Free Lethal Passage by Erik Larson Page A

which only about 5 percent of the population makes its living from farming and from which the frontier has long since gone. Why did the United States, alone among modern industrial societies, cling to the idea that the widespread substantially unregulated availability of guns among its city populations is an acceptable and a safe thing?”
    The best answer is a question: How could we possibly have done otherwise?

    Gun manufacturers have little interest in saving lives, although they struggle to convey the image that they are the last defenders of hearth and home, that their guns will stand by you long after marauding gangs force the police into retreat. To imagine such beneficial purpose is to confuse corporate image with corporate imperative. The domestic gun industry, despite its privileged status as the least regulated of consumer-product industries, sold so many guns in America that it saturated the market and now must scramble for ways to open new markets. The industry relies on Paxton Quigley, and other outspoken sales promoters, including gun writers and the leadership of the National Rifle Association, to make guns more palatable to a society that reads daily of gunshot death and injury.
    There is ample proof of the industry’s disregard for the health and safety of its customers. In a time when even children’s vitamins have childproof caps and electric drills have safety triggers, gun manufacturers still do not manufacture child-safe guns. Likewise, most manufacturers still fail to equip their handguns with loading indicators and magazine safeties.Sturm, Ruger & Co. has yet to order a formal recall of its original Peacemaker look-alikes, eventhough some 1.3 million remain in the hands of consumers. Instead of launching a campaign to buy back the guns, or even to publicize their real dangers, Ruger launched an advertising campaign that bemoaned the national decay of gun-handling practices and told customers the right way to handle the guns. An Alaska jury was so incensed by Ruger’s apparent disregard for safety, it voted a $2.9 million punitive-damages award againstthe company. The Alaska Supreme Court later limited the award to $500,000.
    There is evidence too that manufacturers don’t see crime as being an entirely negative phenomenon.Why else would the now-defunct Charter Arms Co. engrave the barrels of a brace of husband-and-wife revolvers with the names Bonnie and Clyde?
    The gun industry has long contended that only a small percentage of guns are used in crime, while at the same time resisting efforts to document the true number and to identify the most popular crime guns by maker, model, and caliber. As of 1989, rather late in the computer revolution, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at last became able to provide some rudimentary statistics on which guns turned up most often in federal traces. Reports from the new database have already battered the NRA’s “guns don’t kill” stance, proving beyond doubt that certain guns turn up during the commission of crime far more often than others. The company whose handguns were traced most often from January of 1990 to December of 1991, simply because of the sheer magnitude of its production, was giant Smith & Wesson. However, when the frequency of traces is compared with each company’s production, S.W. Daniel, the company that made Nicholas Elliot’s gun, shows a tracing rate far higher.By 1989 the company had produced some 60,500 handguns and an untold number of accessories, including silencers and machine-gun kits.It fondly advertised Nicholas’s gun, the Cobray M-11/9, as “the gun that made the eighties roar.”
    Condemned by police, ridiculed even by those who sell it, the gun has been inordinately controversial ever since its initial design by Gordon Ingram, a California engineer and gunsmith who soughtto make a cheap, reliable submachine gun for close military combat. How that gun went on to become a readily available mass-consumer