Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER TWELVE} THE CULTURE

NICHOLAS ELLIOT HAD COME TO SCHOOL that Friday prepared for combat. He had filled his backpack with his gun, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a variety of battle accessories. The most striking thing about his cargo, however, was not the inherent firepower—although it was prodigious—but rather the weapons savvy evident in what this sixteen-year-old boy had done to the gun and its ammunition in an apparent effort to make them even more efficient at killing.

He did not carry his six clips haphazardly, but had “jungle-clipped” them using tape to bind them in pairs in such a way that the instant he expended one clip he could simply turn the pair over and jam in the other end. Each assembly was capable of providing him with sixty-four rounds of virtually continuous fire, which, barring jams, he could have pumped from the gun at a rate approaching that of a light machine gun. He had used a length of rope to fashion a combat sling for his Cobray similar in concept to slings attached to the compact Uzis and Heckler & Koch submachine guns used by antiterrorist squads to help them better control their weapons during combat. He carried a crude silencer made from a pipe wrapped in fabric, and a “brass catcher” he had made from cloth and tape, to be attached to his gun to catch ejected cartridge cases. “A gun enthusiast might use a brass catcher to catch the brass for reloading,” said Donald Adams, the Virginia Beach homicide detective. “A murderer or a person about to commit a crime might use one to collect the evidence.”

His six clips gave him a total of 192 cartridges ready to fire, but he came prepared for the possibility that he might use up all those rounds and need more. He carried hundreds of extra cartridges, including several boxes containing thirty-two rounds each—exactly enough to refill an expended clip. To speed refilling, Nicholas had inserted a thin, white string through the base of each magazine to produce a primitive speed loader. When tugged, Adams told me, the string would pull down the spring-driven feeder inside the magazine, thus easing the resistance. “He could hold the string down by clamping it under his foot,” Adams explained. Nicholas could then insert each cartridge into the magazine more quickly and with less strain. Adams could not at first figure out what kind of string Nicholas had used. It was thicker than fishing line and very strong. After a while he decided he knew what it was: dental floss.

Finally, Nicholas modified even the bullets themselves. He filed a groove into the tip of at least one bullet apparently in the hopes of turning it into what Adams called a “dumdum,” a bullet that breaks apart on impact, thereby in theory becoming considerably more deadly. Nicholas modified other bullets by drilling from the tip downward to form “hollow points.” On impact, hollow-point bullets spread into lethal mushrooms that produce bigger holes and more potent neural disruption than solid rounds. Commercially made hollow-points are the bullets of choice among law-enforcement officers because they produce a lot of damage in the human body but are less likely than solid-point bullets to pass through the intended target and endanger someone else.

“This guy,” Adams said, “was ready for war.”

Adams knew where Nicholas got the bullets. The fact his mother bought them was troubling enough. But where does a sixteen-year-old boy learn to modify bullets? Where does he learn to devise combat slings, silencers, and even brass catchers?

No one can know exactly how he learned it all because Nicholas won’t say. But the fact that a child can acquire so much lethal knowledge should surprise no one who is acquainted with America’s gun culture and the manufacturers, marketers, writers, and others in the so-called gun aftermarket who make knowledge about how to succeed at murder so readily available to anyone willing to thumb to the back of a gun magazine or take a weekend stroll through the nearest gun show.

Homicide, or rather the homicide fantasy, is the engine that drives America’s fascination with guns. Target shooters spend hour after hour firing into human silhouettes. Practical shooting competitions held nationwide test civilian competitors’ ability to hit targets after leaping from a car. Occasionally such meets conclude in an explosive finale, with entrants firing away at a distant target consisting of dynamite and a gasoline-filled barrel. In this milieu, guns used in grisly crimes actually wind up gaining popularity. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, sales of the otherwise undistinguished Mannlicher-Carcano rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald soared. Hundreds “were immediately bought by souvenir-seekers who wanted to get the feel of the weapon that had brought down the president,” wrote Robert Sherrill in The Saturday Night Special Even the murder of schoolchildren boosts sales. After Patrick Edward Purdy opened fire on a schoolyard in Stockton with his AKS, a semiautomatic version of the now-infamous AK-47, sales of the gun and its knockoffs boomed. Prices quadrupled, to $1,500. Guns Unlimited felt the surge in demand. “I didn’t sell an AK until Stockton in California; then everybody wanted one,” said James S. Dick, the owner of Guns Unlimited, in a deposition.

A New York Times reporter once asked the marketing director at Intratec, a Miami company that makes an assault pistol similar in spirit to the Cobray, how he felt about the widespread condemnation of his company’s weapons. Like the Cobray, the TEC 9 is a handgun of “dirty” design, meant to evoke a submachine gun. It has a perforated barrel sheath, akin to those that appear on full-scale machine guns. “I’m kind of flattered,” he replied. “It just has that advertising tingle to it. Hey, it’s talked about, it’s read about, the media write about it. That generates more sales for me. It might sound cold and cruel, but I’m sales oriented.”

Intratec was so oriented to sales that when California banned assault weapons and included the Intratec 9 on the list, Intratec sidestepped the law through the simple maneuver of changing the gun’s name to TEC-DC-9. Gian Luigi Ferri bought two in Las Vegas and, on July 1, 1993, took them to the thirty-fourth floor of a gleaming San Francisco office building. He killed eight people, wounded six, then shot himself to death. Like Nicholas, indeed, like so many of our very many spree shooters, he carried an excessive amount of ammunition, some six hundred rounds. He had acquired the guns legally. “Everything was by the book,” said a Las Vegas police officer.

The passion for lethality suffuses the process through which guns and ammunition are conceived and made. Manufacturers routinely test their prototypes not by firing them at tin cans, but by blasting away at blocks of Jell-O–like goo—ordnance gelatin—intended specifically to simulate human tissue. Their enthusiasm for gore can lead to some vivid advertising. In the March/April 1992 issue of American Handgunner, a magazine for the civilian firearms consumer, the Eldorado Cartridge Corp. ran a full-page ad for its Starfire cartridge under the bold headline “IF LOOKS CAN KILL.” The ad called the Starfire the “deadliest handgun cartridge ever developed for home or personal defense, and hunting” and went on to describe how the bullet expands on impact “resulting in a massive wound channel.” Its deep penetration, the ad crowed, “helps assure fast knockdown.”

During one of several visits to a gun show in Frederick, Maryland, I stood at one dealer’s table beside a man and his young son who, like me, were intently watching a promotional video produced by Power-Plus, a maker of exotic ammunition. The narrator, dressed in a dark T-shirt and speaking in that laconic backcountry drawl that characterizes today’s notion of toughness, demonstrated his company’s rounds by firing a sample of each into a fresh block of yellowish gelatin, with the camera then cutting to offer a close side-view of the depth of penetration and the jagged wound channel coursing through the translucent plasma. Each round was more destructive than the last, until the narrator fired a sample of the company’s Annihilator high-explosive bullets, which slammed into the gelatin, exploded, and knocked the quivering block from its stand. Anyone wondering who might use such a bullet need only look to John Hinckley, who used a similar bullet marketed under the brand name Devastator in his attack on Ronald Reagan. Only one of the bullets he fired did actually explode, much to the benefit of Reagan, who did not even realize he had been shot, but to the lasting detriment of James Brady, in whose brain that one bullet happened to perform as intended.

The Power-Plus narrator moved on to demonstrate the company’s Multi-Plex rounds, which launched anywhere from two to four bullets from a single cartridge. An Alabama mail-order ammunition dealer described these bullets in its catalog as “an outstanding choice for home defense.”

As if all this weren’t enough, our narrator next demonstrated the effects of the company’s bullets on a pail packed with clay. This time those of us watching were treated to the additional audio enticement of hearing the wet slapping sound of the clay as the bullets entered, fragmented, and ruptured the surrounding muck, gouging caverns the size of pumpkins.

“Still watching, Son?” the father asked softly, his hands resting on his son’s shoulders.

His son, clearly entranced, nodded slowly.

