Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER FOURTEEN} THE NEW TYRANNY

WHEN ONE FOLLOWS THE PROGRESS OF A single gun from design to homicide, the gaps in existing firearms regulations become painfully obvious. We accomplish little in this country by enacting bans on assault weapons and establishing waiting periods without first addressing the regulatory vacuum that allows manufacturers, distributors, and dealers to shrug off all responsibility for the diversion of guns from legitimate gun-distribution channels. An effective body of firearms laws must recognize an obvious truth obscured thus far by our cultural indulgence in the romance of guns and the effective propaganda of the gun lobby: when guns are easy to get, the wrong people get them easily.

Buying a gun should be the most difficult consumer ritual in America, instead of one of the easiest. Toughening acquisition will not harm legitimate gun owners. The right laws, in fact, can only help them. The right laws can reduce the incidence of impulsive teenage suicides. The right laws can limit the firepower of street guns and undoubtedly save the lives of a few innocent bystanders. The right laws, moreover, can give even gun buffs a greater appreciation of the dangers inherent in the weapons they buy and demonstrate society’s conviction that owning a gun imparts a monumental responsibility to the owner. The right laws could at last bring firearms into the twentieth century in terms of consumer-product safety. Who knows, someday our firearms manufacturers, so adept at devising ever more lethal weapons and ammunition, may even come up with a childproof gun. My Cuisinart food processor can’t be started without first taking a series of deliberate steps; how nice if the same could be said for the guns sold now to women and men for self-defense. Toughening the buying of a gun will not harm responsible users any more than toughening the licensing of hunters and boaters has harmed them. If anything, toughening the process will improve the fast-diminishing reputation of shooters, dealers, and manufacturers alike by reducing the “gun-nut” aura that now taints even those good souls who take pride in improving their marksmanship or who live in such desperate neighborhoods that gun ownership really is their only hope of self-defense.

Most important, toughening the process will staunch the free flow of weapons to the bad guys and others who simply should not own guns. Sure, some will acquire guns through burglary just as they do now. Others will drive trucks through the front walls of gun dealerships. And no matter how strict dealer licensing is, there will always be renegade dealers willing to sell guns into the black market. Likewise, there will always be gun manufacturers who tailor their designs deliberately to the demands of felons. But street crime typically is a crime of opportunity. So too is juvenile homicide. Kids have always fought and will forever do so, but the ready acquisition of guns by kids is a new phenomenon. Even our increasing suicide rate, according to the studies I cited earlier, may be associated with too-ready access to guns, allowing the despondent to blow their brains out upon the least dark whim.

The firearms industry has resisted regulation, disavowing any responsibility for the widespread costs and harm produced by its wares. But then, it has always been adept at ignoring the paradoxes inherent in the production and marketing of weapons. It develops ever more lethal weapons while at the same time insisting that guns are not inherently dangerous. It claims the moral high ground by describing its wares as tools of salvation for those afraid to leave their homes, but somehow deftly manages to sidestep the fact that one reason most of us are afraid to venture forth is that someone with the same gun is going to leap out from behind a bush and shove the barrel down our throats. And that’s if we are lucky enough to encounter the old-fashioned crook who merely wants our money, not the snappy new model who likes to sneak up behind us and put a bullet in our brains so he can use our credit cards for a couple of hours without fear of interception.

The NRA’s greatest coup has been in constantly bleating that gun controls cannot and will not work, while working feverishly to ensure that indeed whatever regulations are enacted are so full of exceptions and gifts to the downtrodden dealers and manufacturers that they could not possibly have an impact. Notice, please, that wherever possible in this book I have avoided using the phrase gun control, a term the NRA has conflated with paranoid visions of jack-booted agents kicking down the doors of honest gun owners.

If one parts the curtain hung by the NRA, one sees that in fact firearms regulations can and do work, when given half a chance.

South Carolina, as I mentioned earlier, was a primary source of crime guns seized in the Northeast until it passed the nation’s first law limiting sales of handguns to one a month. It quickly fell to the bottom of ATF’s list of states feeding firearms to New York. The National Firearms Act of 1934 sharply reduced criminal use of machine guns. The bad guys undoubtedly turned to other, more readily available guns, but at least when they used the guns, they fired one shot at a time. If still able to acquire machine guns from hardware stores and pawnshops, our felons and gang members would undoubtedly have done so, and the drive-by shootings we read so much about today would have taken far more innocent lives. Patrick Purdy’s attack on the Stockton schoolyard, for example, might have killed even more children had he used a true, fully automatic AK-47, rather than its semiautomatic equivalent. Machine guns made a comeback in the 1980s, but only because such manufacturers as RPB and S.W. Daniel placed guns on the market that could readily, if illegally, be converted from semiautomatic to fully automatic operation.

