn’t want to be Internal Revenue agents.”

The Gun Control Act greatly expanded the division’s law-enforcement responsibilities. “There’s no question the Gun Control Act of 1968 was like a breath of fresh air,” Davis said. “It gave us a very important law-enforcement jurisdiction, and one that was nationwide as opposed to the moonshine and illicit-liquor enforcement, which was primarily regional, the Southern tier of states.”

When Davis became director in 1970, his “hidden agenda” included separating the ATFD from the IRS. Indeed, the division’s new responsibilities had begun causing something of an image problem for the IRS. When agents participated in raids or became involved in shoot-outs, the headlines inevitably described them as IRS agents, at a time when the IRS was actively promoting the value of voluntary compliance with federal tax laws. On July 1, 1972, the Treasury Department removed the division from the IRS and made it the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. (The bureau would later take to calling itself ATF, dropping the B.) Although most of the agents were delighted, a few were fearful, Davis said. “I think some people had a little trepidation. Really, what we were doing was putting ourselves out in front, and there were probably some people who felt it was nice and safe and cozy being a little thing in a great big place like Internal Revenue.”

Inevitably, the new bureau found itself on a collision course with the National Rifle Association.

By 1972, the NRA was already a formidable foe, but it was wrestling with its own internal schism. In 1968 the NRA’s executive vice president, Gen. Franklin Orth, committed what the association’s hard-liners considered an unpardonable sin. By then, the post of executive vice president had become the most powerful position within the NRA, far more so than the presidency. Orth had dared support, in public, federal gun controls. Not just any controls, moreover, but the Gun Control Act of 1968. The ATFD’s agents may have welcomed the new law, but the NRA’s hard-liners loathed it. And yet Orth, in testimony before a congressional committee debating the proposed legislation, had said no “sane American who calls himself an American” could object to the bill’s elimination of mail-order sales.

Orth was one of the NRA’s old guard, who saw the NRA in more traditional terms as an organization devoted to promoting hunting and hunter safety, protecting hunters’ rights, and protecting the environment. A growing segment of the NRA’s membership, however, wanted the NRA to become a political force and in so doing to become the nation’s primary guardian of the Second Amendment. To these hard-line fundamentalists, led by Harlon Carter, a former head of the U.S. Border Patrol, any gun law was an infringement of the Constitution and was to be opposed without compromise. Gradually, the hard-liners gained influence and, in 1977, at the NRA’s annual meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, won control of the board and elected Harlon Carter to be the new executive vice president. The coup, known within the NRA as the Cincinnati Revolt, set the NRA on the path it still follows today as a relentless opponent of gun control and anyone who supports it. Carter became a hero. “To the NRA faithful,” wrote Osha Gray Davidson in his 1993 book, Under Fire: The NRA & the Battle for Gun Control, “Harlon Carter is Moses, George Washington, and John Wayne rolled into one.”

The NRA chose to attack ATF as a means of diminishing the impact of the newly passed legislation. “That was a well-known strategy in Washington,” Davis said. “If you’re opposed to a law, the way to attack it is to attack the agency which has responsibility for it, and thereby reduce the enforcement of law.”

When Davis became director, he set out at first to try to smooth relations between his agency and the NRA. “I thought it made sense,” he said. “I guess probably what I started out doing was giving them too much credit. I thought that two sides to an issue through dialogue and good-faith efforts could make it a little easier on each other. But I found that not to be true.”

He told the NRA’s new executive vice president, Gen. Maxwell Rich, he would investigate any NRA complaints about his agency and give him a full report. “That didn’t work. Their primary interest as I saw it and as I found out was in criticizing and attacking the credibility of the bureau, rather than trying to reach some accommodation.”

Indeed, to Harlon Carter’s NRA the new bureau was the vilest of enemies. The bureau did little to smooth relations. In March of 1978, for example, ATF agents seized four machine guns and three other weapons from the NRA’s elaborate firearms museum on the first floor of its Washington headquarters, charging the weapons had not been registered in accordance with the National Firearms Act. “We didn’t feel that anybody was above the law,” Davis said. “We saw a clear violation.” The NRA countered that the guns no longer worked and were thus exempt from provisions of the act. A federal judge agreed and ordered the bureau to return the guns. There was more to this raid on NRA headquarters than dispassionate enforcement of federal law. Davis said, with a smile, “I suspect that we would have been a little bit gleeful if we had found something a little bit more severe.”

