The Last Gun (17 page)

The FBI warns that this trend is ominous. “Gang members armed with high-powered weapons and knowledge and expertise acquired from employment in law enforcement, corrections, or the military may pose an increasing nationwide threat, as they employ these tactics and weapons against law enforcement officials, rival gang members, and civilians.”
⁸⁸

In sum, the wide-open U.S. civilian market in military-style weapons, like the Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle and others of its ilk, directly contribute to the power of the international criminal drug organizations. This evil has inevitably seeped down into towns like Murfreesboro. By 2007, the Murfreesboro police had identified a hundred gang members in the city. Carter Smith, who began investigating gangs as a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division agent and helped form the Tennessee Gang Investigators Association, told the local newspaper that some gang members migrated to smaller cities like Murfreesboro, Smyrna, and La Vergne after they were pushed out of
nearby Nashville. “They don't play by the same rules the rest of society does,” Smith said. “They don't care if something is illegal. If they need something, they find a way to get it even if it means killing you or someone else.”
⁸⁹

Someone else did get killed in Murfreesboro when a gang war erupted in late 2007 over distribution of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines. On November 14, 2007, Moss James Dixon, sixty-six, an innocent bystander, was shot to death when gangsters shot up a West Main Street apartment. Murders and retaliatory killing continued through 2008. In October 2009, a sixty-four-count federal indictment was handed up, charging gang members in Nashville and Murfreesboro with racketeering, including several charges of murder, drug trafficking, and various violent acts.
⁹⁰

Although local authorities pronounced the problem abated with the indictment, the Murfreesboro Police Department nonetheless was reported in January 2012 to have found use for a federal grant to strengthen its new gang unit, increase antigang education in schools, and track gang activities.
⁹¹
It was against all of this background—the arming of Mexican drug traffickers, the increasing militarization of gangs, and local gang wars—that the anxious reaction to the shooting of fourteen-year-old Taylor Schulz on Presidents' Day, just one month later, must be judged.

As the gun industry is pushed more and more into the position of attempting to defend the indefensible—the recklessly unrestricted sale of militarized weapons—it has fallen back on the plaintive plea that its civilian sales are necessary to support manufacture for the armed forces. “If it weren't for the civilian sales, I wouldn't be here. There's a lot of defense contractors that would not be here,” Ronnie G. Barrett told
60 Minutes
.
⁹²
He went on to say that he “would never have been in business” if he could not sell to civilians.
⁹³

Barrett's story in 2005 was different from what he told the ATF in 1984. Records from Barrett's federal firearms license file indicate that he told the ATF back then that his intention was
to market his newly designed 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifle primarily to the military and law enforcement. Thus, the written report of the ATF agent who delivered Barrett's first federal firearms manufacturer's license to the company in 1984 states:

Mr. Barrett said that this is a sniper-type weapon, and he intends to try to market it to the U.S. military or police departments prior to considering sales to the public. He said that it will be quite expensive and probably of interest only to collectors. He said that the number manufactured will be limited unless a large military sale is possible.
⁹⁴

Moreover, Barrett has claimed that he was losing money selling to civilians and was $1.5 million in debt until he made his first big military sale, to the Swedish army in 1989.
⁹⁵

Proposals to regulate 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles are part of a struggle between good and evil, in Barrett's view.
⁹⁶
“When you have governments disarming citizens, you have catastrophe on your hands,” Barrett told a reporter.
⁹⁷

The gun situation in America is not the inevitable corollary of a free society. The Harvard public health professor David Hemenway, for example, compared the U.S. record with those of the three other developed “frontier” nations where English is spoken: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Hemenway points out that, although the four countries are similar in per capita incomes, cultures, histories, and rates of violent and property crimes, “What distinguishes the United States is its high rate of lethal violence.” The difference, he concluded, is that these other countries “do a much better job of regulating their guns.”
⁹⁸
Like the tobacco industry before it, the American gun industry and its lobby have successfully employed political intimidation, the crassest form of flag-waving propaganda, and mass-marketing techniques appealing to fear and loathing to prevent being called to account for the public health disaster it has inflicted on America and to avoid meaningful regulation.

What drives the gun industry is, perhaps surprisingly, not success but failure. The civilian firearms industry in the United States has been in decline for several decades. Although it has from time to time enjoyed brief peaks in sales, it has been essentially stagnant. For example, demand for firearms apparently increased beginning in 2008 because of fears that “high unemployment would lead to an increase in crime” and that the administration of President Barack Obama would “clamp down” on gun ownership by regulating assault weapons. But demand fell back as neither of these happened.
⁹⁹
Unlike many other consumer product industries, the gun industry has failed to keep up with population growth. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. population grew from 226,545,805 to 281,421,906—a 24 percent increase.
¹⁰⁰
Over the same period, total domestic small arms production fell from 5,645,117 to 3,763,345—a 33 percent decrease.
¹⁰¹

In short, as America has gotten bigger, the gun industry has gotten smaller. But like a snake in its death throes, the gun industry has also become more dangerous. This trend began in the mid-1980s, when China began dumping semiautomatic AK-47 and SKS assault rifles on the last great civilian market, the United States. Militarization gathered steam through the 1990s, and is now hurtling through America. As a recent article in an industry publication observed, “If you're a company with a strong line of high-capacity pistols and AR-style rifles, you're doing land office business. If you're heavily dependent on hunting, you are hurting.”
¹⁰²

The gun industry today feverishly designs, manufactures, imports, and sells firearms in the civilian market that are to all intents and purposes the same as military arms. It then bombards its target market with the message that civilian consumers—just like real soldiers—can easily and legally own the firepower of militarized weapons. The industry has done this through three major types of firearms: high-capacity handguns like the FN Five-seveN used by Major Hasan, assault rifles and pistols like the AK-47 clones that are flooding in from the factories of Eastern
Europe, and sniper rifles like the Barrett 50 caliber antiarmor rifle.