Gun shows are marvelous places to capture a feel for America’s gun culture. The moment I stepped from my car, I saw a middle-aged man with a well-developed paunch sauntering toward the show entrance. He was dressed in a short-sleeve shirt and loose, wrinkled slacks and looked like a TV producer’s dream image of the average suburban American male—except, that is, for the black Colt AR-15 assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

The show occupied two buildings at the Frederick County fairgrounds. A few men walked the aisles wearing little signs on their backs listing the guns they owned and wanted to sell. Another man had stuck a FOR SALE sign in the barrel of the rifle dangling at his back. Seated behind battered fold-down tables, dealers sold guns, books, accessories, and ammunition, even those hard-to-find .50-caliber rounds needed for long-range sniper rifles and battlefield machine guns. Several dealers sold books on how to kill and, for those who knew how already, how to do it more effectively, including books on how to make silencers, military manuals on how to make booby traps, black-covered Army manuals on how to make “improvised munitions,” and a nifty little tome courtesy of the Pentagon on how to brush up on your sniper skills.

One dealer offered a Browning heavy machine gun complete with tripod. A thin, balding clerk wearing a black T-shirt commemorating the 1992 “Machine Gun Shoot” told me the gun worked and asked, was I interested?

“I don’t have the tax stamp,” I said. (I was referring here to the $200 transfer tax any adult must pay before acquiring a machine gun, a silencer, or any other weapon restricted by the National Firearms Act of 1934.)

“No problem getting one,” he said. “If it’s the cost—think how much money you’d spend if you had a boat. You fill that tank, that’s what? Fifty bucks each time you go out?”

Elsewhere in his booth he displayed an S.W. Daniel Street-Sweeper shotgun, a Cobray M-11/9, and on an adjacent table the Cobray’s full-auto RPB-made ancestor, its price reduced to $410 from $598 as a special deal for this show only.

“Looks new,” I said, referring to the RPB. “Has it been fired?”

“That’s the display gun. All the rest, new in the box.”

“How many have you got?”

I hadn’t meant to be cagey, but he gave me a sly grin all the same. “How many you need? I got lots and lots.”

For an advanced course in dealing death, all Nicholas Elliot would have had to do was turn to the back pages of his treasured gun magazines, where advertisers peddle all manner of lethal know-how. One afternoon I sat down with my checkbook and the classifieds from a current issue of American Handgunner and scanned the ads as would, say, a presidential assassin.

I wrote to the Kinetic Energy Corp., at a post office box in Tavernier, Florida, to learn about its products, which it called the “world’s deadliest handgun ammunition.” A week later I received a badly typed one-page photocopy listing the company’s cartridges and, to the probable delight of police officers everywhere, touting their ability to penetrate bulletproof vests. Kinetic wrote, for example, that its nine-millimeter bullet “will penetrate the Kevlar Type IIA bullet proof vest and make a 1 ½ inch diameter hole through 1600 pages of a dry phone book protected by the Kevlar vest from a distance of 45 feet.”

Kinetic felt moved to add three rather ill-crafted lines to the very end of the flyer. “Any one including the worst of criminals can purchase a kevlar bullet proof vest. More and more of the criminals are commiting hold ups and home invanisons [sic] wearing these vests.”

I also sent three dollars to Lafayette Research of Varnell, Georgia. This company proposed not to sell me deadly ammunition, but to teach me how to make my own. A week or so later I received from Lafayette a set of directions on how to make exploding bullets. The two-page instructions, clearly produced on a none-too-sophisticated computer printer, began with the warning: “This plan is for information only!!”

This disclaimer struck me as less than convincing, however, in light of another warning that followed closely thereafter: “Warning: Always wear proper safety equipment including protective eye wear whenever in the vicinity of moving machinery or tools such as drills!!”

Explicit, step-by-step instructions followed, detailing how to drill out the nose of a .44-caliber bullet, pack the hole with oil and a BB, then reassemble the cartridge. On impact, the steel BB is rammed backward into the softer lead of the bullet, thus causing the bullet to shatter.

Despite the “information only” disclaimer, the directions included machining tolerances down to a few thousandths of an inch.

One American Handgunner ad was especially compelling to my inner terrorist.

“MEN OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE,” it hailed.

This was Paladin Press of Boulder, Colorado, offering me a fifty-page catalog of books and videos on “new identity, improvised explosives, revenge, firearms, survival, and many other outrageous and controversial subjects.” I sent in my dollar and soon afterward received a catalog chock-full of books every red-blooded American really ought to be reading.

Inside I found dozens of books that promised to turn me into a major neighborhood asset. Here, for example, were Breath of the Dragon: Homebuilt Flamethrowers; Improvised Land Mines: Their Employment and Destructive Capabilities (“Just in case your future includes a little anarchy,” the blurb reads); Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives (with the author’s techniques “a single individual can easily dig a dry well, redirect creeks, blow up bad guys and perform a host of otherwise impossible chores of immense benefit to mankind”); Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, purportedly written by a practicing professional named Rex Feral; and Death by Deception, on how to turn ordinary objects like computer modems and showerheads into deadly booby traps.

Here too I found the How to Kill series by John Minnery, all six books now packaged in one handy 512-page volume called Kill Without Joy: The Complete How to Kill Book, whose chapters according to the catalog “provide gruesome testimony to why these books have been banned by certain countries around the globe.” The catalog calls this a how- to history of murder, but quickly inserts its catchall disclaimer, “For information and academic purposes only!”

I ordered Kill Without Joy. Paladin, the L.L. Bean of mayhem, delivered it shortly thereafter.

The book begins: “The object of this study is to instruct the reader in the techniques of taking another human life, up close, and doing it well.” It includes a chapter called “Smothering” and offers a few tips on decapitation. “If the subject’s execution is to be ritualized, kneel him down, hands tied behind his back. Pass the blade of the weapon lightly over the back of his bowed head. This causes the muscles to stiffen.”

Interested readers can find the book in the rare-book collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Not because it’s at all rare, however. “For security reasons,” a librarian there told me. “A book like that wouldn’t stay on the shelf for long.”

Paladin Press merits closer examination. It represents the distillation of the attitude of nonresponsibility that prevails in America’s gun culture and that so influenced the evolution of Nicholas Elliot’s gun. At a time when America is struggling with a rising tide of violence, Paladin Press enthusiastically peddles primers on how to produce such violence. Its books are well-known to police and federal agents across the country, who have found them in the libraries of serial killers and bombers. Paladin, moreover, is but one company, albeit the most visible, in a little-known industry nurtured by America’s infatuation with violence and sheltered by the free-speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Often referred to as the “gun aftermarket,” the industry includes scores of small companies devoted to peddling murderous know-how of all kinds, including at least one guide to torture. That such an industry exists at all demonstrates how deep the roots of our infatuation with guns and violence descend.

Paladin Press keeps a low profile in Boulder, a town whose pronounced leftward lean prompts many residents to refer jokingly but pridefully to the city as the People’s Republic of Boulder. A business columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera, the city’s newspaper, had never heard of the company. Nor had anyone at the city’s public broadcasting radio station. Paladin occupies several small, nondescript buildings a few blocks north of Pearl Street, the city’s chic pedestrian mall. No sign announces the location, just a small plaque by a side door to the main building.

The company, however, makes no effort to discourage inquiries. Its owner, Peder Lund, is unabashedly candid about the 450 books he sells and his motives for doing so.

“I prefer to make decisions about publishing based on what we want to publish and what our customers want, rather than acceding to any particular desire for respectability,” he told me. With a gravelly laugh, he added, “Why bother? It’s not on my agenda.”

Lund is a midsize man with dark hair, steady blue eyes, and a deep, assured voice. Although his roots are Scandinavian, at first glance he leaves an impression of Irishness. His nose is on the long side of pug, his ears are cantilevered outward in a mildly elfish way. As always, a fully loaded .357 Magnum revolver rested on the right-hand surface of his desk, in full view.