The Gun Control Act of 1968, however much reviled by the NRA, succeeded in establishing the national tracing network that law-enforcement agencies now take for granted. Strict gun controls in Washington, D.C., helped reduce gunshot homicides in the city by 25 percent from 1976 through 1987, but did not alter the rate of homicide involving other kinds of weapons or the homicide rate in neighboring Virginia and Maryland. This improvement, of course, was erased by the 1990s, when Washington experienced a wild surge of homicides that caused the city to be dubbed the murder capital of America. Although the National Rifle Association likes to point to this as one example of how gun controls cannot work, the real lesson is rather different. Gun controls in a single city cannot possibly succeed when that city is surrounded by regions with few or no controls.

Existing federal laws contain gaping loopholes that allow the free flow of guns from legitimate channels to the bad guys. We have seen, for example, that a consumer who makes a false statement in filling out form 4473 commits a felony; a dealer who does likewise commits only a misdemeanor. Dealers must keep detailed records of their sales of guns from their stores, but a private citizen can sell a gun to a friend with no restriction. A dealer operating at a gun show must follow all federal regulations, but a private citizen at an adjacent table can sell guns from his personal collection without so much as a signature. Federal law prohibits certain classes of individuals such as convicted murderers and dope peddlers from buying guns, then relies on those same individuals to exclude themselves by giving honest answers on form 4473. This last curiosity would be comical if not for its lethal effect.

These gaps in existing federal law, and the utter lack of uniform regulations governing most other aspects of firearms transactions, create insane juxtapositions of regulation and deregulation at those points where federal and state laws intersect. Guns Unlimited, as I’ve shown, played regional variations in the law to its advantage, selling customers a handgun in one jurisdiction, but completing the paperwork and delivering the weapon in another, less-regulated locale. In Maryland, state law requires that anyone who buys a handgun from a legitimate dealer must wait seven days before he can actually take possession of the gun; yet, as per federal law, if he buys that same gun from a private seller, say after seeing it advertised in the classified ads of his local newspaper, he can receive the gun immediately.

On December 14, 1992, Wayne Lo, a Montana boy attending Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bought a semiautomatic Chinese ancestor of the AK-47, called an SKS, simply by presenting his Montana driver’s license and plunking down $150. Before the McClure-Volkmer Act, he could not have bought the gun so readily. The Gun Control Act of 1968 had banned interstate sales. Even if Lo had established residency in Massachusetts, he still could not have walked away with the gun. Under Massachusetts law, he would have had to apply for a firearms identification card and wait thirty days for a background check. The McClure-Volkmer Act, however, allowed sales of rifles and shotguns to out-of-state buyers if the sale is conducted in accord with the laws of the buyer’s home state. Regulations in Montana are notoriously lax. Lo used the gun that night to kill a professor and a student, and to wound four others at the college. He had acquired the ammunition by mail directly from a North Carolina ammunition supplier. This transaction too was a dividend of the McClure-Volkmer Act, which repealed the Gun Control Act’s ban on interstate and mail-order sales of ammunition directly to consumers.

The lack of a uniform system of federal regulations allows traffickers to shop jurisdictions for the easiest commercial conditions. When South Carolina instituted its one-gun-a-month law, for example, Virginia became the number one source of crime guns found in the Northeast. Early in 1993, Virginia passed its own one-a-month law. Although the new law’s impact was not immediately apparent, it seemed certain to reduce the traffickers’ interest in Virginia. The trafficking will not stop, however. Just as many guns will make their way to the bad guys as ever before. The East Coast buyers will simply spend their money elsewhere, most likely Georgia, Ohio, and West Virginia.

That the nation needs a detailed, uniform code of firearms regulations ought to be, by now, beyond rational dispute. The fact is, many states have already passed firearms regulations far stricter than anything Congress has ever seriously debated. As of 1989, for example, twenty states already required that consumers first get some kind of license or purchase permit before acquiring a handgun; nineteen had a handgun waiting period ranging from forty-eight hours to up to six months.