One last story from Murfreesboro serves as a bridge to further discussion of the industry's effect on America in the next chapter.

In March 2009, Stephen Summers, a fifty-one-year-old Murfreesboro man, was showing his wife, Evy Elaine Summers, fifty-three, how to clean and disassemble his Glock pistol. Summers, the holder of a concealed handgun carry permit, and his wife were watching television at the same time. “Mr. Summers advised that he and his wife were watching ‘Cher' on television and must have been distracted,” a Murfreesboro police officer reported. “Mr. Summers cocked the Glock and it went off and struck Mrs. Summers in her right wrist, left breast and (traveled) out her left tricep.” Police checked Summers's story with his hospitalized wife. “She advised that her husband . . . racked the slide and the gun went off,” police reported.
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The report naturally generated wry criticism, including the sarcastic observation that “one of those highly trained, absolutely responsible, law-abiding citizens who are licensed to carry handguns in Tennessee almost killed his wife with his Glock,” and the incident was “more proof of how much safer Tennessee has become since our elected officials, in their infinite wisdom, decided to let a couple hundred thousand Barney Fifes walk around with loaded handguns.”
¹⁰⁴

This, however, is precisely what advocates of allowing the unrestricted carrying of handguns argue: that more guns in circulation make us all safer. The next chapter examines this rationale and links it to a long-standing gun industry marketing and legislative campaign to sell more—and more powerful—handguns.

When it comes to lax gun laws and frequent gun violence, Florida is an epidemic in itself.
¹
Editorialists, op-ed writers, and journalists in the state's own newspapers regularly mock it as the “Gunshine State.”
²
The sarcastic phrase is a verbal play on Florida's official nickname, “The Sunshine State,” adopted by the state legislature in 1970.
³
The mockery is well earned. The state's compliant legislature has been used for several decades as a Petri dish by the gun-mad scientists of the NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA).
⁴

The NRA's person on the spot in Florida is Marion Hammer.
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Starting as an NRA volunteer lobbyist in 1975, Hammer rose to become the first female NRA president. But Hammer told the
Washington Post
in 1987 that she was “certainly not” a feminist and scoffed at such women's initiatives as equal pay for equal work. “That's their fault,” she said. “No one ever gave me special favors.” She also told the newspaper that her personal arsenal consisted of fourteen handguns, six rifles, two shotguns, and three muzzle-loading rifles.
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Currently an NRA board member, Hammer has been the executive director of the Unified Sportsmen of Florida (USF) for more than thirty years.
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“Organized in 1976, with the assistance of the National Rifle Association,” according to a membership application, USF is “affiliated with NRA as the Florida Legislative affiliate.” Hammer herself “did business” with the NRA in the amount of $122,000 in 2011, according to the NRA. The exact nature of the business was not specified.
⁸

Throughout her career, Hammer has been portrayed as something of a cross between a chain-smoking bulldog and a steely-eyed, uncompromising drill sergeant.
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“Generally, the NRA brings out the redneck good ol' boys with the gun racks, but when you scratch Marion, she's no different,” Harry Johnston, a former Florida State Senate president, said in 1987. “She's a good ol' boy in a skirt.”
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For decades, this “good ol' boy in a skirt” has lashed Florida's legislators—Democrat and Republican, urban and rural alike—into impotent compliance while she rams the most bizarre and deadly “gun rights” laws imaginable through the halls of Florida's capitol in Tallahassee.

Some have shrugged and concluded that Florida's inert citizenry gets the kind of weak gun laws it deserves.
¹¹
But these virulent ideas—from Florida's pioneering “shall issue” concealed-carry-permit law to the misshapen monster twins of its “castle doctrine” and “stand your ground” laws—have been injected into the veins of scores of other state legislatures all over the country. The NRA, packaging its poison in the back rooms of a slick and well-funded network of right-wing legislators known as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, has already pushed two great waves of ill-advised and poorly considered legislation into American life. The first was a nationwide weakening of state concealed-carry laws; the second, a combination of the “shoot first” castle doctrine and the “shoot anywhere” stand-your-ground laws.
¹²

It's interesting that many rank-and-file police organizations sat out these waves of legislation. Some endorsed them. But a third wave—a mutated form of “self-defense” with law enforcement officers in the crosshairs—may be building. The idea is to grant citizens the right to shoot first, even at a police officer, if they conclude that the officer's intrusion into their lives is unconstitutional. The disastrous potential of this “shoot cops” third wave has got the attention, and the opposition, of at least one otherwise gun-friendly police organization, the Grand Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police.
¹³
“Shoot first” may have been OK,
even a good thing, when ordinary citizens were being put at risk. But it seems not to be such a good idea when cops are endangered.

The case of concealed-carry-permit holder Humberto Delgado Jr. is an instructive parable about this infectious gun madness. Delgado was pushing a shopping cart full of guns down Nebraska Avenue in the Sulphur Springs neighborhood of Tampa, Florida, at about ten o'clock on the night of August 19, 2009. A few minutes later, he used one of his guns to pistol-whip Tampa police corporal Michael Roberts, then shot him to death.

Just about everyone who came into serious contact over any length of time with Humberto Delgado—including the judge who sentenced him to death on February 10, 2012—concluded that he had serious mental illness. The question Circuit Judge Emmett Lamar Battles addressed at the time of Delgado's sentencing was not whether he was seriously mentally ill. That was evident. The question was whether Delgado was legally insane.