Lund and a partner, Robert K. Brown, founded Paladin in 1970 after both had served with the Army’s Special Forces in Vietnam. The two first met in Miami in 1964 where Lund was working on a plan to lead a group of amateur soldiers into Castro’s Cuba to rescue some refugees and to capture the whole heroic saga on film. “It was a harebrained scheme hatched by harebrained people, myself included,” Lund said.

Brown advised Lund not to get involved. The plan stalled of its own accord.

In July 1964, Lund joined the Army and in December 1966 went to Vietnam, where he served as a second lieutenant and company commander. He joined the Special Forces in July 1967. He fought in the Central Highlands until July 1968 when the Army tried to transfer him to the U.S. to run a training company. “It was a waste of talent,” he said. He quit the service, did odd jobs, until he and Brown founded Paladin in 1970, taking the name Paladin not from the lead character in the old TV series “Have Gun Will Travel,” but from a class of medieval knight that rode about the countryside correcting injustice.

Paladin Press had no particular interest in righting wrongs, however. “The point,” Lund told me, “was pure profit.”

Initially Paladin concentrated on subjects in which Lund and Brown felt they had some professional expertise, such as guerrilla warfare and firearms. Paladin’s first title was Silencers, Snipers and Assassins by J. David Truby, a book Paladin still sells.

Brown left Paladin in 1974 to found Soldier of Fortune magazine, also based in Boulder. Paladin branched into other topics. Lund had noticed an increasing interest in survivalism during the last days of Jimmy Carter’s administration. Lund moved to capitalize on the trend and published Life After Doomsday, a guide intended to help individuals, families, and small groups survive after a nuclear holocaust. Lund also published The Great Survival Resource Book, a consumer’s guide to the tools of survival. The book evaluated weapons, water-filtration systems, and other products.

In 1980, Paladin expanded beyond the survival movement with Get Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks, a half-serious primer on nonlethal revenge by an author using the name George Hayduke, a name more widely recognized as that of the maverick environmentalist in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Lund approached Hayduke with the idea, he said, “because I realized there was a great deal of frustration among people against institutions that screwed them.” Get Even remains a Paladin staple, its top seller as recently as the autumn of 1992; Hayduke became one of its star authors, identified in Paladin’s catalog as the “Master of Malice.”

Nicholas Elliot might have produced a better silencer if he had read Paladin’s catalog and ordered Hayduke’s The Hayduke Silencer Book: Quick and Dirty Homemade Silencers. “These simple, effective silencer designs are your passport into the world of muffled mayhem,” the catalog says of the Hayduke classic. “And best of all, they can be made right at your kitchen table with common items found around the house.” Or, Nicholas could have picked any of seven other books advertised on the same page, including several more how- to primers on silencers and books on the history and fundamental design requirements of effective sound suppression.

Lund declined to tell me his company’s profit or revenue, other than to say that over the previous decade revenue had doubled. The company, which employed fifteen people full-time, seemed to provide him a comfortable living. He owned a $45,000 Range-Rover free and clear and said he customarily spent up to five months of every year at a cottage Paladin owns in Britain’s Cotswolds. For the rest of the year, he lived in a house in Boulder Canyon with a skeet and rifle range off one of its several decks and a one-story indoor waterfall.

Paladin’s books have exposed the company to business trials not typically faced by small companies. Printers have refused to print its books. Magazines have declined to accept its ads. Two different banks asked Paladin to take its business elsewhere.

Even Paladin betrays a certain lawyerly squeamishness about its books. The first page of Kill Without Joy, for example, disavows any responsibility for “the use or misuse of the information herein.” Most of Paladin’s books and catalog blurbs include the caveat “For Information Purposes Only.”

But surely, I argued, Lund knew that some customers would try out the advice and instructions included in his books, particularly Kill Without Joy.

“I understand someone could conceivably misuse the information,” Lund said. “I know that. Absolutely. There’s no question in my mind about it. But I am not responsible for someone misusing information.”

“Why publish the book at all?” I asked. “Does the world really need a five-hundred-page book on how to kill?”

For the first and only time during my visit, Lund flared with anger: “If you want to pin me down on moral culpability, I cannot accept it. I cannot accept it.”

Besides, he argued, Paladin published much more than books on how to kill and bomb. He cited books on military history and self-defense, and a handbook for law-enforcement officers.

Paladin’s eclectic tastes can lead to some odd juxtapositions in its catalog. For example, Streetwork: The Way to Police Officer Safety and Survival appeared on page forty-four of one of its catalogs. According to Lund, its author was a San Diego police officer. Kill Without Joy appeared two pages earlier.

Paladin readers are not crooks, Lund said. Many customers, he argued, buy his books as a “cathartic,” a means of harmlessly working off frustrations with bosses, ex-wives, and intractable institutions by imagining acts of violence and revenge. “I think there are many, many Walter Mittys on our mailing list, people who live in a fantasy world.”

Michael Hoy, owner of Loompanics Unlimited of Port Town-send, Washington, another mail-order publisher with a taste for handbooks on violence, told me he doubted Paladin’s books or his own triggered any crimes—although he was quick to add that a “couple hundred” of his own customers were already in prison. Once a week he prepared a special catalog just for them by tearing out pages on improvised firearms and other topics that prison officials tended to frown on. He did not believe that killers needed to read such books as Kill Without Joy, which Loompanics buys from Paladin and resells. “I just don’t think that’s how serial killers operate, reading books and all.”

One Loompanics offering is Physical Interrogation Techniques by Richard Krousher. The book, according to a Loompanics catalog, “tells you the best ways to tie and bind a subject for physical interrogation, where to obtain tools and devices needed, and even how to get the guy to torture himself while you’re out for coffee.”

Hoy’s own lead-stomached staff refused to proofread it, so he took on the task alone. “It’s a pretty gruesome book,” he told me. “I was pretty sick of that stuff myself by the time I was done.” Nonetheless, by the time we spoke in December 1992 he had sold 5,500 copies.

A big fan of Lund and his company, Hoy gushed, “It’s just a joy doing business with Paladin Press.”

Paladin seems to have a good many satisfied customers. Many write fan mail to the company, applauding both its efficient service and its daring. A San Antonio customer wrote: “I’ve got to give you credit, you offer controversial, often shocking literature that is invaluable to all Americans. It’s a pity that all mail-order companies don’t follow your example.”

Here are three of the five books this particular customer ordered, along with excerpts from their catalog descriptions:

An urgent need for revenge apparently prompted a customer in Valdosta, Georgia, to write for a copy of George Hayduke’s Get Even.

“I have a lot of people that need to get screwed for a change!” this customer wrote. At the bottom, he added: “Rush please! They are way past due!”

A Wallingford, Pennsylvania, parent was less than thrilled, however: “Take our son’s name off your mailing list immediately. You should be stopped from sending your publication through the mail to minors.”

Bomb squad members are some of Paladin’s most motivated customers. Joseph Grubisic, commander of the Chicago police bomb and arson section, told me he put himself on Paladin’s mailing list and bought any new book on explosives in order to be prepared for future encounters with the fruits of the book’s instructions. As a training exercise, members of each shift build hoax bombs (without explosives) and pass them along to colleagues on other shifts, who then attempt to defuse them. Often, Grubisic said, the shifts design their bombs using Paladin books as a guide.

Investigators often find books from Paladin and its competitors in the possession of bombing suspects. “Hundreds of times,” an ATF bomb expert told me.

Although a direct connection between the books and bombs is almost always difficult to prove, ATF agents now routinely look for such books in their searches of suspects’ homes and use them to buttress their cases in court. The connection can be close. A few years ago a religious zealot tried bombing an X-rated drive-in theater in Pennsylvania by attaching fourteen explosive charges to the posts that supported the screen. Only one charge went off. The ATF lab analyzed the remaining explosives and discovered the contents matched a formula from The Poor Man’s James Bond, published by Desert Publications of El Dorado, Arkansas, but sold both by Paladin and Loompanics. The lab was even able to cite the page. When agents searched the suspect’s home, they found the book.