The NRA kept the pressure on Davis and the bureau. The association routinely attacked the bureau before Congress, depicting its agents as secret police who systematically trampled the rights of ordinary citizens. It cited example after example of what it alleged to be ATF abuses, including the case of Kenyon Ballew, a pressman with The Washington Post, who was shot in the head and paralyzed during an ATF raid on his apartment. The NRA and Gun Owners of America charged that the bureau’s men barged in without reasonable cause and shot an innocent gun owner.

In fact, Ballew possessed many firearms and chose to point one at the raiding party as they entered, prompting a Montgomery County police officer to fire. The bullet struck Ballew in the head. ATF agents seized three hand-grenade casings and a supply of black powder, which together constituted an illegal destructive device. Ballew sued, but lost. The federal court found that the ATF agents “had acted reasonably” and agreed the “three grenades together with the powder seized were in combination both designed and intended to be used as destructive devices.”

The NRA, however, took Ballew, by now in a wheelchair, to its annual meetings and wheeled him onstage as evidence of ATF’s infamous behavior.

Despite these attacks, the bureau felt reasonably safe. When Rex Davis became director, Richard Nixon was still president, and he favored some gun controls. So did Gerald Ford. And so too did Jimmy Carter. At one point, apparently with the blessings of the Carter White House, the Treasury Department invited Rex Davis to design new regulations that would help improve enforcement of the Gun Control Act—whatever regulatory powers Davis felt he would most like to have and that could be instituted without new legislation.

Davis, delighted at the invitation, published his bureau’s proposed new rules, which would have created unique serial numbers for every gun (as things stand now, guns from different manufacturers may have the same serial numbers) and established a central gun-tracing database that would include every step in the travels of every gun up to the last retailer in the chain. The database, however, would not include the names of the gun buyers themselves.

To the NRA, this was tantamount to establishing a national registration system. Outright confiscation of guns would surely follow. “The NRA went ape,” Davis said. The association sent out an emergency plea to its members to write letters of protest. “We got over three hundred thousand pieces of correspondence, of which seven thousand were in favor. We had mailbags in the corridors.”

Nonetheless, ATF persisted and asked Congress for the $10 million the bureau felt it would need to develop the new computer system.

“We took a beating,” Davis said. “Congress not only didn’t give us ten million dollars. They took ten million dollars out of our budget. So they penalized us for having the gall to initiate these programs. Needless to say, the regulations were withdrawn by Treasury, by the Carter administration, with their tails between their legs.”

And ATF was left to cope with $10 million less in its operating budget.

Nonetheless, ATF still had the benefit of an administration that at least in spirit favored gun control. But Carter wouldn’t be president forever.

During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan made it clear where his sympathies lay. He wooed the NRA with a campaign pledge that if elected president, he would abolish the hated bureau.

The NRA and its powerful allies, including Rep. John Dingell of Michigan and Rep. John Ashbrook of Ohio, both members of the NRA’s board of directors, moved in for the kill. The NRA went so far as to produce a TV documentary called It Can Happen Here, alleging ATF abuses. In the film, Representative Dingell appears and says, “If I were to select a jackbooted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick ATF.”

What particularly irked the NRA was ATF’s tactic in the late 1970s of sending agents into gun stores masquerading as illegal buyers to see whether the dealers would sell them guns or suggest that they arrange a straw-man purchase. “We were using those kinds of techniques,” Rex Davis said, “because unscrupulous dealers were then, and are now, a major source for the illegal acquisition of guns.” Other agencies used similar sting techniques, but only ATF seemed to catch the heat. “If the guy was a pharmacist selling illegal narcotics,” Davis said, “nobody would scream at all.”

