Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER EIGHT} THE DEALER

ON A BRILLIANT MORNING IN JUNE 1992, I paid a visit to Guns Unlimited. I had arranged to meet its manager, Mike Dick, at the store at nine. His full name was J. Michael Dick and he was the son of the store’s founder and owner, James S. Dick, who by then had limited his gun-dealing to sales at weekend gun shows.

My drive had begun an hour earlier in Virginia Beach, on an expressway that took me past metropolitan Norfolk, then plunged under the Elizabeth River. From the highway Norfolk looked prosperous, with a perimeter of high glass buildings, a brand-new hotel, and a festive riverside development similar to Baltimore’s Harborplace. But I had been downtown several times before and knew that urban pressures had turned this portion of Norfolk into a Potemkin village. Two blocks in from the city’s gleaming rim, life seemed to stop. Abandoned buildings, some boarded, some just empty, lined block after block. The streets were clean, however. There were no piles of litter, no plumes of broken glass, and no people, just a clean desolation like that of a city awaiting a hurricane.

As I traveled, the landscape gradually softened. Brittle urban architecture gave way to suburbs, then to cool green countryside. From time to time I spotted the giant cranes of shipyards and cargo wharves along the distant blue band of the Roads. I had expected Carrollton to be a neat little Southern town of stores and a church or two arrayed along a clearly demarcated central avenue. The Carrollton I found, however, consisted primarily of a small shopping plaza on the north side of Route 17.

Guns Unlimited occupied one of the plaza’s seven retail establishments, which were arrayed along a cinder-block rectangle fronted with a hot, white-gravel parking lot. A BP gas station and convenience store occupied the western end of the lot. A poster in the window of the video store immediately to the right of Guns Unlimited advertised a movie called Mobsters; the poster consisted mainly of eight stylized bullet holes. The only other car in the parking lot was a black-and-white Ford Mustang belonging to the local sheriff’s department. The deputy glanced my way now and then, before wandering into the convenience store. As it happens, he too was waiting for Guns Unlimited to open. He had heard about a new kind of ammunition and wanted to ask about it. He was a frequent browser at the store, the clerks would later tell me—one of that class of shooter who finds guns and everything about them infinitely compelling. He was welcome, they said; it was always nice to have a patrol car parked outside as a deterrent against the daylight gun-shop robberies that as of 1992 had become a frequent and often lethal fact of life in the gun trade.

Mike Dick and his father held two of the nation’s 245,000 firearms-dealer licenses, and two of the 7,500 licenses issued to residents of Virginia alone, where at the time of our meeting gun controls outside the major cities were virtually nonexistent. The lack of regulation probably traced its roots to 1776 when Virginia became the first colony to adopt a bill of rights, which included the declaration that a “well regulated Militia, composed of the body of the People, trained to Arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defense of a free state.” By the time Nicholas acquired his gun, Virginia’s enthusiasm for firearms had turned the state into a massive shopping mall for gun traffickers from the North. A Baltimore police detective described Virginia to me this way: “It’s the only place I know where you can go get gas, diapers, and a gun at the same time.” As one Guns Unlimited clerk put it, during a court deposition, Virginia was “Second Amendment” country.

A thick printout of Virginia’s licensed firearms dealers, which I bought from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ disclosure branch, captured this penchant for mixing gun peddling with other pursuits. The list included Capt. Mike’s Seafood, Ray’s Used Cars, Dale’s Exxon & Grocery, Miss Molly’s Inn, Miracle Chimney Sweep, the Capitol Cafe, Forbes Window Co., Stallard’s Shoe Shop, Jenning’s Music Co., Bucks Barber Shop, Glasgow Video, the Portsmouth-Norfolk chapter of the Izaak Walton League, and Camp Sequoya for Girls in Abingdon. Some of the business names listed in the printout were tantalizing in and of themselves, such as Boys Noisy Toys, The Gunrunner, Gut Pile Guns, and, my favorite, Life Support Systems of Norfolk.