These “burn-and-blow” books may pose the gravest danger to their own users. Any bomb recipe is dangerous, no matter how precise. Even a change in the weather can cause a devastating change in chemical reactions needed to make such explosives as nitroglycerin. Some published recipes are flat-out wrong, particularly, experts say, in The Anarchist’s Cookbook, published by Barricade Books of Secaucus, New Jersey, and sold by Paladin. (“It’s kind of like the Physicians’ Desk Reference” one assistant U.S. attorney told me. “Every self-respecting terrorist has to have The Anarchist’s Cookbook.”) The experts won’t say exactly where the errors lie, preferring to pick up the pieces of wannabe bombers rather than innocent civilians.

Even the marketers of such books acknowledge their dangers and flaws. Mr. Lund told me he is fully aware the Cookbook’s recipes contain dangerous errors: “They’re wrong. No doubt about it.” But he added, “There are so many copies of that book extant, I don’t see how not selling another one is going to be in any way redeeming.” Billy Blann, owner of Desert Publications, said anyone who tries to act on the directions in Desert’s book The Poor Man’s James Bond takes a great risk. Most of his customers, he said, are “closet commandos” who just like to read on the wild side. “Anybody who fools with this stuff,” he said in a profound Arkansas twang, “has got to be a fool.”

Or, bomb investigators fear, a child.

That Wallingford, Pennsylvania, parent wrote to Paladin after his son received a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook and, while trying out one of its recipes, blew off the tip of one finger. In August 1992, two boys in Athens, Tennessee, set off two powerful bombs in a city park. In a search of one suspect’s home, investigators found The Poor Man’s James Bond, Volume II, complete with little pink Post-it notes marking crucial pages. In San Juan Capistrano, California, three young boys were seriously injured when a pipe bomb they were making in one boy’s garage exploded. Members of the Orange County bomb squad searched the boy’s home and in a freezer found a high-explosive solution made from a recipe in the Improvised Munitions Blackbook, Volume III, another book published by Billy Blann’s Desert Publications and sold by Paladin and Loompanics. “We’re talking some bad-news stuff,” said Sgt. Charles Stumph, commander of the squad. “He was just taking it through the cooling process, and he was a thirteen-year-old kid.”

Park Elliott Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist and FBI consultant in La Jolla, California, studied Paladin Press and its peers. In 1983 he set up a dummy company, Hawkeye Industries, through which he corresponded with Paladin and other companies in what he calls the “violence industry.” He used this oblique approach, he said, “because I thought these people were dangerous. Some of them are.”

He no longer placed Paladin in that category, however. “Paladin is so aboveboard in selling the worst of information for profit that there’s no need for any subterfuge with them.” His scrutiny earned him a dedication in one of Paladin’s books—George Hayduke’s Payback: Advanced Back-Stabbing and Mudslinging Techniques. Hayduke’s dedication reads, in part: “Park Baby, this book’s for you.”

Dr. Dietz estimates that he is called on to serve as a forensic psychiatrist in fifty to seventy-five criminal cases a year. When he interviews defendants, he said, he asks about the movies and TV shows they watch, the books they read. “And when one asks them,” he told me, “one learns that a large proportion of offenders of the type I’m asked to see are aware of and interested in these materials. I’ve come to expect bombers, killers using exotic weapons, mass murderers, and political-extremist offenders to have a level of familiarity with the violence industry, including Paladin Press, equivalent to the familiarity of sex offenders with pornography.”

The effect of Paladin’s books and pornography is similar, Dr. Dietz argued. “People with a preexisting interest in tying and torturing women gravitate to such pornography. People with a preexisting interest in mass destruction gravitate to titillating descriptions of that.”

His work brought him into contact with at least two multiple murderers who had read books by Paladin and its competitors: George Banks, who killed thirteen people in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Sylvia Seegrist, who killed three people and wounded seven in Media, Pennsylvania.

In an article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, Dr. Dietz argued that books sold or published by Paladin—in particular the How to Kill series, Get Even, and The Poor Man’s James Bond—may have been the inspiration for the Tylenol killings of 1982 and subsequent product-tampering cases. As early as 1972, he wrote, The Poor Man’s James Bond described how cyanide could be substituted for the drugs in medicinal capsules. The first murder using cyanide in capsules occurred in 1982 in Chicago, in the Tylenol case. Nine other murders followed, six more in Chicago, three others in 1986 in Seattle and Yonkers, New York.

In 1973, Dr. Dietz’s report continued, Paladin’s How to Kill suggested adding acid to eyedrops. A few years later a pharmacist allegedly used a similar technique.

In 1981, Get Even described a novel means of contaminating a bottled drink. Four years later, someone used the approach in a Santa Clara, California, grocery store.

In 1983, Paladin’s Hit Man noted a way of tampering with tea bags to make them deadly. Four years later, Dr. Dietz wrote, a New Jersey man was convicted of placing similarly contaminated tea bags in a grocery store.

“One of the usually ignored concerns about this industry that 1 would underscore is the effect of exposure on vulnerable members of the community,” Dr. Dietz told me. “It’s the same concern that I have always emphasized ought to be foremost in our thinking about the effects of pornography. It is not relevant what effect if any either pornographic or violent materials have on college-educated, nonantisocial, non-substance-abusing, nonpsychotic persons. What is relevant is the effect on uneducated, substance-abusing, antisocial, or psychotic persons with little or no family or community control, in circumstances where they think they have no witnesses.”

In fact, he argued, vulnerable readers migrate to such material and may incorporate the “worldview” of the publication into their thinking. “My concern,” he said, “is not just that one can learn to build a better bomb this way, but also that through sufficient immersion in this subculture one comes to find a greater need to build the bomb.”

I asked Peder Lund what he thought of Dr. Dietz’s views.

“I really can’t be bothered by him,” he said. Dr. Dietz, he said, had seized on a few aberrant cases to postulate a link between Paladin’s books and crime. “If you take two hundred thousand people, statistically you’re going to find two or three who don’t wear underwear, four or five who cultivate bonsai trees, six or eight who’ve shaved their heads. There’s no statistical validity to the man’s conclusions. It’s as if you went to a party last night and met five people who were divorced and decided the divorce rate had gone up catastrophically.”

Lund dismissed Dr. Dietz’s product-tampering theory as “conjecture.” On the reports of bomb injuries from books published by Paladin and others, Lund said, “As a human, I feel very sorry for anyone who’s put through any physical suffering. As a publisher and as a pragmatist, I feel absolutely no responsibility for the misuse of information.”

Paladin is merely a vehicle for conveying information, he said. “We are not encouraging illegal activity.”

No one, at least no one I could find, has sued Paladin over the ways people put its books to use. “And I think it would be a travesty of the legal system to do so, don’t you?” Lund said. “Do you sue General Motors because a kid runs over his schoolmate in a stolen car? Do you sue the manufacturer of a hammer because a child picks it up and bashes his little sister’s head in? I can’t see any clear-thinking person holding someone responsible for conveying information.”

The U.S. Supreme Court agrees. “The general rule is, people do have a constitutional right to engage in speech which might cause serious harm or danger to others,” said Bruce Ennis, a First Amendment attorney. Speech, or a written work, can be deemed illegal only when it is virtually certain to lead a listener or reader to an immediate act of violence. “These are difficult standards to meet,” said Floyd Abrams, considered a leading expert in First Amendment law. “They are supposed to be difficult.”

Even bomb investigators, the people who most often encounter the fruits of the violence-industry’s advice, oppose banning such books. “You can’t say they can’t print this stuff,” said Joe Grubisic, commander of the Chicago bomb squad. “I don’t like it, but I really don’t know what the solution is. I don’t want a police state.”

No problem would exist, argued Sergeant Stumph of Orange County, if Paladin and its peers simply chose not to publish their violence primers. “It’d be so nice if the big R-word would just come into play, if some of these people would just take responsibility for their friggin’ actions.”