During a 1980 hearing, ATF defended itself by arguing that it had in fact conducted few operations against dealers. Its new director, G. R. Dickerson, testified, “We often hear that ATF makes a practice of harassing licensed dealers in an attempt to drive them out of business. I point out to the committee in the period July 1, 1979, through April 30, 1980… we had over eight thousand seven hundred firearms investigations. Only one hundred and sixty-two involved licensed dealers.”

His testimony confirmed the fears of members of the gun-control camp, who charged that if anything ATF was too soft on dealers. At the same hearing the National Coalition to Ban Handguns presented a survey of 136 licensed gun dealers in New Haven, Connecticut, which found that “more than three-fourths (77.2 percent) of licensees were in direct violation of at least one federal, state, or local law or regulation. Nearly one-half (48.5 percent) were in violation of two or more firearms, tax, or zoning requirements.”

The NRA and its allies kept up the pressure. By September 1981 the NRA seemed assured of achieving the destruction of the bureau. That month, at a meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in New Orleans, President Reagan announced that he planned to fire ATF’s firearms enforcement agents and dissolve the bureau.

The NRA was delighted; Reagan’s audience was not.

Reagan had misjudged the respect accorded ATF and its firearms tracing services by other law-enforcement agencies. A slap against ATF was a slap against all law enforcement.

The administration backpedaled. Reagan still promised to dismantle ATF, but proposed now to shift the firearms agents from the bureau to the Secret Service. Everyone seemed to like this idea, including ATF agents, who, although they would have preferred an outright transfer to the Department of Justice, looked forward to joining a bona fide law-enforcement team and shedding the last vestiges of ATF’s tax-collecting past.

The gun lobby now balked at the idea.

At a February 1982 hearing before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Representative Dingell reiterated his “jackboot” statement word for word. Of ATF, he said, “I think they are evil.” He warned, however, that shifting the bureau’s agents to the Secret Service “is a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” He charged that “the transfer of BATF to other agencies affords only the certainty that other agencies will be contaminated by the kind of people and behavior we have seen on the part of BATF.”

The Gun Owners of America testified that the proposed transfer might make things worse than they already were “if the extraordinary powers available to the Secret Service were ever made available to the one thousand former firearms agents at BATF.”

Neal Knox, head of the NRA’s chief lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, testified that most of the “provisions of the Gun Control Act are purely regulatory in nature; they should be administered by a regulatory agency and not by a criminal law-enforcement organization.” The NRA, he said, believed ATF should remain a freestanding agency under the Treasury Department.

The NRA’s turnabout prompted Rep. William J. Hughes, chairing a House hearing on May 4, 1982, to chide, “In the confusion, the National Rifle Association, apparently with a straight but somewhat reddened face, has been able to publicly change its position and is now in the unlikely role of supporting the continuation of BATF, on the grounds that the Secret Service, to which most of BATF’s functions were to be transferred, might actually take the functions seriously and not be so easy to intimidate,”

The NRA, according to author Osha Davidson, suddenly saw that the shift to the Secret Service would indeed enhance ATF’s prestige. “The NRA realized,” he writes, “that it wouldn’t be able to call Secret Service agents ‘jackbooted fascists’ and get away with it.”

The bureau survived, but the dangers of aggressive, proactive investigation were imprinted forever in its institutional memory. “Some of the things we did were probably not the best techniques,” said Bernard La Forest, a veteran agent and special agent in charge of ATF’s Detroit office. The bureau, he said, took its lesson to heart: “Before you conduct an investigation of a licensed dealer, you better have some pretty good proof that there’s a high probability he’s engaged in some type of illegal activity.”

Throughout the 1980s, the NRA continued its fight to restrict ATF’s powers over dealers. In May of 1986, again with the help of powerful congressional allies, most notably Sen. James McClure of Idaho and Rep. Harold Volkmer of Missouri, the NRA succeeded in muscling through the McClure-Volkmer Act, also known as the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act. A more appropriate title might have been the Gun Dealers’ Protection Act. The bill banned the sale and manufacture of new and hitherto unregistered machine guns, thanks to a last-minute amendment added by Representative Hughes, but it eliminated a previous requirement that gun dealers keep records on ammunition sales. It also explicitly barred any central registry of dealer records, limited dealer inspections to once a year and only after advance notice, allowed the interstate sales of rifles and shotguns, gave private gun owners more leeway to sell guns without first acquiring a dealer’s license, and, perhaps most important in terms of understanding ATF’s treatment of Guns Unlimited, required prosecutors to prove that dealers charged with violating firearms laws did so “willfully.”