Dick was late, but two of his clerks arrived and invited me and the sheriff’s deputy inside. The shop was small, no larger than a suburban living room, with display cases arranged in a U shape and a central table containing miscellaneous accessories and special “safety” ammunition for use in home defense, including the Glaser “safety” round, a bullet that ruptures on impact and scatters a multitude of tiny steel balls through whomever it strikes. One medical examiner, writing in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, reported on the mysterious X ray he had made of the skull of a suicide victim. Instead of finding one or two bits of metal, he saw dozens scattered through the dead man’s brain like stars. The manufacturer calls the bullet a safety round in the belief that its pellets are less likely to pass through bodies and walls to injure bystanders on the other side. At up to $3 a cartridge, Glaser safety rounds are not for practice.

The store was a fortress. The Dicks had embedded steel “tank traps” in the sidewalk out front, this to prevent the recurrence of what has now become a fairly routine, if hardly subtle, means of burglarizing the gun stores of America: the use of trucks to crash through the front wall of the store. The Dicks learned the value of tank traps a few years ago when a thief backed a dump truck into the display windows of Guns Unlimited, then climbed out and stole dozens of handguns. An alarm system now guarded the place at night. The front door had been reinforced with steel. Steel herringbone grates covered the inside surfaces of the two large plate-glass windows. A big Pepsi machine stood against the grate just inside the door as a barrier to anyone hoping to cut through the glass to reach the door locks. As a last defense, the two clerks wore large-bore handguns strapped to their hips, one a revolver, the other a black auto-loading pistol. One clerk, dressed in black and wearing tinted glasses, told me he and his partner were careful to stand at different points in the shop so that no one could get the drop on them simultaneously. He untacked a brief news clipping from the bulletin board behind him and proudly handed it to me. The item reported how just that week a Portsmouth gun-shop owner had shot and killed a would-be robber. No charges were filed.

Mike Dick arrived in jeans and a T-shirt. He was a young man, a bit round at the corners, whose prior career was in the hospitality industry. He joined Guns Unlimited to help his father salvage the business, which had suffered badly not only from the recession but from the sudden decampment of so many military men from the Hampton Roads area during the Gulf War. The domestic gun industry as a whole had likewise experienced declining sales over the previous few years, and that March one of the country’s highest-profile arms makers, Colt’s Manufacturing, had filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11. At the time of the shootings at Atlantic Shores, however, the industry was enjoying a robust surge in sales, and Guns Unlimited was thriving. As of 1990, James Dick owned three Guns Unlimited stores, including branches in Virginia Beach and Portsmouth. But he too had been forced to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. By the time I met his son, Guns Unlimited had scaled back to just the Carrollton store.

The company was hardly a big-time arms dealer. Financial statements filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Norfolk show that in April 1992 it had sales of $30,000, which produced a net profit after wages, taxes, and other operating costs of only $503. The best month of the preceding dozen had been April 1991, when Guns Unlimited’s revenue of $51,000 yielded a net profit of $1,752, the kind of money a big arms dealer like Interarms of Alexandria, Virginia, probably spends on lunch when wooing a major customer.

At its peak, the company advertised aggressively on television and with huge fourteen-by-forty-eight-foot billboards that featured a giant handgun and proclaimed NO PERMITS, a reference to the fact that in Isle of Wight County as in most of the rest of Virginia you didn’t need a permit to buy handguns. Regulations were much stiffer in individual cities in Hampton Roads. Portsmouth, for example, required that buyers first had to get a city police permit. Guns Unlimited used the placement of its three stores to defeat these laws. In a deposition, Christopher Hartwig, a clerk until May 1991, said that if a customer at the Portsmouth store needed a gun right away, a clerk would drive the gun to the Carrollton store and meet the buyer there.

The practice came to light in a deposition given by Hartwig during the negligence suit against Guns Unlimited.

“Is that something the salesclerk would suggest or the customer?” asked Randy Singer, the Norfolk attorney who brought the suit on behalf of the murdered teacher’s family. A bright, soft-spoken young man, Singer had been driving back from Disney World on December 16, 1988, with his own children safely in the car—they were Atlantic Shores students also, but had gotten permission for the trip—when he heard a news broadcast about Nicholas Elliot’s shooting spree.

“I can’t lie,” Hartwig said. “We would do it.”

But other shops did it too, he said. “Most people don’t want to wait…. It would be like waiting two weeks to buy a nice car. You would want it today if you got the money. So they’d send the gun… to the other store and then all the paperwork, everything would be done right there.”

This bit of gun-law arbitrage was legal. In the ethos of the gun trade, legal meant acceptable.

