Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ANY WORK OF JOURNALISM REQUIRES THE assistance of a large array of sources; any journalistic work on the subject of guns seems to require that many of these sources retain some degree of anonymity. To all those men and women who spoke with me on condition I would not reveal your names and professions, thank you. I recognize that trusting your privacy, livelihood, and perhaps even your personal safety is not an easy thing. I’d also like to thank the many honest, clear-eyed gun owners of America who told me, in correspondence and over the telephone, of their love of guns and the kinship that guns afford, and in a few cases of their real and pressing need to possess a weapon for self-defense. You provided me, often with a good deal of heat and enthusiasm, a much-needed perspective.

I owe an especially great debt to Bill Farley, Randy Singer, Dennis Henigan, Col. Leonard Supenski, Earl Taylor, Rex Davis, Jack “Ganja” Killorin, Thomas Stokes, Bernard La Forest, David Troy, Edward M. Owen, Donald Adams, Paxton Quigley, and Peder Lund. A special thanks goes to J. Michael Dick, for having the courage to talk on the record about matters that are too often buried beyond public view.

Betty Prashker, Michelle Sidrane, Kim Reilly, Andrew Martin, Joan DeMayo, and Penny Simon made me feel extraordinarily welcome at Crown Publishers, and convinced me from the start that there is still a taste among American publishers for confronting the most troubling issues of the day. Denise Shannon got the ball rolling. Court TV, in New York, graciously allowed me to watch a video of the entire Farley vs. Guns Unlimited trial. Mike Curtis, Cullen Murphy, and William Whitworth of The Atlantic Monthly demonstrated an exceptional tolerance for lengthy prose; Sue Parilla, queen of the Atlantic’s fact-checking squad, taught me the meaning of pain.

The award for patience goes to my wife, Christine Gleason, and my children, Kristen and Lauren, for not ejecting me from the house as my deadline neared and my mood decayed. Jane Berentson, my boss at the Wall Street Journal, cheerfully engineered a much-needed month of leave, which her bosses, John Brecher and Paul Steiger, magnanimously granted.

Last, I’d like to acknowledge a debt to the occupants of that white Cadillac with Virginia plates who paid my neighborhood a visit—who fired a paint ball gun four times at my home at 3:30 one Sunday morning. If I ever needed reassurance that I was on the right track, you gave it to me in as vivid and convincing a manner as any I could imagine.