The Second Amendment certainly poses no obstacle, despite the NRA’s rhetoric. As written in the Constitution, the full amendment reads: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The amendment may indeed guarantee individuals the right to bear arms. Then again, it may not. At this point, only a definitive ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court can resolve the matter. I for one remain intrigued by the “well-regulated” portion, which the NRA omitted when it displayed the rest of the amendment on the front of its Washington, D.C., headquarters. One gun-camp scholar has gone so far as to suggest that “well-regulated” means equipped with rifles that shoot straight. In his book, The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? David Kopel argues that “in firearms parlance ‘regulating’ a gun means adjusting it so that successive shots hit as close together as possible.” He writes that “‘regulated’ was an exhortation to competence, not an invitation to bureaucracy.” His conclusion, one he describes as “plausible,” is that a “well-regulated militia” meant “an effective citizen militia whose members hit their targets.” Kopel presents this notion three hundred pages into a detailed, heavily footnoted volume published by the Cato Institute that on first read may seem unbiased and almost scholarly. It is always important, however, to read anything on the gun debate carefully with an eye to capturing distortion and undisclosed bias. Kopel raises his true flag on page 152 where he cites research by “criminologist Paul Blackman.” Blackman may indeed be considered a criminologist in some circles, but he is also the NRA’s director of research. And Kopel, as I later found, is an NRA activist: and gun columnist. Nowhere, I might add, did the book divulge Kopel’s true identity.

I happen to side with established constitutional scholars who believe the document was designed to be applied at any time in the future with full relevance and authority to accommodate even such once-inconceivable developments as women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. I cannot help but wonder how James Madison would react upon reading a week’s worth of the Metro section of the New York Times, especially at year-end when the Times and most other big-city papers present their running tallies of the year’s homicides.

All the noise and dust generated by the debate over the true meaning of the Second Amendment obscures a fundamental question: Who cares? I recognize: that here I am inviting the NRA to do a little joyful editing and display this sentence in one of its ads or better yet in one of its emergency Minuteman mailings. (I say now, it’s okay, boys, you have my permission.) In fact, the Second Amendment does not, and never has, prohibited robust regulation of firearms, not even the NRA-conjured bogey, national registration of firearms.

Rather than viewing federal firearms regulation as the first step toward tyranny, as the NRA propagandists propose, we should see it as a means of ensuring that we can still enjoy the liberty we do have. We live now under the increasing restrictions of a particularly pernicious kind of tyranny that has sharply proscribed the contours of our lives. We do not go out at night without first considering the risks involved in doing so. Already many of us consider vast portions of America off-limits to us because of the potential for gun violence. We run red lights at lonely intersections. We choose our gas stations with care. We park as closely as possible to the entrances of our favorite malls. We avoid certain automated teller machines. When we pull up at our neighborhood 7-Eleven store, we look carefully through the display windows to see if the place is being held up. We do not intercede when we encounter an altercation among teenage boys because one or both may have a gun. We don’t dare yell at drivers who drive too fast through our neighborhoods. When our cars are hit from behind, we keep driving until we reach the nearest police station. In happier times this was called leaving the scene of an accident; now even my insurance company advises the practice.

Today when we send our kids off to school, we experience a brand-new kind of anxiety, the fear not that some bully will rough them up and steal their lunch money, but that they will be shot dead. What are we to advise our children today when they come home complaining of harassment by the school bully? Do we teach them how to fight, as Ward Cleaver might have taught “the Beave,” or do we buy them Kevlar vests and tell them to stay low? Should we buy our kids Raven pocket semiautomatics? A 1993 survey by Louis Harris found that four out of ten students said the fear of violence had sharply altered what they did with their free time and whom they picked to be their friends. These students lived in rural, suburban, and urban neighborhoods. Fifty-five percent said they wished their schools had metal detectors. In a related survey, Harris found that 59 percent of adults saw the dangers from guns as “serious” as or “more serious” than car crashes. Even the NRA’s rank and file seem troubled. Thirty-four percent of the NRA members captured in Harris’s survey agreed “young people’s safety is endangered by there being so many guns around these days.”

I read with rueful delight a 1993 cartoon by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Constitution, which showed an Arab terrorist squad in a bomb-packed car receiving some last-minute advice before heading for America. “Remember, carry a map. If you get lost, you may end up in a bad neighborhood. If someone rear-ends you, don’t get out. They may be armed carjackers. Keep your doors locked….”