“Guns Unlimited is very well respected,” Mike Dick assured me over coffee at the convenience store at the end of the little mall. He told me he’d been invited to join the state police firearms advisory board and had assisted ATF in numerous investigations, often calling the regional office after—or even during—suspicious transactions. “In fact, I would venture to say if you talked to the local regional office of ATF, you would find that no one in this region assists them as much as we do.”

At the same time, Guns Unlimited was more than willing to sell an especially lethal weapon to an adolescent—a weapon, moreover, that its own staff had derided as serving no useful purpose. At one point in the deposition process, Randy Singer asked another former Guns Unlimited clerk what anyone would use a Cobray M-11/9 for.

“Whatever you want to use it for,” the clerk answered. “Off the record, personally I wouldn’t use the damn thing for crab bait.”

The clerk went on to say that he would never recommend the gun for target shooting, hunting, or self-defense.

Was there anything he could recommend it for, Singer asked?

“Boat anchor.”

Hartwig was equally disparaging: “It’s good for nothing.” He allowed, however, that one class of customer did seem drawn to the weapon. “Your blacks are real impressed with them. We usually joke around about it because that’s the first thing they want to look at when they come in, or we get phone calls—’Do you have an Uzi? Do you have an M-11?’—because they see it on TV. They feel pretty powerful having one of those.”

Nonetheless, he said, “the gun is a piece of junk.”

As to whether the Cobray was any more deadly than other guns, Mike Dick, James Dick, and their clerks were in agreement. They cited one of the fundamental tenets of America’s gun culture and a cherished dictum of the National Rifle Association: all guns were created equal. At bottom an AK-47 is no more dangerous than a High Standard .22; a hundred-round Caleco semiautomatic pistol no more deadly than a Smith & Wesson .38.

Mike Dick also gave the Cobray a poor appraisal. “I hate to use this particular term, but it’s a toy,” he told me. “It’s a fun gun for a person who wants to go out and line up a bunch of cans on a log, or to shoot at a target at very close range.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “What I have a problem with is the implication that this particular gun because of what it costs or what it looks like or how many bullets it holds is inherently bad. With very little effort at all, cosmetically, that gun could be any other gun.”

And yet it is cosmetics that account for some of the Cobray’s appeal, as even he acknowledged.

“The Cobray is bought, I think, mainly because of its looks. It does in fact look kind of evil. And it does carry an awful lot of rounds.” He was careful, however, to hew to yet another gun-camp theme: the large-capacity magazine had a sporting purpose. “Many people like to get multiple magazines or larger-capacity magazines simply to save time on reloading while they’re at the range. When you’re paying by the hour for range time, a lot of people do feel the need to stock up as much as possible.”

Just as Nicholas Elliot knew he wanted to buy his gun at Guns Unlimited, so too have other traffickers, gang members, and killers chosen Guns Unlimited as their dealer of choice, a fact that had given Guns Unlimited something of a notorious reputation in Virginia’s Tidewater region—unjustly, perhaps, but also unavoidably, given the peculiar nature of firearms retailing.

In two cases in the 1990s gun traffickers recruited straw-man buyers to shop at Guns Unlimited and purchase large numbers of guns, from high-quality Glocks to cheap Davis pistols. In both cases, according to documents in Norfolk federal court, the traffickers specifically directed their recruits to Guns Unlimited; in both cases Guns Unlimited did indeed act as an exemplary corporate citizen.

But a closer look at the two trafficking cases shows that Guns Unlimited and gun dealers in general operate in a world where profit and morality bear an inverse relationship to each other—where a truly moral dealer who followed his best social instincts at every turn would more than likely wind up on a bread line. What does it mean that even a “good” dealer can wind up promoting crime? Has gun retailing become simply too costly a pursuit for our society to tolerate?

In August 1991, Amir Ali Faraz, a twenty-two-year-old student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, asked a friend of his, Matthew Jones, about buying “a couple of firearms.” Faraz couldn’t buy the guns on his own, he knew, because his permanent residence was in Pennsylvania and he had only a Pennsylvania driver’s license.