It was this bill too that reduced to a misdemeanor the penalty for dealers found to have violated record-keeping rules, while retaining the felony charge for consumers who did likewise.

Before the act was finally passed, Representative Volkmer called it “the second most important step in the history of American gun owners. The first was the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” Representative Hughes said the bill “would elevate gun dealers to a special level of privilege never before seen in the law.”

ATF got the message. First came Congress’s punitive $10-million budget cut, then ATF’s brush with dissolution, and finally McClure-Volkmer. “I don’t know what kind of syndrome it is when you get batted over the head repeatedly,” Rex Davis told me, “but it certainly turns your attention away from the direction you were going.”

In following years, ATF used its mandate as the nation’s firearms cop to concentrate more and more resources on mainstream investigations of narcotics gangs, terrorist groups, and motorcycle gangs. From 1988 through 1992, ATF’s law-enforcement divisions ranked narcotics crime as their top priority, followed by violent crime committed with firearms. “These are safe activities, and sexy activities in terms of public perception,” Davis said. “With dealers, they’ve had their hands slapped several different ways. So it’s a natural reaction.”

ATF remains less than enthusiastic about policing the vast dealer network. From 1975 through 1990, ATF revoked an average of ten licenses a year. The low was in 1978, with none, the high in 1986, with twenty-seven. This rate seems downright skimpy given the sheer numbers of licenses and the rate of violations discovered whenever ATF’s skeleton crew of inspectors does its routine compliance audits. In 1990, for example, inspectors conducted 8,471 of these routine inspections; they found violations in 90 percent of them.

But revocation can be a tortuous process, as ATF found when in 1989 it at last moved to revoke the license of a Michigan dealer doing business as Al’s Loan Office. In arresting and prosecuting Curtis Williams, the man who accompanied Nicholas Elliot to Guns Unlimited, the bureau acted with breathtaking speed; in contrast, its dealings with Al’s Loan show remarkable forbearance.

In ten inspections, beginning in 1976, ATF inspectors found repeated violations of ATF record-keeping regulations, many of them serious and the kind that could have put guns into the hands of felons and traffickers. Al’s Loan had failed to keep accurate records in a separate bound book of all its firearm acquisitions and sales. It had failed to make sure that customers properly completed form 4473. Moreover, the inspectors found, Al’s Loan had sold guns to people prohibited by federal law from buying them.

Far from whisking officials of Al’s Loan off to jail, ATF inspectors patiently sat down with them to instruct them in the proper recordkeeping procedures, as they did following inspections in 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1981. After a 1982 inspection, the bureau at last flexed some muscle. It wrote the pawnshop an admonitory letter, setting out the dealer’s violations. The letter, the first phase in the carefully choreographed dance ATF must go through in trying to revoke a dealer’s license, warned Al’s Loan that “your license is contingent on your compliance with law and regulations and that continued violations may lead to revocation of your license.”

ATF agents inspected Al’s records again in 1983 and again found the same kinds of violations. Again ATF wrote an admonitory letter.

The violations continued. Three more inspections took place, in 1985, 1987, and 1988, each followed by another admonitory letter.

At last ATF lost patience. On March 31, 1989, thirteen years after inspectors first discovered violations at Al’s Loan, the bureau revoked its license.

The dealer protested. Under provisions governing the revocation process, the dealer requested a hearing before an ATF hearing officer. An attorney for Al’s Loan argued the dealer should be allowed to keep his license because he had cleaned up his records. The attorney then presented a sample. During a recess, however, ATF inspectors examined these records and immediately found violations.

One of the inspectors testified, however, that the records did show signs of an effort to improve; he seemed more than willing to shrug off more than a decade’s worth of violations. Al’s Loan had testified that it had set up a new computer system to help manage its records and had fired employees who failed to keep good records of firearms transactions. “So there are some problems,” the inspector testified, “but the records as presented today do show a decent and sincere attempt by the licensee to try and change his record-keeping system to meet the regulatory requirements.”