In 1975, a congressional subcommittee asked the NRA’s Harlon Carter if he felt it was preferable to allow felons, drug addicts, and the mentally ill to acquire guns, rather than to establish a means of checking the backgrounds of all buyers. Yes, Carter responded, it was “a price we pay for freedom.”

We are advised today by the NRA and the likes of Paxton Quigley not to fight like the devil to free ourselves from the new tyranny of the gun, but to arm ourselves. The more guns the better. To anyone raised in the Vietnam War era, surely, this position has a disconcertingly familiar ring. For what is the NRA doing but reshaping that sad old maxim “We must destroy the village in order to save it.”

We must endure tyranny—the new tyranny of the gun with its concomitant loss of dignity, honor, and compassion—in order to avoid tyranny.

I propose a five-part omnibus law that will use the word ban only once—yes, I apologize, I betray a rather antiquated bias here: I do happen to believe that silencers should be outlawed, even those registered by police and law-enforcement agencies. However hard I try, I simply cannot foresee a practical use for silencers that would conform to our society’s belief in due process and the rule of law.

If enacted in its entirety, with none of the almost-criminal loopholes that have marred existing laws, I guarantee my proposed regulations, which I like to think of as the “Life and Liberty Preservation Act,” would sharply impede the flow of guns to kids, felons, and irresponsible shooters, with no significant impact on those upright citizens who keep guns for self-defense, for plinking, or for hunting. If anything, today’s patchwork of laws has made things far more difficult for the legitimate shooters, something the shooters tend to blame on gun-control advocates, the media, and other “gun grabbers.” In fact, the blame belongs with the NRA itself, which bears so much responsibility for the disarray in firearms regulation that exists today.

I propose, for example, to abolish all barriers to the interstate transportation of firearms. Wouldn’t that be nice, those of you who hunt or who for professional reasons feel a need to carry a gun? (I refer here to private detectives, bodyguards, and the like, not hit men.) In fact, I suggest that the nation’s first step ought to be the wholesale repeal of every state, county, and municipal firearms regulation currently on the books. The NRA is quite right in pointing out, ad nauseam, that New York and Washington, D.C., have some of the toughest gun-control laws in America, and two of the highest per capita homicide rates. Erase these ineffective regulations—but immediately replace them with a formal, rational federal code that at last recognizes guns for what they are: the single most dangerous, socially costly, culturally destabilizing consumer product marketed in America.

Herewith, the Life and Liberty Preservation Act, its provisions divided into three parts governing the distribution, purchase, and design of firearms:

Any serious effort to halt the mass migration of weapons to illegal hands must first concentrate on the firearms distribution network, in particular, the role played by retail dealers. As things stand now, it is simply too easy to get a license to buy and sell guns. As a first step, Congress should repeal all provisions of the McClure-Volkmer Act, except the machine-gun ban.

The Life and Liberty Preservation Act would then:

♦ Sharply increase the cost of the basic gun-dealer license to $2,500 and designate this a one-time business-entry fee. This alone would sharply reduce the number of Americans who now hold Federal Firearms Licenses. At $30 the license has proven too tempting for would-be felons to pass up.

♦ Require that before receiving a license, a prospective gun dealer first present proof that he has met all local and state regulations governing the operation of a business. For example, he would be required to show proof that his dealership satisfied all local zoning requirements.

♦ Require every dealer to take a course designed to familiarize him with all federal firearms laws, with the ways in which buyers try to evade the laws, and with proper techniques for protecting firearms and ammunition from robbers and burglars. The law further would require that dealers demonstrate a basic working knowledge of firearms and firearms law by passing a licensing examination, as doctors and lawyers must. The dealer would have to attend a refresher seminar every three years to revalidate his license. These seminars would brief dealers on new changes in federal regulations, new court precedents, and the latest patterns in firearms trafficking.

♦ Provide, for the first time, an objective definition of what it means to be “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms. Any dealer who wished to retain his license would have to prove that in his first year of operation he had revenue from gun sales of $1,000 or more. As proof, he could simply file a duplicate of his dealership’s annual IRS filing.

♦ Establish a scale of penalties for failure to keep accurate records. If, for example, ATF discovered that a dealer had failed to record the disposition of firearms sought in three ATF traces conducted in any one year, ATF could immediately revoke his license, subject to administrative appeal. Any dealer who refused to cooperate with an ATF trace request, even once, would likewise lose his license.