This posed no great problem in Jones’s eyes. About two weeks later, on August 30, 1991, Faraz met with Jones. Jones gave Faraz a Virginia driver’s license belonging to a twenty-one-year-old Virginia resident, Brant Gomez Requizo, who had lost his driver’s license earlier that year. Jones took Faraz to Guns Unlimited, where Faraz bought six high-caliber handguns—four for himself, and one each for Jones and a friend of Jones’s who had accompanied them to the store. A week later Faraz sold three of his guns to Jones for $1,200. Faraz would later tell ATF agents that Jones had bragged he could sell the guns “for a ‘big profit’ in the Tidewater area to people who would take them up north and make even a bigger profit from them.”

In the gun trade, buying more than one gun at a time automatically raises a warning flag; in fact, ATF requires dealers to mail in a multiple-purchase form anytime a customer buys two or more handguns within a period of five working days. Nonetheless, in the absence of specific local regulations, anyone in America can walk into a gunstore and buy a hundred handguns. The dealer is under no obligation to telephone ATF, or even to inquire why anyone would want so many guns. All the dealer must do is mail the form by the close of business on the day of the purchase. The buyer, meanwhile, is free to scoop up his hundred handguns and start selling.

ATF will investigate high-volume purchases, provided it learns of them. If a purchase takes place on a Saturday night, however, ATF will not see the multiple-purchase form for several days. Meanwhile, the guns will begin their rapid migration through the illicit-arms network. Guns trafficked from Norfolk, Virginia, for example, typically wind up in the hands of crooks in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, half a day’s drive up Interstate 95—nicknamed the Iron Road for all the illicit weapons that make the trip. In 1992, ATF conducted a massive tracing project to find out where the guns recovered from crime scenes in New York City had begun their travels. The agency discovered that Virginia alone accounted for 26 percent of the guns, more than any other individual state. Florida came in second, supplying 19 percent; Texas third with 11 percent; Georgia, home of S.W. Daniel, was fourth at 9 percent. Even Batman, in a December 1992 comic book, noted how easily the crooks could buy guns in Virginia. In the early 1970s most crime guns seized in New York came from South Carolina, but in 1975 the state passed a law allowing consumers to purchase only one gun per month. Although the law included a huge loophole—for inexplicable reasons it exempted purchases made at gun shows, a common source of crime guns throughout the country—it succeeded in sharply reducing the number of South Carolina guns found at New York crime scenes. South Carolina contributed only 2 percent of the New York crime guns traced by ATF in 1992. Virginia, deeply embarrassed by its role as crime-gun distributor of the Eastern Seaboard, passed a similar law in 1993. Before it took effect, however, ATF found that gun buyers in Virginia made 3,400 multiple purchases a year, or nearly ten a day. That the notification of such purchases takes place by mail in an age when virtually every ordinary consumer transaction involves some immediate form of computer verification is but one of the peculiar ironies that characterize arms commerce in America.

Mike Dick managed the first sale to Faraz and was immediately suspicious, enough so that he telephoned the ATF field office in Norfolk to alert the bureau to Faraz’s purchases. (Dick also filed the multiple-purchase form.) Over the next two weeks Faraz returned three more times and bought twenty-nine more guns, selling twenty-five to Jones, according to court documents. On the last of these shopping trips Faraz placed an order for thirteen more handguns, all Glock pistols, the same guns now adopted by police departments around the country. Mike Dick telephoned ATF while Faraz was still in the store and helped choreograph an undercover operation against Faraz. Dick allowed the bureau to choose the day on which Guns Unlimited would notify Faraz that the guns he had ordered were ready for pickup. The agency chose September 17, 1991, a Tuesday.

Agents took up positions inside and outside the store and waited. At about five-fifteen that evening, a 1987 Pontiac Grand Am, registered to Faraz, pulled into the Guns Unlimited parking lot. Faraz stepped up to the counter and presented Brant Requizo’s driver’s license, which gave an address in Norfolk, Virginia. As an ATF agent watched, Faraz signed the required form 4473 with Requizo’s name. Faraz left the store carrying the guns, then drove home, where agents kept him in sight while others contacted first Brant Requizo’s mother and then Brant himself to confirm that his license had been lost.

At eight-forty, the agents arrested Faraz at his home. Faraz admitted buying the guns for Matthew Jones—Jones, he said, had agreed to pay him $6,000 for ten of the Glocks, or roughly $1,000 more than Faraz had paid to Guns Unlimited. The agents persuaded Faraz to make a monitored call to Jones and arrange to deliver the ten guns later that night. The stakeout team followed Faraz to the two A.M. rendezvous and arrested Jones.