The hearing officer was not moved, however, and recommended revocation, concluding: “The licensee was plainly indifferent to the regulatory requirement for conducting his firearms license operations and therefore willfully violated the regulations.”

This recommendation was then passed along for the required review by the ATF regional director responsible for Michigan. The director agreed. The bureau revoked the license effective September 18, 1989.

This time Al’s Loan protested to federal court, where it tried to win an injunction to stop the revocation. The judge, however, argued that Al’s Loan may indeed have improved its records, but for the twelve years preceding the supposed improvement had “displayed flagrant, willful indifference” to the ATF rules. In his May 7, 1990, opinion affirming the revocation, the judge wrote: “Selling and pawning firearms is a privilege granted by the federal government and is not a right of any person…. Furthermore, the Court notes that we live in a very violent society where careless and violent individuals use guns to kill and maim innocent people. Those who distribute guns must be held accountable as they are the first step in preventing lawless individuals from obtaining guns.”

At last Al’s Loan was out of the firearms business—but the process had taken fifteen years.

ATF publicly argues that the vast majority of its FFLs are honest, law-abiding citizens, and that only “one or two” go bad. Even if true, the bureau’s argument would hardly be comforting given the speed with which guns migrate. A single illicit dealer can put hundreds, perhaps thousands, of weapons into the hands of would-be killers before the guns are detected by the ATF tracing network.

The fact is, many dealers do operate illegally. In fiscal 1991, ATF considered licensees to be suspects in 139 law-enforcement investigations.

The case of one Baltimore dealer demonstrates both how much damage a single maverick dealer can do, and how little time it takes for guns diverted from the legitimate distribution network to be used in crime.

On July 1, 1989, ATF issued a federal firearms license to Carroll L. Brown, then a twenty-eight-year-old postal worker and father of three kids. Initially, at least, Brown seemed intent on operating a formal, commercial gun store, going so far as to rent commercial space in an office building in Reisterstown, Maryland. A few months later, however, he stopped paying rent and broke his lease. By April the following year he had begun selling high-powered handguns from his home and from his car, without asking buyers to fill out required state and federal documentation. He advertised his wares in at least six classified ads in the Baltimore Sun. (In 1993, the Sun, recognizing the dangers of undocumented private sales of handguns, stopped accepting classified ads for firearms.)

The guns of Carroll Brown quickly fell into the wrong hands. Beginning September 20, 1990, Baltimore police began discovering Brown’s guns in the course of routine calls and investigations of homicides and drug trafficking. On October 26, Baltimore officers arrested a man wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an unregistered Astra .380 pistol. Det. Richard Young, then a member of Baltimore’s Handgun Enforcement Arrest Team (HEAT), first traced the vest and learned it had been shipped to Brown from an Orlando, Florida, distributor only the day before by the United Parcel Service. The distributor also told Detective Young that it had shipped Brown two guns. The detective next checked with the distributor’s parent company, RSR North of Rochester, New York, and learned it too had shipped guns to Brown—fifteen in all between July and November.

Soon afterward, Baltimore’s HEAT squad and the local ATF office began a joint investigation. An ATF agent compared serial numbers from the RSR shipping invoices with records of guns confiscated during arrests made by Baltimore police. He discovered that one month earlier, on September 20, officers had confiscated a nine-millimeter pistol that had been shipped to Carroll Brown in July. Two weeks later, he found, Baltimore police had seized two more of Brown’s guns, from two suspects arrested for illegal possession of handguns. One suspect, according to a federal affidavit, was a three-time felon.

On November 16, Baltimore detectives investigating a homicide conducted a search of one suspect’s home and recovered a Cobray M-11/9 made by S.W. Daniel and sold by Brown. Five days later, police arrested four other suspects on handgun charges and found three more guns that had been sold by Brown, including another Cobray pistol. One of the guns, a Glock nine-millimeter automatic, had been shipped to Brown by a distributor just five days before. Another arrest one week later yielded another Cobray, this with its serial number obliterated. Technicians were able to restore the number, and police traced this gun also to Brown. It had been shipped to him about six weeks earlier.