♦ Require mandatory inspection of the business premises of all new licensees. The dealer’s license would remain provisional until the dealer passed such an inspection, or until six months had elapsed, whichever came first.

♦ Require that consumers who buy guns from private sellers fill out a form 4473, just as they would if buying from a licensed dealer. In this case the sellers would send a copy directly to their regional ATF office. (Notice I said regional office—the same place where multiple-purchase forms currently end up. I emphasize this to calm those who may be inclined to leap from their chairs and condemn this measure as an effort to build a central database of gun owners.) The actual transfer of the weapon would take place in the presence of a licensed dealer. Such a service would not be that different from the role now played by dealers who act as middlemen in mail-order sales of firearms. Consumers cannot receive mail-order firearms directly, but must designate a local dealer, who then formally transfers the weapon, keeps the form 4473, and records the transaction in his acquisition and disposition book. Dealers should not object to my proposal. The new purchaser is highly likely to turn around and buy ammunition and other accessories from the dealer.

♦ Require that ATF issue to licensed dealers a primary display license and a set of formal, embossed duplicates to be signed by the dealer and notarized before being mailed to the distributor. Distributors in turn would be required to verify the dealer’s license number and name before sending him any guns. A distributor would accomplish this by calling a toll-free number at ATF’s licensing center, punching in his own license number, waiting for a prompt, then entering the dealer’s number and name. A tone would signal that the license was valid. An ATF computer would keep a digital record of the call and file it for later retrieval when inspectors got around to doing their routine compliance audit of the distributor’s business. Manufacturers would likewise have to verify the license numbers of distributors.

The primary benefit of these distribution regulations would be to shrink the number of licensed dealers to a core group of those willing to take the time and energy to establish bona fide businesses. These dealers, in turn, would benefit from reduced competition and by capturing as customers those consumers who became kitchen-table dealers just to buy guns at wholesale prices. Dealers who remained in the business would have a greater incentive to keep good records and to turn away clearly questionable buyers. Private sellers too would be less inclined to sell their guns to such buyers. The measures, moreover, would greatly bolster the tracing network.

It would be unfair, of course, and exceedingly naive to expect that dealers would suddenly become priestly arbiters of firearms distribution, rejecting customers who looked felonlike or who sweated too much or whose eyebrows twitched a tad too often.

My law would at last remove from their shoulders the weighty burden of screening customers through a measure that many ardent gun owners tell me they would be more than willing to accept….

The Life and Liberty Preservation Act would require that all prospective gun buyers age twenty-one or over first acquire a license-to-purchase. Yes, we are talking here about licensing gun owners. To qualify for the license, each consumer would have to pass a criminal background check and take an ATF-certified course covering firearms law, the use of deadly force, and safe gun-handling, and including lectures on the most common forms of firearms accidents, the importance of cleaning a gun, and how best to keep that gun out of the hands of children. It would be nice, but certainly not mandatory, if such a course also included a film or some other means of demonstrating the damage real bullets do to real people. Scare films of the kind I envision here were a staple of driver’s education classes at my high school: one image, of bodies strewn around a head-on wreck caused by a drunk driver, stays with me even now just as vividly as ever.

These purchase provisions also would:

♦ Require license applicants to demonstrate minimum proficiency with a handgun and a rifle. An appropriate firearm would be supplied to them for use during their training course. (Many firing ranges already provide rental guns, even machine guns.) Licensees would have to renew their licenses and undergo a new background check every five years, but the renewal process would be accomplished simply by mailing ATF a form attached to the original license. ATF would charge a licensing fee meant to recoup some of the program costs. The license would, of course, include a photograph of the holder, and such vital statistics as his age, height, weight, and the color of his eyes.

♦ Allow successful applicants to acquire guns in any state and to transport guns to any state. A rigorous licensing program would allow states and cities to lessen their vigilance and thus alleviate a good many of the headaches now endured by hunters, private detectives, and even state and local law-enforcement officers when they travel or relocate from one part of the country to another.

♦ Designate the use or manufacture of a counterfeit license a felony, with a mandatory sentence of five years in federal prison.

♦ Prohibit minors, as now, from acquiring handguns and rifles, and set the minimum age for purchases of both at twenty-one. (Currently federal law allows a minor to acquire a rifle when he turns eighteen. He must be twenty-one to buy a handgun.)