Jack Thompson, a Miami lawyer whom the ACLU picked to be one of its 1992 Arts Censors of the Year, took a less indulgent view. That Paladin can continue to sell a book like Kill Without Joy, he said, is evidence of a lack of prosecutorial initiative. “The ACLU has been very successful in convincing an entire generation of prosecutors that you can’t do anything about this stuff,” he said. The majority of Americans, he argued, want the likes of Paladin Press “aggressively pursued and prosecuted, but they’ve been abandoned because of a lack of will by the government at every level.”

Some books even Paladin will not publish, Lund told me. He will not accept anything racist or “scatological.” He will not publish advice on altitude-sensitive detonation devices. “We don’t want to be the scapegoats for an investigation of an airliner coming down,” he said.

He also said he would not publish books on poisons—although in fact several books in Paladin’s catalog, including Kill Without Joy, include tips on the subject. He countered that these references were very general. “We try to avoid publishing specifics.”

But why this scruple if Paladin’s customers are just Walter Mitty types in search of a psychic release?

Lund tipped back his chair. “Perhaps I can’t tell you accurately,” he said slowly. “I find it very offensive, poisoning. Because it’s something done by the devious, it isn’t a direct-confrontation kind of thing.”

“Bombs are pretty devious,” I suggested.

“We all have our boundaries, wouldn’t you say?” His voice was mild, but his gaze turned perceptibly cooler. “Perhaps my boundaries are different from yours. My boundaries are different from many people’s.”

The “aftermarket” bazaar offers far more than mere advice. Dozens of large and small companies peddle all manner of accessories capable of turning your neighborhood bully into a Rambo-esque urban warrior. U.S. Cavalry, a mail-order company in Radcliff, Kentucky, offers “military and adventure equipment,” including laser sights, a “sleeve dagger” meant to be strapped to the user’s arm or leg (complete with “blood grooves” ground into its triangular blade), a plastic hairbrush with a knife embedded in the handle, and all the accessories needed to turn your Mossberg Model 500 shotgun into a tactical assault gun with front and rear “assault grips,” folding stock, and a perforated barrel shroud that gives the weapon the look of an exotic machine gun.

The lushest source of weapons and accessories remains Shotgun News, the thrice-monthly advertising tabloid in Hastings, Nebraska. The front page invariably includes half a dozen ads from companies offering to help people acquire their own federal gun-dealer licenses (“Confused? Call Bob or Jennie today!”). The rest of each issue consists of 150 or more onionskin-like pages of classified and display advertising directed at gun dealers, collectors, and shooters of all tastes. In July 1989 the newspaper carried an advertisement offering the “Whitman Arsenal,” consisting of the seven weapons and accessories that Charles Whitman brought with him on August 1, 1966, when he climbed the twenty-seven-story clock tower at the University of Texas and spent the next ninety minutes firing away at anyone who happened to fall within his sights. He killed sixteen people, including a receptionist and two tourists in the tower; he wounded another thirty-one. The ad offered the guns along with a copy of the Life magazine edition that covered the shooting and called the incident “the most savage one-man rampage in the history of American crime.”

Shotgun News also carried ads placed by an Athens, Georgia, company for products designed to convert semiautomatic weapons to full-auto machine guns, a company later included in ATF’s wide-ranging effort to discover how the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, managed to acquire enough firepower to repel the 1993 ATF raid on the compound.

When I opened the July 10, 1992, edition of Shotgun News, to which I had subscribed, I found an advertisement for a Nazi tank—“a rare opportunity to own a fine piece of German artillery.” A Chillicothe, Ohio, broker of vintage military vehicles offered the tank for $145,000. “There’s no difference between owning a tank and a Ferrari except four inches of armor,” he told me during a visit to his office. Oddly enough, such ads may be among the most innocent in the publication. Private buyers of tanks tend to be history-loving souls and members of the Military Vehicle Preservation Association, which doesn’t allow live guns of any kind at its various meets.

Once notorious for running quasi-legal and occasionally racist ads, including an advertisement placed by the Ku Klux Klan, Shotgun News has grown more circumspect, at least in terms of its published policies. It now includes a notice that it no longer accepts ads for silencer parts, plans for making explosives and booby traps, “plans, videos or books” for full-auto conversions, and such burglar-friendly tools as lockpicks, slim-jims, and books on how to pick locks. Nonetheless, my April 1993 issue contained an advertisement from a Sun City, Arizona, company offering instructions for converting Chinese SKS semiautomatic assault rifles to full-auto operation. Another company, Jonathan Arthur Ciener Inc. of Cape Canaveral, Florida, “Manufacturer of the Finest in Suppressed Firearms,” ran a full-page ad offering sound-suppressed handguns and rifles, and separate silencers for a variety of assault weapons including the MAC-10 and MAC-11 and Nicholas Elliot’s gun, the Cobray M11/9.

During a reporting journey unrelated to guns, I inadvertently wound up at the fountainhead of aftermarket suppliers, the huge annual “surplus” show in Las Vegas, also the source of much of the cheap merchandise we encounter in “dollar” and Army-Navy stores and in low-rung direct-mail catalogs. Some thirty thousand retailers from around the world visited the show, shopping its four thousand booths for bargains in bulk quantities of those ubiquitous purple-haired trolls, cheap plastic toys, and other merchandise. But I found dozens of dealers selling a darker sort of merchandise, including surplus night-vision scopes like the one used by the serial killer in the movie Silence of the Lambs, dummy hand grenades, combat knives, police badges, and black caps emblazoned with the law-enforcement acronyms we see routinely in newspaper photographs of raids conducted by ATF, DEA, and the FBI. “It’s perfectly legal,” an attendant at one of the cap booths told me. These caps and badges, along with the magnetic blue or red police-style flashing lights offered in U.S. Cavalry’s catalog, can turn anyone into a convincing replica of a bona fide lawman.

At one of the largest booths at the Las Vegas show I encountered Jim Moore, chief executive officer of Military Supply Corp., LaCenter, Washington, who told me he sold uniforms and other equipment to armies around the world. He was also selling .50-caliber long-range sniper rifles. In fact, he said, he had one up in his room at the Las Vegas Hilton at that very moment. He flipped to a page in his catalog that contained a sketch of the bipod-mounted rifle. “It’s called reach out and touch someone at two thousand yards,” Moore said. “Would you like to come out and shoot it?”

He later canceled the demonstration. The colonel was a victim of jet lag, Moore explained; he had napped through the afternoon.

The aftermarket has so much to offer that Nicholas Elliot need not have gone to all the trouble of making the combat accessories police found in his backpack. With a little effort, he could have ordered them directly from S.W. Daniel’s mail-order catalog. It offered a brass catcher, complete with see-through bag and Velcro fastener; an official Cobray “assault sling,” wrist strap, and rear sling collar (“Get Super Control By Adding These Accessories,” the catalog said); “fake” silencers; slotted barrel extenders; and flash suppressors, designed to keep that all-too-detectable muzzle flash to a minimum. For $127.95 Cobray enthusiasts could also order a screw-on barrel-and-grip assembly to make the Cobray M-11/9 resemble “the fabled Thompson” machine gun. Instead of jungle-clipping his magazines with tape, Nicholas could simply have ordered a plastic magazine joiner tailored to the purpose. S.W. Daniel named this product Double Trouble.

The catalog asked, “Can You Imagine 64 Rounds?”

Two institutions share much of the responsibility for cultivating the anything-goes attitude of firearms makers and the aftermarket bazaar. They have declared themselves each other’s enemy, but together both served as a kind of cultural cheering squad, nudging Nicholas Elliot and his Cobray along their path to Atlantic Shores.

The first is the National Rifle Association.

To people who dislike guns, the NRA is the Great Satan. They see its influence in every act of gun-related legislation and in every political race. Although its impact on electoral politics has been greatly inflated, the association has indeed been influential in lobbying against firearms regulation, as when it diminished the authority of the Gun Control Act of 1968 by promoting the McClure-Volkmer Act. Where the NRA has been most influential, however—and where its influence has been least acknowledged or appreciated—is in defining the vocabulary of the firearms debate and thus, in a sense, winning the debate before it even began.