Jones in turn told the agents that he had arranged to sell the guns to two New Yorkers and was to be paid $500 for his services.

Both Faraz and Jones were convicted of violating federal firearms laws. At Faraz’s sentencing hearing on January 9, 1992, his attorney, John Cooper, complained to the judge that the clerks at Guns Unlimited should have been able to tell from the picture on Brant Requizo’s driver’s license that Faraz was not Requizo. Requizo, the license showed, stood five foot five and weighed 131 pounds; Faraz was a 215-pound weight lifter. Cooper said, “There’s something fundamentally strange about our society allowing somebody to go in and buy forty-eight guns within the course of a month on an ID that doesn’t look anything like him.” The judge, however, sentenced Faraz to seven months in prison, with two years’ supervised release.

Mike Dick was proud of his role in the investigation. “I don’t just send the forms in and hope it takes six months for ATF to get around to them,” Dick told me. “If there is something that’s obviously a problem—and this obviously was—my opinion is the best way to correct the problem from a society standpoint is to get these people off the street. If I just refuse to sell them weapons, nothing’s going to happen. They’re just going to go to someone less ethical than myself. And he may send the multiple-purchase form in, he may not send it in. Not all dealers are good.”

Society did not make out in this deal quite so well as Guns Unlimited. The store booked at least $15,000 in sales. Yet twenty-nine of the forty-eight handguns that Faraz bought wound up in Matthew Jones’s hands and thus in the gun-trafficking network, where weapons migrate quickly to their final users. (Some of the guns were kept by Jones, Faraz, and some of Faraz’s friends.)

In the second trafficking case, a local college student, Dean Archer, was recruited to buy guns by a convicted felon. He made his first purchase on December 1, 1990, when he bought four handguns from Guns Unlimited—not just any guns, but four inexpensive pistols made by Davis Industries, a California company whose guns are favored by traffickers who buy them cheaply in jurisdictions with lax controls, then sell them at a steep markup to inner-city buyers.

No one at Guns Unlimited seemed overly concerned by the purchase. The clerk on duty that Saturday night did not feel moved to telephone ATF. Moreover, she sold Archer the guns on the strength of a rent receipt for a Virginia apartment and his driver’s license—a New York driver’s license.

When ATF learned of Archer’s purchase—three days later—the agency was instantly suspicious and launched a preliminary investigation. A few days after the first purchase Archer reappeared at Guns Unlimited, this time accompanied by a young woman, Lisa Yvonne Scott. Scott bought seven cheap Davis handguns. Again ATF learned of the sale only through a multiple-purchase form mailed by Guns Unlimited. Again the form arrived three days after the purchase—more than enough time for those guns to make their way from hand to hand, state to state. And again ATF immediately assumed that something illicit had occurred.

ATF’s Norfolk office called Guns Unlimited to get more details and learned that Scott had been accompanied by an unidentified male later identified as Dean Archer. By this point, however, eleven of the country’s favorite crime guns were on the street.

A few days later Scott appeared again and bought thirteen Davis pistols. This time Mike Dick telephoned ATF. Nonetheless, Archer and Scott left the store with their new purchases. The total of cheap and deadly Davis pistols bought by the pair had risen to twenty-four. Four days later Scott and Archer made yet another buying trip, but at last ATF was waiting. The two were arrested and convicted.

Clearly the store had been helpful to the bureau. But why would Guns Unlimited even consider selling a handgun to a buyer presenting an out-of-state license for identification? Federal law explicitly forbids out-of-state buyers from acquiring handguns.

Dick explained that the clerk accepted the license as identification only because it had a photograph of Archer and established the link between his face and his name. A Norfolk rent receipt and an ID card from a local college established that he lived in Virginia. The fact that he was enrolled in college explained why he would have a New York license and be renting an apartment in Virginia.

Federal law grants a licensed gun dealer broad discretion to refuse a sale to anyone; a brochure mailed to licensees shortly after they get their licenses states in bold print, “Know Your Customer.” Wouldn’t prudence have dictated that Guns Unlimited simply refuse to sell weapons when the nature of the sale provides clear grounds for suspicion—clear enough, certainly, for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms?