♦ Limit purchases of handguns to one a month. The law, however, would also establish a mechanism for exempting collectors and others with a compelling reason for buying more than one handgun at a time.

♦ Establish a waiting period of ten working days, both to provide a cooling-off period for consumers intent on killing themselves or others in a fit of passion, and to allow ATF to verify that the purchase license is still valid. A fresh criminal-record check would be unnecessary. The law would include a provision for emergency exemptions in situations where a gun buyer can demonstrate an immediate threat to life and limb if he cannot have his gun immediately. The Brady bill’s five-day waiting period will provide a welcome pause in gun transactions, but only for five more years, after which the pause will be eliminated and replaced by an instant criminal background check. This is an optimistic expectation given the complexity of developing any computer system capable of searching the databases of fifty states in any period of time even broadly qualifying as “instant.”

♦ Enact a nationwide version of the parental-liability laws now in force in Florida and California, which hold parents criminally liable if their children wound themselves or others using an improperly stored firearm.

These purchase provisions would, at the very least, compel consumers to recognize the grave dangers and responsibilities inherent in owning a firearm. The buyer-licensing program alone would save lives simply by requiring consumers to learn about the weapons they hope to acquire.

The Life and Liberty Preservation Act would include provisions aimed at restricting the firepower of consumer guns, improving the design of guns to make them safer for the people who buy them, and producing for the first time hard statistics on what makes, models, and calibers of guns are most often used in given crimes. These provisions would ban the sale or transfer of silencers, limit the magazine capacity of civilian firearms to ten rounds, and forbid the sale and possession of empty magazines having capacity for more than ten. The law also would take the long-overdue step of increasing the tax fee for transferring machine guns to $500, from the $200 fee established in 1934.

In addition, these design provisions would:

♦ Amend the Consumer Product Safety Act to include firearms and thus grant the Consumer Product Safety Commission authority to monitor firearms accidents and firearms defects, and to order the mandatory recalls of defective or unsafe guns. This measure would go a long way toward at last compelling firearms manufacturers to build safer guns, in particular child-safe guns. At last an official oversight agency could ask that most obvious of questions: If aspirin bottles can be childproof, why not guns?

♦ Require that police departments report to ATF the manufacturer, model, and serial number of every gun they seize in the course of their operations, along with a description of the primary criminal charge that prompted the seizure. Such a massive tracing effort would for the first time provide an accurate count of just how many guns are used in crime each year, and which models the crooks choose most often. The data would be published quarterly and annually in the Federal Register, complete with the name of each manufacturer, the caliber, and the model. The nation’s firearms industry would undoubtedly protest this provision, but it would provide the great benefit of at last establishing in quantifiable, objective terms the direct relationship between the production of guns and their use in crime. It would, for example, provide hard numbers on just how often criminals use assault-style weapons like the Cobray M-11/9.

The Life and Liberty Preservation Act doesn’t have a chance in hell of being passed.

Even the simplest regulations meet outraged opposition from the NRA, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Gun Owners of America. Theirs is a reflexive opposition based on the rather paranoid belief that any step toward firearms regulation must necessarily take us one more step down the road to federal confiscation of America’s guns and, willy-nilly from there, to tyranny and oppression. Yet survey after survey shows that most Americans favor rigorous firearms regulations. The 1993 Harris survey of adults found that 52 percent of us favored an outright ban on ownership of handguns, provided consumers could petition a court for special permission to own one. Sixty-seven percent favored limiting “the purchase of guns by any one person to one a month.” Eighty-two percent favored a federal law requiring that all handguns be registered with federal authorities.

Given all this support, why does America still stand virtually alone in the world as the nation with the fewest and least effective limits on the proliferation of guns?

The answer, I think, is that even those of us who favor strong regulation lack the conviction of those who oppose such laws. The vociferous few dominate the debate and shape the laws to suit their interests while the rest of us stand by and cluck at news of the latest homicidal spree.

Robert Sherrill in his 1973 book, The Saturday Night Special, suggested that all this mayhem might satisfy something deep within the American soul. “We enjoy it more than we will admit,” he wrote. “We experience the assassination of a Kennedy with all the wailing gusto that an Irish wake deserves. We are honest enough to admit, by implication at least, that gunplay involving some of our lesser celebrities doesn’t always, or uniformly, make us feel nearly so depressed…. We are like the old Wobbly who, shortly after Huey Long’s assassination, told a colleague, ‘I deplore the use of murder in politics, but I wouldn’t give two cents to bring the sonofabitch back to life.’”