On December 10, a man named Melvin King telephoned Brown and, identifying himself as a resident of Richmond, Virginia, asked to buy a Glock. King called Brown twice more over the next two days. On December 13, Brown agreed to meet him and sell him the pistol. Brown told King to come to a shopping plaza located about a mile from Brown’s home.

When King arrived, he found Brown sitting in his 1989 Dodge, listening to a radio scanner capable of picking up police communications. Brown told King to sign what he called a “requisition blank” but told him not to write down that he was from Virginia. Brown agreed to sell King two more Glocks at another meeting they set for one week later.

Melvin King was an ATF agent. On December 20, he arrested Brown on felony charges of violating federal firearms laws. The next day Baltimore police arrested Brown again, this time on state charges. Brown pleaded guilty on March 7, 1991, and on May 31 was sentenced to twenty-one months in federal prison, later reduced to nineteen months.

The guns Brown had sold, however, continued their travels. As of January 1991 police had recovered only a tenth of the 268 handguns he had received from distributors.

Just over a week after his sentencing, at about two A.M. on a lovely spring night, another of Brown’s guns made an appearance on the streets of Baltimore. A drug dealer named Ronnie Hunt had acquired a Glock .40-caliber pistol that Brown had sold to a convicted felon the previous October. Hunt and an associate cornered Sheldean Simon, a member of a local rap group called Murder Inc., and opened fire. Simon drew two nine-millimeter pistols of his own, but faced an onslaught like something from the tommy-gun massacres of the 1920s. Within seconds his opponents fired some seventy rounds of ammunition. Simon fired only once. He died after being struck by two of the forty-four rounds fired from Hunt’s Glock .40.

Brown’s nine-year-old daughter wrote a letter to the court to help her father: “Dear Judge: My daddy is not a bad man. He has been very good to all of us. He does his best to take care of us.” Rev. James Ross, pastor of Nicodemus Baptist Church in Baltimore, wrote to the judge as well, pleading that Brown “was not intentionally trying to break the law, but that he ran his business somewhat haphazardly. He did not commit a crime of violence; he was only trying to provide a secure financial position for his children and wife.”

Soon after the murder of Sheldean Simon, however, Baltimore detective Harry Edgerton told a Sun reporter, “As we speak, people who are out there right now, who are killed or wounded, could be the responsibility of Carroll Brown. In the end, all this gun stuff comes down to one guy who says, ‘I don’t want to follow the rules.’”

Among the guns Brown sold were twenty-seven Cobray pistols of the kind carried by Nicholas Elliot.

On those occasions where ATF does take a proactive rather than merely reactive approach to policing America’s gun dealers, it invariably discovers crooked dealers responsible for diverting thousands of weapons into criminal hands. A classic example of such enforcement, and the kind that ought to be pursued as a matter of routine, is Project Detroit, an ongoing effort by ATF and the Detroit police to trace as many guns as possible.

ATF began the first Project Detroit study with a pool of 2,342 weapons entered into the property room at Detroit police headquarters between January 1989 and April 1990. Common wisdom nurtured by an endless series of TV crime shows and detective novels holds that all weapons can be traced readily, but that is not the case. ATF agents were able to trace only half the weapons in the initial pool. The remainder of the guns had been incorrectly identified by investigators, were too old to be traced (any weapon sold before the Gun Control Act of 1968 is essentially untraceable), had obliterated serial numbers that could not be restored, or could not be traced because of inadvertently or deliberately sloppy record-keeping among licensed dealers.

In its report on this first phase of Project Detroit, the bureau—gun-shy ever since its near demise under Ronald Reagan—was careful to note that high-volume dealers would necessarily experience more traces. It is a truism, indeed, that the bigger the gun dealer’s volume of sales, the more often the guns he sells will be used in homicide, suicide, rape, robbery, assault, and gang warfare. The report said, “Just because an FFL has sold a large number of weapons that were subsequently used in crimes does not necessarily indicate the FFL is intentionally diverting weapons to the criminal element.”