“Yes, they tell me I can refuse sales,” Dick said. “They tell me I have the discretion to do that. But in practical terms, that doesn’t give me the right to infringe on one’s civil rights.”

I asked him how he felt knowing that Nicholas Elliot and various gun traffickers had specifically sought out Guns Unlimited as the place to acquire their guns.

“Well, actually, good,” he said. “I don’t know how to describe it without sounding… bad. Because I come out of hospitality, customer service is my number one concern. Period. Beyond all others. The ethnicity of an individual, in my restaurants, my hotel rooms, my store, is absolutely unimportant. I don’t care what part of town you live in, what race you’re of, you’re going to be treated like a human being.”

“But I’m not talking about race. All I—”

Dick cut me off. “But that’s the point. I have a stronger black clientele than any store in Tidewater and I would bet any store in the state, and maybe any store in the Southeast, because—and word gets around—I treat people like human beings, and they can’t always get that elsewhere.”

One such client was Jean-Claude Pierre Hill, a young black physician from Virginia.

On March 20, 1991, Hill walked into the Guns Unlimited store in Carrollton and was met at the counter by Mike Dick. Soon afterward, Hill decided to buy two stainless-steel Colt .45 auto-loading pistols, each priced at $529.99. He ordered the guns and put down a $100 deposit, then left the store. He returned on March 29 to pick up his guns and was again helped by Mike Dick. Dick brought out the two gleaming guns and let Hill inspect them, then pulled out a copy of form 4473 for Hill to fill out and sign.

ATF requires that the buyer himself fill out the top portion of the form, which asks for an address, details of the buyer’s physical appearance, and other information. The buyer must also answer eight questions about his background and mental health.

Hill wrote down an address in Hampton, Virginia, said he was born at Clarke Air Force Base in the Philippines on July 17, 1961, and described himself as standing five feet six inches tall and weighing 170 pounds. At the prompt for “race,” he wrote “other.”

Next he answered the eight questions. The first four questions asked if he was currently under indictment, if he had ever been convicted of a felony, if he was currently a fugitive from justice, and if he used drugs. He answered no to each.

The fifth question asked: “Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective or have you ever been committed to a mental institution?”

Here too Hill answered no.

Yet from July 25 through September 18, 1990, Hill had been a patient in an Air Force psychiatric unit, where he was diagnosed as paranoid, schizophrenic, and prone to exhibit “aggressive behavior.” On several occasions Hill threatened the hospital staff, once saying, “I’m going to get you when I get out of here, I’m going to get you all.”

From time to time, the hospital ordered him placed in four-point restraints. This was a prudent measure, as it happens. On the evening of August 29, 1990, Hill—at that moment unrestrained—leapt from his chair and punched a resident physician in the face, breaking the young doctor’s nose. Before the staff could restrain him, Hill punched the doctor again.

He threatened to kill members of the staff. He told a nurse, “I’m going to bring my gun back when I’m released and blow your goddamn brains out, you bitch.”

Hill answered the remaining questions on form 4473 and passed the form back to Mike Dick, who looked it over and asked Hill to explain what he meant by “other,” in the race box. Hill said his mother was French, his father African American; to Dick, however, Hill was clearly black. Dick asked him to be more specific. Hill changed the answer to “black.”

Still, something about Hill made Dick uncomfortable.

Dick remembered the case well.

“I can tell you that in that particular situation there was something wrong about him,” he told me during our conversation over coffee that June morning. Hill claimed to have been in the Army, but knew nothing about how to field-strip a Colt, “one of the first things you learn in boot camp,” Dick said. “I called ATF while he was in the store; I said I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s just something not right here.”

ATF ran a background check through the National Crime Information Center, Dick said, but found nothing. No one at the agency’s Norfolk office knew of Hill or had any reason to worry about him. So Dick sold Hill the guns.

“Why?” I asked. “Couldn’t you have just said, ‘You worry me, I don’t think you were in the Army, I’m not going to sell you these weapons’?”

“You’re absolutely right, that’s what I could have said. But do I trample on somebody’s individual rights simply because I feel bad and ATF says I have the discretion to do it?”

In addition to the two Colts, Hill bought two extra magazines, some cleaning equipment, and 270 rounds of ammunition. He paid $1,147.87 in cash and left.