The assassinations of the sixties were a unique and in a sense nonthreatening form of gun violence. We in the TV audience could congratulate ourselves on being safe because we, after all, were not in politics. Even the race riots in the last third of the decade seemed containable phenomena. Most of America watched from secure living rooms with a collective shaking of heads. I can remember watching the news in the weeks before one of my family’s annual trips to visit relatives in South Dakota. Although I did briefly wonder whether the world could remain intact, I assured myself there would be no riots in the town of Arlington, South Dakota, where my grandparents lived behind still-unlocked doors. I trusted the turnpike system to neatly whisk me past the smoldering remains of Newark and Detroit. Many Americans did buy guns in those years, enough to produce that largest-ever increase in gun sales, but the fact is, most of us fortunate enough to live outside the ghetto were as safe as rain. Many of us, no doubt, even saw a positive side to letting those people duke it out among themselves. This sense of remove from the battlefield has long been one of the fundamental obstacles to reasonable, effective gun legislation; it explains why our able representatives on Capitol Hill only feel empowered to crimp the free flow of guns when some hitherto unimaginable act of carnage demonstrates beyond doubt that violence knows no geographic or racial border.

Many of our most ardent supporters of firearms regulation became so a bit late, after the grotesque tragedy of gunshot violence had already speared their lives. Pete Shields founded Handgun Control Inc. after his son was shot dead in the infamous Zebra killings in San Francisco. Sarah Brady joined the cause after her son picked up a family friend’s revolver. A Sandston, Virginia, woman, Beryl Phillips-Taylor, began her crusade when she received a mailing from the NRA addressed to her son, who had been shot dead by a classmate two years before. “Hell flew in me,” she told a Baltimore Sun reporter. “There is a misconception by the general population that murder happens to others. The truth is that murder has no barriers. It can happen to your child just as easily as it happened to mine.”

Today more Americans of all races, classes, and ages are being touched by gun violence than ever before. The gunplay, indeed, seems to come closer and closer to home. In the course of my pursuit of Nicholas Elliot’s gun, I learned that the brother of an old high-school friend had been shot dead following an argument. On hearing this I remembered an afternoon in my teen years when this friend led me to his father’s bedroom and pulled a large auto-loading pistol from under the mattress, just to show me. I felt a mix of excitement and terror and asked him to please put it back. Another friend, an avid shooter, told me over lunch how as a college student he along with two friends had been kidnapped at gunpoint, but managed to escape. In June 1993, when Gian Luigi made his assault on a San Francisco law firm, a friend of mine was hard at work in his office a few floors above. In March 1992 a wealthy young bachelor who lived a few doors from my house was murdered in his company parking lot, shot once in the back of his head apparently by a car thief who wanted his $85,000 BMW. On the day the man’s mother put her dead son’s house on the market, the for-sale sign was emblazoned with cheery balloons and an extra signboard that called the place an “American Dream Home.”

The spreading violence evokes the forecasts made by AIDS researchers in the early days of the epidemic. As the disease gained momentum, forward-looking doctors warned that a time was fast approaching when the disease would cease to be a “gay” crisis; that every American, regardless of race, income, or sexual inclination, would soon know someone who was dying of the disease. The same, I think, can now be said of gun violence.

So what are we to expect in coming years if we continue on our current course? Will things get better on their own, and this era take its place beside the great hard times of history? Or will conditions simply worsen? Many of us already send our kids to child self-defense courses. When, I wonder, will some enterprising company introduce the first bulletproof vest for kids?

Prophecy is a dangerous pursuit, but some trends seem certain to continue gaining momentum for a good while to come. We will see, for example, a proliferation of more advanced and lethal variations on legal weaponry, such as guns with built-in laser sights and ever-more-powerful handguns, including more models built to fire .50-caliber bullets, the largest caliber allowed for unrestricted sale.

We will witness, and soon, firearms massacres conducted in realms we now naively consider off-limits to even our most craven killers. Schools are now accepted killing grounds—what Nicholas Elliot did is old hat. Post-office massacres do not surprise us either. The link between postal workers and random gun violence is now well-established in contemporary mythology, causing us all to contemplate that trip to the post office just a little more carefully than we did in the past. Law firms have been done. So have playgrounds and public pools.