The NRA accomplished this bit of intellectual gerrymandering by deftly marketing an ideology that posits any and all firearm regulation as a direct challenge to the U.S. Constitution and, by inference, to America itself. In this ideology, all guns are equal, be they Cobray pistols having no utilitarian value or the Glocks now embraced by so many police departments; guns are to be kept in readiness to repel invaders or—and this is a real prospect to the hard-liners who run the NRA—to resist the U.S. government itself; regulation of firearms is necessarily the first step toward confiscation of all firearms. Soon after I joined the NRA in 1993, I received my official NRA “Member Guide,” which stated the NRA’s position in unequivocal terms: “Any type of licensing and computer registration scheme aimed at law-abiding citizens is a direct violation of Second Amendment rights, serves no law enforcement purpose, and ultimately could result in the prohibition and/or confiscation of legally owned firearms.” In a 1975 fund-raising letter to NRA members, retired general Maxwell E. Rich, executive vice president, warned of the true consequences of gun control: “My friend, they are not talking of ‘Control’; they want complete and total ‘Confiscation.’ This will mean the elimination and removal of all police revolvers, all sporting rifles and target pistols owned by law abiding citizens.” He asked, “What would the crime rate be if the criminal knew our police were unarmed…?”

At times the NRA has even sought to link support for firearm regulation to Communist sympathies, as in 1973 when the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine described the “Rules for Revolution,” a never-authenticated document purported to set out the principles by which Communist cells could attain world control. The tenth rule, the magazine said, called for “the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the population helpless.”

On this battlefield anyone who advocates firearms regulation finds himself immediately on the defensive, forced into arcane debate over the exact meaning of the Second Amendment, and branded an enemy of The People.

An important effect of the NRA’s propaganda was to arm even the least articulate of gun owners with a snappy response that allows them to readily deflect unfriendly challenges from the unpersuaded and at the same time to avoid having to think about what kinds of firearms regulations might indeed ease the national crisis. (To the NRA, of course, guns are not the crisis. People are. More jails and swifter prosecution will solve the problem of gun violence.) In this intellectual desert, the mere act of possessing or manufacturing a gun, even a Cobray M-11/9, becomes a noble and patriotic undertaking.

The NRA was not always the paranoid, Constitution-thumping entity it is today. Nor is its current radicalism shared by the great mass of its members, many of whom simply join to take advantage of the organization’s broad array of grass-roots services or merely to get the NRA hat (mine is black with the NRA eagle insignia stitched in gold thread). The NRA is not the monolithic, omnipotent force of popular imagination. It is two organizations, and only by understanding this can one come to understand the fervor with which the association opposes even the simplest efforts at impeding the flow of guns from the good guys to the bad.

The NRA was founded in New York in 1871 by William Conant Church, a former New York Times war correspondent and soldier, and Gen. George Wingate, with the rather modest goal of sharpening the marksmanship skills of the New York National Guard and Guard units in other states by promoting a system of rifle practice and establishing rifle ranges. It remained a small, struggling organization until 1905, when federal legislation allowed the United States to sell surplus military weapons at cost to rifle clubs and made the NRA responsible for determining which clubs were qualified to acquire the guns. A 1911 amendment allowed the government to donate the guns to such clubs free of charge. Needless to say, NRA membership began to rise.

The association began attempting to influence legislation in 1934, in response to the increased clamor for firearms regulation that resulted in the National Firearms Act, which banned the sale of unregistered machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. The act was the NRA’s first defeat, but also its first victory. As originally proposed, the act would have regulated the sale of pistols and handguns as well. But the NRA objected and, in its first demonstration of how a relative few ardent loyalists can shape a nation’s laws, launched a lobbying and letter-writing campaign that convinced Congress to limit the retrictions to “gangster” weapons.

By 1946, the association had all of 155,000 members. In 1956, the NRA amended its New York State charter to include a set of objectives broader than those it had outlined in 1871. Now it sought “to promote social welfare and public safety, law and order, and the national defense; to educate and train citizens of good repute in the safe and efficient handling of small arms,” and, broadly, “to encourage the lawful ownership and use of small arms by citizens of good repute.”

The NRA was still largely a sportsman’s organization, promoting target shooting, hunting, and hunter’s rights. It might have kept to this moderate course if not for the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, which prompted a horrified and heartbroken nation to call for gun control. The NRA, now galvanized by a threat to its members’ favorite pastimes, began attacking controls and pressuring legislators to oppose them, while sidestepping the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald acquired his rifle by mail through an advertisement in the American Rifleman. Nonetheless, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968.

The NRA’s hard-liners, who despised the Gun Control Act, began working to ensure that such an infringement of the constitutional right to bear arms would not occur again. And soon the bald, bullet-headed figure of Harlon Carter took the helm. He was the perfect leader for an organization steeped in the myths of the American frontier. As an officer and later chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, he came as close to being an Old West lawman as anyone could in the twentieth century.

But he also symbolized the darker aspects of America’s enthusiasm for guns. For Carter was a convicted murderer.

In 1931, when he was seventeen, Carter shot and killed a Mexican boy with his shotgun under circumstances that prompted a jury to convict him of murder. Carter claimed he killed the boy in self-defense, after he brandished a knife. An appellate court overturned the conviction, charging the lower-court judge had improperly instructed the jury as to what constituted a valid claim of self-defense. The charges were never refiled.

After Carter and his allies seized control of the NRA in the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt, the NRA heeled sharply to the right. It shifted emphasis from promoting the shooting sports to battling firearm regulations, a shift made official in 1977 when the association amended its New York State charter to include the goal of promoting “the right of the individual of good repute to keep and bear arms as a common law and constitutional right both of the individual citizen and of the collective militia.”

A study conducted a few years earlier by the Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, California, for Remington Arms Company, warned that the NRA’s “right-wingers are becoming increasingly isolated from the society of today.” The report continued: “Dismissing unpleasant information about guns in society and denying integrity to those who are concerned about guns, they manage to survive in a bunker decorated with white hats and black hats, in a make-believe world of American ‘sacred rights,’ ancient skills, and coonskins.”

Nonetheless, by 1978 the NRA claimed 1.2 million members. By 1983, its membership had increased to more than 2.6 million and was growing at three thousand a week.

But the NRA had moved so far to the right, had become so ardent in its opposition to any and all firearms regulation, that it soon began to lose some of its closest friends outside the organization. Most important, it alienated the law-enforcement community. In the late 1980s it opposed legislation aimed at outlawing armor-piercing ammunition and at banning such assault weapons as the MAC-10 and the Cobray. When police agencies dared criticize the NRA, their officials came under withering return fire. One of those attacked was Joseph McNamara, the widely respected chief of police in San Jose, California. (As of 1993 he was a fellow at the Hoover Institution studying ways to halt illegal drug distribution and was working on his next police novel.) In a 1987 advertisement for Handgun Control Inc., McNamara charged that the NRA leadership “has repeatedly ignored the objections of professional law enforcement,” thus making police work “more difficult—and more dangerous.” The NRA, in its own advertisements, accused McNamara of favoring legalization of drugs, a course he had never endorsed. At one point, someone sent him a bull’s-eye target bearing his image. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “That target was shot full of holes.”

Until the NRA began its attacks, most law-enforcement agencies considered the NRA their ally, McNamara said. Their allegiance, he said, reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the NRA’s attitudes and mission. “The NRA had gotten by for a lot of years on an image that wasn’t really accurate, that they were supportive of law enforcement.” The attacks on police chiefs, he said, “educated law enforcement as to their true colors.”

Then the unthinkable occurred: the NRA began losing membership. From 1989 to 1991, its membership shrank from almost 3 million to about 2.5 million. Newspapers across the country began running stories that the NRA had lost its punch. The embattled association launched a campaign to restore the popular conception of its influence, drawing on frontier imagery to help. The annual meeting that was to mark its comeback was deliberately staged in San Antonio, home of The Alamo. The historic site, according to Osha Davidson, author of Under Fire, “was the touchstone of all those American values the gun group liked to claim as its own: an uncompromising attitude, unabashed love for this country, and a readiness to fight her enemies—no matter what the odds.”