He had never signed the federal purchase form, however. And Mike Dick, despite his concerns about Hill, had not noticed the omission—even though the buyer’s signature is an absolute requirement before any handgun purchase can be completed, and ATF insists the dealer witness the signature.

“I don’t really have a good answer as to why I did not further pick up the signature,” Dick said in testimony one year later in a Pennsylvania court. Guns Unlimited later caught the omission, Dick testified, and sent Hill a letter stating “please come in at your earliest convenience and sign this form for us.”

The letter came back, however, bearing a Postal Service notice that the address did not exist.

April 8, 1991, by all counts, was a stunningly beautiful day in Philadelphia, the sun bright and temperatures in the seventies. The banners along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway moved gently in the breeze. At the offices of CIGNA Corp., an insurance company, four executives gathered for a walk to a popular restaurant on the parkway, where they planned to celebrate the forty-ninth birthday of a colleague, Peter Foy, who was married and the father of two children. The lunch lasted only an hour. Everyone had chicken salad. The executives—Peter Foy, Robert Dowe, John Senatore, and Leonard Allen—had to be back at CIGNA for a one P.M. meeting.

They walked back down the parkway, Foy beside Dowe, Sena-tore beside Allen.

Witnesses, including a Philadelphia police officer, saw a blue Chevy Cavalier pull up at the curb. They saw the driver, a short black man, calmly exit the car, walk up behind the four men, and open fire with a large pistol. Moments later, he just as calmly returned to the car, adjusted his side mirror, and drove off. The car had Virginia plates.

Robert Dowe hadn’t seen the car or its driver. He heard an explosion. “I did not see anything happen to Peter,” he later testified. “The only thing I knew was that a round was fired and it was very, very close, and as I was trying to get down, I felt my—I believe I was trying to turn my head because I knew the shot was coming from behind me, and I felt my head pop. I knew I was shot in the head.”

For no reason, purely at random, Dr. Jean-Claude Pierre Hill, carrying one of the stainless-steel Colt pistols he had bought a week before from Guns Unlimited, had chosen to attack the four executives. Foy, who weighed 284 pounds and stood six foot two, went down first. The .45 bullet entered the right side of his head just above his ear, then exited on the left side, leaving a massive “stellate,” or star-shaped, exit wound. A hydrostatic shock wave—a pressure surge driven ahead of the bullet—fractured his skull in many places, even the orbital plates behind his eyes. The bullet macerated his brain—“not lacerated,” emphasized James Lewis, a forensic pathologist with the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office—“but macerated. The bullet basically destroyed his back portion of his lobes of the brain.” Foy was pronounced dead at Hahnemann Hospital at 6:47 the following morning.

Robert Dowe too had been struck in the head, but he had been lucky. The bullet entered at his temple, exited near his ear, then reentered his body, plunging into his right shoulder and exiting through his arm. Another of Hill’s bullets struck John Senatore in the arm, then continued on into his chest where it punctured a lung. Leonard Allen, the luckiest of the three, dove for cover when he heard the shots. “As I was diving,” he testified, “something glanced through my hair.” He was uninjured.

Jean-Claude Hill was found guilty of first-degree murder, with the caveat that the jury believed he was mentally ill.

“How did you feel when you heard about this?” I asked Mike Dick. “That this guy had taken these guns you sold him, even though you had doubts, and killed somebody—the ultimate deprivation of somebody’s rights? Did it cause you any sleepless nights?”

“No.”

“Did you get drunk?”

“No. I did everything I possibly could have, short of compromising something I feel very strongly about. And that is, I’m not going to decide if you are a worthwhile person or not. He gave me red flags. I checked him out. Had there been anything, had ATF found mental instability in his background, had ATF said he was [dishonorably] discharged, I could have gone to him and said, ‘Jean-Claude, I’m not going to sell you these guns.’ But I’m not going to decide somebody’s character based on my impressions of him, I’m just not gonna do it. It’s not necessarily tied to any Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, it’s not tied to my right as a retailer not to do business with somebody. I just would not want to put myself in the position of deciding someone else’s character arbitrarily based on my own opinion. Empowering people to do that is dangerous.”