What remains? Well, churches certainly. Funerals. Grocery stores. Museums. Baseball games. Hospitals—well, perhaps not hospitals. Most major urban hospitals have already felt the unaccustomed sting of violence in their sterile corridors and have already stepped up security.

We can in the next few years expect to see metal detectors turning up at the entrance doors of an ever-wider array of institutions, such as malls, emergency rooms, elementary schools, and fast-food shops located in perilous neighborhoods. This last may be of limited value, however. Another neighbor of mine was held up at the drive-through window of a Wendy’s restaurant located a few blocks from our homes. She had been hungry when she drove up to the window. When a robber pointed a gun at her head as she waited in line, her appetite disappeared.

The question is, when will we as a culture get the point?

In discussing this book with my editor and her marketing associates, we all came to the same conclusion. This book would never lack for a promotional tie to a national news event because a new massacre was bound to occur within the viable lifetime of the book, and this massacre would be more horrifying than the last.

When will we as a culture stop seeing gun ownership as a God-granted right, so precious as to be nurtured and preserved at the cost of thirty thousand corpses a year; when will we at last demand that all those armed patriots out there first demonstrate a little responsibility and recognize that while they are in the woods waiting for that eight-point buck to wander within range, a newly released felon in Nebraska is buying a gun to blow his ex-girlfriend away, a kid in East Baltimore is tucking a .45 into his belt to defend his lunch money, a toddler in Chicago is aiming the family gun at his baby brother, and a drunken husband in Beverly Hills is climbing the stairs to teach his wife a lesson she will not soon forget?

We can solve the problem of firearms violence. The National Rifle Association and its homicidal allies in Washington would have us believe otherwise, but we can solve this. We have solved other equally intractable, even comparably lethal, problems. We have awakened to the dangers of smoking to the point where smokers are now an embattled minority. We have virtually eliminated polio, smallpox, and the German measles. We have controlled highway litter and sharply reduced the presence of lead in our lives—atmospheric lead, that is. Anyone who has been to a recycling depot lately and seen young and old dutifully sorting colored glass from clear cannot help but marvel at how much we as a culture have changed our wasteful ways.

The nation’s success in reducing the death rate from traffic accidents provides the best model of what could be done with guns. Through a combination of lower speed limits, increased enforcement of drunk-driving laws, public service advertising campaigns, strict regulation of car safety, and nationwide monitoring of the causes and characteristics of traffic accidents, the death rate has declined to the point where public health researchers expected it to fall, by the turn of the century, below the death rate from firearms.

America’s gun crisis cannot be solved just by limiting the proliferation of guns and mandating responsibility on the part of gun owners. Solving the problem requires far more fundamental change. Where now our cities consider it an accomplishment simply to keep school-kids from getting killed, we must have excellent schools that cause hope to blossom. A true, full-scale National Service program might be a good start, offering interesting and creative jobs in far-flung portions of the country. Safe, clean housing for America’s poor would be nice too, in place of the somber, stinking temples of despair that ring most of our biggest cities. Vital too is federal recognition that times have indeed changed, that women do raise families all by themselves, that many couples need two incomes just to survive, and thus that access to good, safe, nurturing day care ought to be near the top of the nation’s domestic agenda, rather than at the bottom. All these are, or should be, obvious requirements. And these are just the minimum. We will have to fix much more in America if we are to slow the rise and expansion of gun violence.

The place to start is with guns themselves, and the time is now. There will be no better time. There will be far worse times.

Unfortunately, as the history of federal gun legislation so clearly demonstrates, a dramatic worsening may be necessary. The tommy-gun massacres brought the first federal controls; the riots and assassinations of the sixties brought the second. What will bring the third, in a country so stunned by violence that we now expect and accept armed rampages as if they were natural phenomena like hurricanes and tornadoes? “Maybe that’s the answer,” said David Troy, the special agent responsible for ATF law-enforcement in Virginia. “Right now you have people who are involved in violent crime and firearms violence who were never touched by it before. Maybe there is a watershed coming in the United States. We haven’t gotten there yet.”

More firearms atrocities will occur. In America today, this is a given. The greater atrocity, however, is to stand back and allow the gunslingers of America free play while the rest of us cower under the new tyranny of the gun.