The NRA stepped up spending to bolster its influence, calling itself “The New NRA.” Its political action committee—the NRA Political Victory Fund—spent $1.7 million on the presidential and congressional campaigns of 1992, more than twice as much as the $772,756 it spent in 1988. Between the 1990 and 1992 election cycles, the Victory Fund increased its spending more than any other registered PAC. The NRA also stepped up its lobbying expenditures. In 1992 it spent $28.9 million, 43 percent more than in 1988.

The centerpiece of its image-burnishing campaign, however, was a membership drive of unprecedented expense. The best way to refute reports of the NRA’s demise was to boost membership to record levels. The NRA set out to do so, and to spare no expense. In 1992 alone, PM Consulting, the direct-mail company chosen to manage the drive, spent $25 million—$10 million more than budgeted. The NRA lured members with all manner of appeals and devices, including no-fee credit cards, gun-safety videos for kids, even a “Sportsman’s Dream Gun Sweepstakes,” in which the grand-prize winner stood to receive ten different hunting rifles and ten all-expenses-paid hunting trips. For the first time, the NRA enlisted the help of firearms dealers, offering them a substantial share of the $25 new-member fee for each recruit they managed to sign. For-profit gun shows waived their admission fees for anyone who joined the NRA on the spot.

The drive worked. In 1992, the NRA had a net gain of 616,000 members. As of October 1993, its membership had risen to a record high of nearly 3.3 million. The NRA was indeed bigger than ever before, but its campaign to boost membership and bolster its member programs had resulted in a 1992 operating deficit of $31.6 million, larger than ever in its history.

Despite all this spending and the surge in membership, by the middle of 1993 the NRA still seemed to have lost important ground. The association remained estranged from the nation’s law-enforcement community. And it faced a series of unaccustomed setbacks. In 1993, Virginia passed its one-gun-a-month law, despite the $500,000 the NRA spent to defeat the legislation. Connecticut passed an assault-gun bill that outlawed the sale of certain assault guns, including the AR-15 made by Colt’s Manufacturing, headquartered in Connecticut’s own “Gun Valley.” New Jersey passed an assault-gun bill. The New York assembly did likewise. Politicians and pundits began talking of a “sea change,” a new distaste for gun violence as pervasive as the antigun mood of the late 1960s. One New York assemblywoman, Naomi Matusow, won her seat in 1992 after campaigning with an explicitly anti-NRA slate. “It may just be,” she said, “that the NRA had cast a longer shadow than the reality.”

Far from adapting to the changing mood, the NRA continued its shift to the right. In 1993, a hard-right faction headed by Neal Knox, a former NRA executive who heads his own firearms lobbying group, further consolidated its hold over the NRA’s board and helped win a seat on the board for Harlon Carter’s widow, Maryann Carter. The board already included such hard-liners as Robert K. Brown, cofounder of Paladin Press and publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine, but Maryann Carter’s election symbolized a return to first principles. No gun controls; no compromise. The “New” NRA seemed a reincarnation of the old NRA of Harlon Carter’s day.

The NRA went on the offensive. It saw in the shifting national mood an opportunity to raise money and membership by sounding an especially urgent alarm. A four-page ad inserted in gun magazines showed President Bill Clinton and Sarah Brady shaking hands and on the verge of an embrace. “If you still need convincing reasons to guard your guns,” the ad said, “here’s a couple.” Striking a familiar note of hysteria, the ad cried: “All conditions are ripe for 1993 to be the worst year for gun owners in American history. No holds are barred. No one’s guns are safe. No one’s hunting is protected. No one’s ammunition is off limits. No one’s firearms freedoms are secure.”

It is a mistake, however, to think of the NRA as one uniform block of hard-right, pro-gun zealots. A survey by Louis Harris in 1993 found that of those NRA members captured in the sample, 59 percent supported registration of handguns and 49 percent favored limiting handgun purchases to one a month.

Why this division in attitude between the leadership and the ranks? And how does the NRA manage to avoid blowing apart from internal pressures?

For one thing, turnover among the rank and file is high. In the 1992 membership drive, for example, the NRA actually recruited more than one million new members, but lost more than half a million. Such turnover helps account for why the hard-core faction is able to retain control, despite a far more moderate member pool. For under the bylaws of the NRA, only members who have maintained their membership for five years in a row, or who have acquired a life membership, are permitted to vote in elections of board members. Thus only a small percentage of members are eligible to vote. And a small percentage of these ever bother to use the privilege. Those who do vote tend to be the most ardent of the NRA’s Constitution-thumpers. They field slates of hard-line candidates in each board election and campaign aggressively to see that these candidates win.

To mollify the nonvoting ranks, the NRA provides a broad array of practical services. NRA-certified instructors provide shooting courses and teach gun safety to adults and kids. Celebrated hunters tour the nation conducting NRA hunting seminars. The organization runs shooting camps for kids and for advanced shooters hoping for a berth on the U.S. Olympic shooting team. It helps shooting clubs establish skeet ranges and provides grants to affiliated state shooting associations.

The NRA of political legend is a relatively small group of insiders who control the NRA’s propaganda and lobbying apparatus and adhere to what is at heart a radical, Libertarian political orthodoxy—yet cloak their beliefs in familiar images that evoke mainstream American values and history. Eagles abound in NRA literature. The NRA cap bears an eagle. The NRA’s gun-safety program is named Eddie Eagle. The NRA’s famous bulletins, crafted to rouse the membership to write their legislators in response to some immediate threat, are called Minuteman Alerts. NRA executives lace their remarks and columns with allusions to the American Revolution, patriotism, and frontier history. At the NRA’s 1993 annual meeting in Nashville, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told the crowd, “You know, a couple of hundred years ago a group of citizen-patriots met at a bridge—Concord Bridge. You are no different from them. Because every day somebody still has to go to that bridge and stand there to defend freedom.”

During the same annual gathering, a John Wayne impersonator, Gene Howard, addressed a separate meeting of the NRA’s board. He wore a red cowboy shirt, brown leather vest, and a blue kerchief—tied at his neck in John Wayne fashion—and recited two of his own poems. One, titled “Do You Want My Gun,” reprised Cold War themes:

Curiously, Howard then shifted battlefields and identified the NRA cause as nothing less than a fight to restore religion to America:

Central to the NRA’s rhetoric is opposition to the American media—both the press and the entertainment media—which the leadership perceives as antigun. In his Nashville speech, Wayne La-Pierre called the news media “a force that dwarfs any political power or social tyrant that ever before existed on this planet.” In a column in the June 1993 American Rifleman, NRA president Robert K. Corbin called the offending media “thought police” and warned such media “can unwittingly be manipulated by hidden, far-more-sinister forces.”

In 1993 the association launched a formal assault on television violence, joining a broad popular attack that culminated early in the year in a network decision to air content warnings before especially violent shows. The NRA’s attack, however, contained a curious twist. In testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, NRA lobbyist Susan R. Lamson complained that violent television shows unfairly stigmatized guns and gun owners. “This steady diet of stereotypes coupled with gratuitous criminal violence provokes a widespread bigotry against law-abiding gun owners and fuels the drive for restrictions that impact the law-abiding.”

The media—and I include here the gun press—bear at least equal responsibility for nurturing firearms violence in America. Gun writers, TV and movie producers, and the daily press directly and indirectly stoke demand for exotic firearms and accessories and orchestrate the bloodthirsty mood that infuses the gun culture.

