Free Lethal Passage by Erik Larson Page B

product—something S.W. Daniel once even gave away free in a monthly contest—provides a clear example of the culture of nonresponsibility at work in America’s firearms industry. It is but one example of how this commercial ethos governed the gun’s progress from conception to its use as a murder weapon in a Virginia Beach classroom.
    “We’ve got technology running amok,” said Col. Leonard Supenski, the Baltimore County firearms expert. “No gun manufacturer ever decided in its R-and-D process that the product it was developing might not have any useful purpose for society and might in fact harm society. When Gordon Ingram began production and eventually tried to get into the commercial market, I’m sure the thought never entered his mind. The people at SWD don’t give a damn who gets those guns.”

CHAPTER FOUR
N ICHOLAS
    O N F RIDAY , D ECEMBER 16, 1988, N ICHOLAS Elliot awoke feeling ill. He had an ear infection and was taking medication for it, but that did not account for his malaise. He had made big plans for the day, and suddenly those plans seemed too big. The anxiety sickened him. “I didn’t feel like going to school,” he told Detective Adams. “But I knew I would get in trouble if I didn’t, so I went.…I was just so sick.”
    He planned to bring his gun to school for the express purpose of scaring Billy Cutter, his tormentor, and at last getting some respect. He had bought the gun two months before, a Cobray M-11/9 semiautomatic pistol capable of firing thirty-two rounds before requiring the shooter to reload. His mother did not know about his acquisition. Nicholas told Adams he had hidden the gun in a bird cage, but Adams believed he probably kept it in his attic.
    “I was scared,” Nicholas told the detective, “because I didn’t know how I would feel with a gun at school.”
    He packed his backpack and caught his usual bus. He attended the first of his classes. “I was looking for him from the beginning,” Nicholas said. “I wasn’t angry … I wanted to scare him, to make him see how much of a wimp he was in front of everyone.”
    During Nicholas’s ride to school, the knowledge of what he carriedin his backpack and what he could do with it deeply frightened him. “I was scared,” he said. “I was looking for Billy, but I also was scared.”
    At one point, he considered abandoning his mission. He could not find the boy and was surprised at the fear he felt walking around school with a gun. “I was kind of thinking about just hiding the gun and getting it later on … take it home and just leave it.”
    “Just forget the whole thing?” Adams prompted.
    “Well, sort of, yeah, I mean, I wasn’t planning to shoot them.”
    Briefly he had imagined an alternative means of getting back at Billy Cutter. “I was thinking about having someone do something to him. Well, like, you know, beat him up and teach him not to pick on people. Just do something to him, you know. I wanted to scare him. That’s what I really wanted to do.”

CHAPTER FIVE
T HE G UN
    T HE B ALTIMORE C OUNTY P OLICE SHOOTING RANGE occupies a wooded area just north of Towson, Maryland, where the broad six-lane strip roads of Baltimore city taper to rolling two-lane highways. I heard the range the moment I stepped from my car, the sound like something you would get if you put a microphone beside a package of microwave popcorn in midpop. The range was a flat plane carved from a hillside so as to leave an earthen cliff at one end, which serves as a backstop to keep stray rounds from bounding north into Baltimore County horse country. Colonel Supenski arrived carrying a gray attaché case and led me onto the range where a group of county corrections officers was undergoing pistol training. He asked their instructor to have the group stand down for a few minutes, even though he and I were headed for the far end of the range roughly one hundred yards away. His caution was a measure of the deep respect police