Yet of the five licensed dealers identified most often in the Project Detroit traces, four—including the top three—became the targets of full-scale ATF investigations. The worst offender, according to the report, was Sherman Butler of Sterling Heights, Michigan, near Detroit, whose Sherm’s Guns accounted for twenty-nine traces stemming from a range of crimes that included at least two homicides. Butler’s specialty was the sale of S.W. Daniel Cobrays modified to include a sixteen-inch barrel and shoulder stock, thus qualifying them as long rifles and allowing purchasers to buy them without first having to comply with stricter federal and local handgun regulations. For $125 extra, however, Butler threw in a pistol-length barrel and enough of a pistol frame—a pistol “upper receiver”—to allow buyers to quickly turn their carbines back into semiautomatic pistols.

Next in line, with twenty-seven traces, was Steven Durham, whose All Gun Cleaning Service in Detroit “provided hundreds of firearms to the most visible and most violent narcotics organizations in the Detroit metropolitan area.” Durham persuaded acquaintances to fill out the form 4473s for specific handgun purchases even though these associates never actually bought the guns. Instead Durham simply filed their records and sold the guns to illegal buyers.

Three other federally licensed dealers, as a routine business practice, obliterated the serial numbers on every gun they received from wholesalers. The report estimated that together the three had sold more than three thousand firearms “and that law-enforcement officers will be recovering them in various crimes for years to come.”

In all, Project Detroit led to investigations of thirteen licensed dealers—including six of the top ten in traces—and successful prosecutions against all but three. Two of the three died (one blew himself up while manufacturing hand grenades); the third, whose case was still pending at the time of the report, was a Toledo, Ohio, dealer who allegedly sold cheap .25-caliber Raven pistols to anyone, regardless of age and background. That investigation began after weapons sweeps in Detroit’s public schools turned up an inordinate number of guns traced to him.

Project Detroit also turned up a new and troubling wrinkle in firearms trafficking: the use of counterfeit licenses. To order weapons from a distributor, all the law requires a dealer to do is send a photocopy of his license, freshly signed in ink. The law does not require that the dealer first have his signature notarized or otherwise validated. Nor does it require the firearms distributors who receive these copies to verify the license numbers. Distributors, driven by the profit imperative to seek as many retail outlets as possible, tend to be lax about making sure their customers are bona fide, commercial dealerships. Major manufacturers are far more picky. The same profit imperative drives them to seek out the biggest distributors with the widest reach, characteristics a fly-by-night company is not likely to possess. Smith & Wesson, for example, told me it only accepts new distributors into the fold after dispatching a sales representative to visit their operations and evaluate the quality of their records. At the same time, a company spokesman disavowed any responsibility for the customary practices of the industry. “We’re not in the business of policing the laws or enforcing the laws,” he told me, “other than seeing that we ourselves follow the laws.”

According to Bernard La Forest, the Detroit special agent in charge and author of the Project Detroit report, one licensed dealer altered his license number several times, each time making photocopies. He gave these to associates who used them to order guns for themselves at wholesale prices. “The wholesalers thought they were dealing with eight individual dealers, when in fact it was one guy’s license,” La Forest said.

Any distributor who did find himself moved to check a dealer’s license number would quickly find that once again the age of automation has passed the firearms industry by. No easy mechanism—no 800 telephone line, no computer-accessed data bank—exists to allow quick verification of a dealer’s license number and identity. Likewise, La Forest said, ATF has no effective means of distributing an alert to dealers to watch for licenses known to be counterfeit.

The Project Detroit report failed to note what ought to be the most troubling finding of its underlying investigations: that apparently honest dealers accounted for the remaining one thousand traces, a fact that testifies again to the high costs imposed on the rest of us by even legitimate gun shops. Indeed, of the top ten dealers as ranked by ATF traces, the four who were not investigated by ATF nonetheless accounted for ten to twenty traces each, including traces involving at least four homicides. In all, Project Detroit traced guns sold by legitimate dealers from New York to Alaska and used subsequently in at least two kidnappings, thirty-four homicides, and hundreds of narcotics offenses—this again from only 1,226 seized weapons.

In his introduction to the report, La Forest asked: “What would the results indicate if we had the capability of successfully tracing 10,000 to 15,000 weapons seized by all law enforcement agencies in this metropolitan area?”