The gun writers know what their readers want. The newsletter Gun Tests routinely rates the penetration power of handguns and ammunition the way Consumer Reports compares new cars. American Handgunner’s 1992 “Combat Annual” reviewed six new high-caliber revolvers, calling them “The Ultimate Manstoppers!” Regular issues of the magazine are full of tales of combat tactics and police shoot-outs, part of a running series by Massad Ayoob, the magazine’s star reporter. “Gory True Story,” teased the cover of the October 1991 issue. “REAL-LIFE TERMINATOR! Soaking up bullet after bullet, a cop-killing PCP freak just won’t die! Massad Ayoob’s chilling account on page 70.”

Gun writers often skirt the gory reality of gunshot injury by driving euphemism to new heights, deftly avoiding the words kill, murder, and death, using instead such etymological eunuchs as knockdown, stopping power, and—this is my favorite—double-tap, meaning to shoot a guy twice. (Double Tap also happens to be the name of a Virginia Beach gun store, whose sign features a black human silhouette with two red holes over the heart.)

To the gun press, no firearm is unworthy of praise, not even the Saturday night specials made by the now defunct RG Industries, one of which was used by John Hinckley when he shot James Brady in the head. In its “Combat Annual” American Handgunner included a defense of RG’s guns written by Mark Moritz, special projects editor. Moritz, who noted that his first gun was an RG, tested a .22-caliber RG revolver against an expensive Smith & Wesson .22, comparing their performance in both head and body shots.

The RG was a little slower.

However, Moritz wrote, “even out of the box we are only talking about two-tenths of a second for multiple headshots at the relatively long range of seven yards.”

Moritz won’t win any awards for sensitivity in journalism. Early on in the story, in an angry denunciation of the “slimebucket” lawyers who sued RG Industries out of business after the Reagan-Brady shootings, he wrote: “When John Hinckley shot James Brady, with an RG .22 revolver, his wife, Sarah, head spokesnut at Handgun Control, Inc., sued RG. She was offended that her husband was shot with a cheap, low-powered gun. I guess she wanted him to be shot with an expensive, high-powered gun.”

A writer for American Survival Guide even had nice things to say about S.W. Daniel’s Ladies’ Home Companion shotgun, the gun the Maryland state police ballistics expert refused even to test-fire. “When we first came across the Ladies’ Home Companion at a large gun show earlier this year, we found it a highly interesting and unique firearm,” the author wrote. He never commented on the inappropriate name of the weapon. The gun’s heavy trigger pull, he wrote, “makes the LHC a very safe gun.”

The Cobray M-11/9, Nicholas Elliot’s gun, gets its share of praise too. The Gun Digest Book of Assault Weapons included a chapter on the pistol and its heritage. The author described it as “a plinker’s delight and the bane of all tin cans, milk jugs, clay pigeons and other inanimate objects.” He saw its primary practical value as being home defense. “Appearance alone should cause most burglars and intruders to consider instant surrender if brought before its muzzle.”

In the closing paragraphs, the writer waxed nostalgic: “It is nice to know the Ingram family of submachine guns still is living and well. Because of their use on television and in the movies, they are justifiably famous.”

America’s entertainment media provide the last ingredients to the perverse and lethal roux that sustains our gun culture. Today’s TV producers and movie directors have not only adopted and amplified the elemental messages of frontier myth—in particular the notion that only a gun can set you free—but so deified guns as to promote the use and proliferation of specific kinds of weapons. Just as McQ promoted the Ingram, so too Dirty Harry promoted the Smith & Wesson Model 29, and “Miami Vice”—in addition to also promoting the Ingram line—such assault weapons as the Uzi and Bren 10. Dr. Park Dietz, the La Jolla forensic psychiatrist, studied the effect of “Miami Vice” on gun prices and demand and found that the appearance of the Bren 10 in the hands of Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) in the early episodes of the show immediately boosted demand for the weapon. Dietz has argued that “Miami Vice” by itself “was the major determinant of assault-gun fashion for the 1980s.”

Dr. Dietz told me he believes America’s news and entertainment media—its action movies, “reality” shows, news broadcasts, novels, and newspapers—play a far greater role in stimulating the country’s bloodlust than any other source, including underculture publishers like Paladin Press. “Nothing evil or disgusting known to man lacks a guidebook,” he told me. “But it’s not only Paladin producing them. Today Hollywood studios market more widely a more graphic version for the illiterate than Paladin would be capable of generating or selling. Whereas ten years ago someone wanting to know how to more effectively rob a bank or kill with poison or booby-trap a crack house would have to consult a more experienced offender or go to a library or bookstore, today they need merely turn on HBO. And so a lower intellectual grade of offender has been given access to what only those who could read or communicate had available in the past. That’s not Paladin’s doing. That’s Hollywood’s doing.”

Clearly, the role of movies and television in stimulating violence can never be quantified. Their impact, however, seems obvious. Consider how the phrase “Make my day” migrated from the movie Dirty Harry to car bumpers from coast to coast, even to a presidential speech, and, in slightly altered form, to the dialogue in a Disney “Duck Tales” cartoon. Recall too how sales of the Ingram submachine guns boomed after McQ, how Dirty Harry jolted sales of the Smith & Wesson Model 29. Add to this the American Psychological Association’s estimate that by the time a child finishes elementary school he will have watched eight thousand murders on television.

Early in 1993 I again visited the Frederick County gun show and, while loitering at a booth offering sawed-off shotguns, silencers, and submachine guns (including a MAC-10 for $595), listened in as a young boy peppered the dealer with questions. The image was pure Rockwell, but with a rather dark contemporary twist. The boy wore a baseball cap with the beak lifted high off his forehead. He had freckles and ruddy cheeks, and glasses that had slipped a bit down his nose. His jacket was new, and too big. Instead of trying out the stethoscope of some kindly Rockwellian doctor, he caressed the smooth metal finish of a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. He paused before a Barrett Firearms .50-caliber sniper rifle, which reared above the table on its bipod barrel rest. This was the gun Jim Moore had offered to show me in Las Vegas.

“Is this the same gun they used in the movie?” the boy asked the dealer.

“Right,” the dealer said. “The Navy SEALs.”

The boy touched the rifle. “He used this to shoot through a building,” the boy said with the kind of reverence once reserved for home-run baseballs.

“You shoot this at a building, it’ll take off a pretty good piece,” the dealer agreed.

The boy pointed at the powerful scope mounted on the rifle. “And he used this to see through the building.”

The dealer kept a straight face.

The power of the entertainment media in fostering the appeal of guns became especially clear to me one afternoon when I and my daughters visited a video store in hopes of renting Peter Pan. My two-and-a-half-year-old was immediately distracted by an almost life-size cardboard cutout of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in their Lethal Weapon roles, with Mel Gibson’s arm and his trademark Beretta extended into space. My daughter closed her hands around the Beretta, then pulled away, making her hands into the shape of a gun. She held them out before her in a position astonishingly like the isosceles combat stance used by police and their TV counterparts and, while imitating as best she could the sound of a gun, fired two pretend shots at her older sister. This was sibling rivalry, American style.

Our movies and TV shows do far more damage than simply boosting the appeal of weapons, however. They teach a uniquely American lesson: when a real man has a problem, he gets his gun. He slaps in a clip, he squints grimly into the hot noon sun, then does what he’s gotta do. The training begins early. In the summer of ’92, for example, I watched a TV commercial for the Super Soaker water gun, then the rage among pint-size assassins. The commercial offered a chilling parallel to the kind of real-life revenge killings carried out every day in the streets of America’s inner cities:

Two nerdy boys show up for a pool party at the home of a snooty preppy girl named Buffy. She shuts the door in their faces.

They return, however, this time dressed in black suit jackets, white shirts, black ties, black fedoras, and of course dark glasses, exactly like the Blues Brothers as portrayed by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, except that in place of black slacks the boys wear gaudy swim trunks. One boy solemnly opens a briefcase. His friend reaches in and pulls out the Super Soaker. “Oh, Buffeeee,” he calls in a mocking, nasal voice. She turns. He fires. Buffy is so shocked she spills her glass of punch over her face and torso.

The punch, of course, is dark red.

It was this lesson, above all, that Nicholas Elliot absorbed: when all else fails, maybe a gun can solve your problem.