In most jurisdictions in America, however, there is little else to protect society from sales of handguns. Form 4473, far from helping to keep guns out of the wrong hands, has become a conduit for the discharge of responsibility. You would have to be naive indeed to put a yes in any of the eight boxes asking if you have been indicted, have been convicted of a felony, are a fugitive from justice, an addict, an illegal alien, have renounced your citizenship, or have ever been committed to a mental institution. In most jurisdictions no formal channel exists to check the truth of your answers. (In 1989, Virginia established an “instant-check” system that requires dealers to run a quick criminal check on every purchaser. But the system only looks for Virginia convictions and tells nothing about whether a buyer has been committed to a mental institution or is addicted to drugs.) One can argue that it is unfair to ask America’s gun dealers, who after all are merely businessmen, to go beyond what the law requires of them. Nevertheless, the dealers and the gun lobby, in particular the NRA—as I’ll show in Chapter Ten—played a large role in shaping the very laws that now allow gun dealers to disregard whatever qualms they may feel about selling guns to particular individuals.

The result is yet another of those curious ironies that mark America’s gun culture. On the one hand, federal law clearly recognizes the dangers inherent in arming certain classes of individuals, including kids, addicts, convicted felons, and the mentally ill. Yet the law offers no practical means of eliminating those buyers from the buyer pool—nothing, that is, other than form 4473. Put another way, the law asks those people who arguably have the greatest motive to lie about their backgrounds to step forward just this once and come clean, even though doing so will automatically void the purchase they had felt so compelled to make.

Form 4473 is flimsy protection indeed for an enterprise under assault from all quarters. Mike Dick must defend against trucks. He has armored his doors and windows against burglars. He must be vigilant for traffickers, killers, and other felons seeking to buy his wares—or simply to murder him and take the guns. In the early 1990s a growing number of traffickers apparently decided that killing a gun dealer might be more efficient than recruiting a straw purchaser. In 1991, ATF’s FFL Newsletter, which the bureau sends periodically to all federally licensed firearms dealers, warned of a rash of robberies and burglaries in Minnesota and Wisconsin. It devoted three pages to the July 29, 1991, robbery of an Ohio gun store during which the robber shot the dealer dead. The killer and two accomplices escaped with sixteen conventional guns—handguns, rifles, and shotguns—and eleven true machine guns, including two MAC-10s and an M-11 A1, a fully automatic variation of the MAC made by S.W. Daniel of Atlanta.

Increasingly, gun dealers have taken to wearing guns during the workday. Mike Dick often wore one but, unlike his colleagues, kept his concealed. “The object of a concealed weapon is that nobody knows you have it,” he said matter-of-factly. “I wear it about forty percent of the time and let people decide if they’re going to be lucky or not.” He concedes, however, that a handgun offers only limited protection. “If somebody wants to get you, you’re never going to draw your weapon. They’re going to start blasting before they get in the door. They’re going to have surprise, and unless they’re poor shots or you’re very lucky, you’re doomed.”

All this for skimpy profits in a crumbling national industry facing ever-more-stringent controls.

“Why,” I asked Dick, “do you stay in the business?”

“That’s a difficult question. I come out of the hospitality industry, hospitality is my first love. I came here out of necessity to help my father. It has become a challenge to me, taking a declining business under constant siege by various aspects of society—it is a monumental challenge. My goal is to become profitable enough that at some point we can sell and I can go back to what I do best, and that is run hotels and restaurants.”

I asked Raymond Rowley, the ATF special agent who investigated Nicholas Elliot’s acquisition of his gun, how he would describe ATF’s relationship with Guns Unlimited.

“I would say it’s a good relationship,” Rowley said. “We try to deal with all these firearms dealers as fairly as we can. They are selling a legal commodity. Obviously, guns can be used in crimes. We try to deal with them fairly.”

Baltimore County’s Col. Leonard Supenski was a bit less circumspect. Of James Dick, Mike Dick’s father, he said, “That guy is a pariah. He ought to be turned out of that industry. But ATF didn’t do anything—ATF should have nailed him to the cross.”

ATF, indeed, plays a curious role in regulating the commerce of guns. A division of the Treasury Department, it is a bastard agency to which America has grudgingly assigned the well-nigh-impossible task of ensuring that the companies that make and distribute booze, cigarettes, and guns—together the nation’s most prolific killers—pay their taxes and operate within a set of rules designed not to prevent the killing, but to keep it honest.