What the report also demonstrates is the great value of cumulative information on the guns used in crime and the dealers who sold them. But such information is hard to come by. Until 1989, ATF couldn’t even do a computer search to detail which guns were traced most. Early in 1989, two reporters from the Cox Newspaper chain found that the ATF tracing center in Landover, Maryland, possessed all the information necessary to produce such an analysis, but in hard copy. The reporters gained access to this rich seam of data under the Freedom of Information Act, then hired their own team of clerks, armed them with computers, and moved them into the center where the reporters built their own database. ATF allowed such access on the condition the team use a special computer template that prohibited its hired clerks from punching in the names and addresses of the consumers who owned the guns.

The database provided immediate revelations. For one thing, it put the lie to the NRA claim that assault weapons were not often used in crime. The study revealed a startling increase in the use of assault guns from 1986 to 1989 and found that for traces made between January 1, 1988, and March 27, 1989, assault weapons accounted for 8.1 percent of homicide traces and 30 percent of traces stemming from organized crime investigations (including arrests involving drug cartels, arms traffickers, and terrorist groups). The fourth most commonly traced assault weapon was the S.W. Daniel Cobray.

ATF wasn’t able to provide such information on its own until late in 1989, when its own automated trace system began operating; as of June 1992 the agency was still struggling to rid the system of kinks.

No matter how efficient ATF’s database becomes, however, it will offer only limited help in understanding the use and migration of weapons nationwide. The bureau traces only about 10 percent of guns used in crime. In fiscal 1990 and 1991 the Los Angeles police department and Los Angeles County sheriff asked ATF to conduct only 117 traces, even though in 1991 alone the city had 2,062 homicides. In most investigations involving a crime committed with a gun, police simply do not request a trace. “If they’ve got an armed robber and they’ve also got the gun, they don’t care about the gun,” La Forest said. “When they go to court, they say, ‘This is the gun the guy had.’ The question we want to ask is, ‘Where’d he get the gun?’”

When police or even ATF’s own agents do request gun traces, they often fail to provide the Landover tracing center with precise information. Inaccurate descriptions of seized weapons are common. The problem is especially acute for the Cobray and its look-alike ancestors, the MAC, RPB, and Ingram; it’s not uncommon for a police department to list a seized Cobray as a MAC-10 or even an Uzi. Moreover, the agency requesting the trace often fails to provide accurate information about the crime in which the gun was used. Detroit’s La Forest, for example, believes that easily half the Detroit guns identified as having been confiscated for “weapons violations” were actually seized during narcotics arrests. The weapons charges, he said, are merely the quickest and easiest to record in the bureaucratic process of logging evidence that immediately follows an arrest.

Taken together, the lack of comprehensive data about crime guns, ATF’s ticklish political position, and explicit restrictions on the bureau’s inspections and investigations, all help maintain the unimpeded diversion of guns from legitimate channels to the bad guys. Each in its own way nudged Nicholas Elliot’s Cobray along its deadly path.

Raymond Rowley, an agent in ATF’s Norfolk office, initiated the bureau’s search for the source of Nicholas’s gun. He heard about the shooting on the news and quickly volunteered his help to Det. Donald Adams, the Virginia Beach homicide detective in charge of the case. Rowley ordered an “Urgent” trace, the highest of three request levels and one that typically yields a response within a matter of hours. The ATF’s Urgent trace of the revolver used by John Hinckley to shoot Ronald Reagan took all of sixteen minutes.

The serial number from Nicholas’s Cobray was relayed to the special agent in charge in Atlanta, Tom Stokes, who then telephoned S.W. Daniel. No one answered. It was Friday; the company operated only Monday through Thursday. But Stokes eventually managed to speak by phone with Sylvia Daniel, who, in a departure from the usual frosty relations between her company and the bureau, agreed to stop by her office on the way to the S.W. Daniel Christmas party and search the serial number herself.

The number led to a distributor, who in turn said he had shipped the pistol to Guns Unlimited. By eleven o’clock that night, Rowley, another agent, and Detective Adams were at Curtis Williams’s door.

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?