Free Gun Guys by Dan Baum Page A

wear earmuffs like their human masters can—a very British concern.
    “The great majority of the people get their image of firearms silencers from those special agent movies,” he wrote. “That is why people resist using silencers on firearms. If I knew only the movie image of silencers, I would resist them, too.”
    The agency that issued the permits in the United States was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—the ATF. I called to ask whether the ATF disagreed with the Europeans—whether they believed that silencers were a public safety risk.
    “If the police find a body with a hole in it, they can’t tell if a silencerwas used,” said the official in the appropriate department to whom I was passed, who asked that I not identify him. But, he added, “If we thought there was a problem, we’d do something about it. And we don’t.”
    The first step in getting a silencer was to find a “Class III dealer”—someone specially licensed to sell weapons covered under the 1934 law. That led me to the most enthusiastic gun guy I’d ever met: Oliver Mazurkiewicz.
    His shop was hard to find. It had no sign out front. MapQuest took me to a locked, smoked-glass door in a Longmont, Colorado, office park, next to something called White Rose Herbals. I buzzed, and a grim-faced man opened the door six inches and peered out at me suspiciously.
    “I’m here to see Oliver,” I said, and he opened just enough to let me in, then relocked. It was like entering a speakeasy. “I’m here to buy a silencer,” I said.
    “He’ll be back soon.”
    I looked around and understood the security precautions. We were standing in a small, windowless showroom that looked like a set from
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. On the walls hung the most terrifying collection of battle weapons I’d ever seen: twenty-five or so black or desert-tan AR-15s crusted with scopes and lasers, each with a big tubular silencer screwed to its muzzle. I took one of the rifles from the wall, noticing its full/semi switch. It was a machine gun—a silenced, scoped, fully automatic weapon.
    “You military contractors?” I asked the sour-faced man.
    “Not yet. Hope to be.”
    “So who buys these?”
    “Who doesn’t?” He went back to a workshop where two other guys were working on guns at a long bench.
    I sighted through the machine gun’s big scope out the smoked-glass door. A ladder on a rooftop two blocks away shimmered on the bridge of my nose; I could have hit a fly crawling on it. The door flew open, and a broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man burst through, his face filling the scope.
    “Whoa!” he said with a laugh, looking down the barrel. “You Dan?”
    I hung the rifle back on the wall. Oliver was a burly man in his early forties, with a handsome Slavic face and a handshake like Oddjob’s car crusher. “That’s a two-stamp gun,” he said, pointing at the rifle with two index fingers. “You need one federal stamp for the machine gun and onefor the silencer. I’ll sell it to you right now for fifty-six hundred, which is an incredible deal.”
    He started doing many things at once—checking his computer, making phone calls, fixing the printer, rummaging through paper files, and unpacking two guns from holsters concealed in his waistband: a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum and a compact .40-caliber Glock. While talking on the phone, he handed me a small cardboard box in which I found a black anodized tube about six inches long, with TEC -65 and a serial number etched on the side. As he kept up his manic phone call, he took my credit card and ran it for $325—$250 for the silencer and a $75 “transfer fee.” With the phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, he carried what was now my silencer into the workshop and locked it in a huge gun safe. I wouldn’t see it again for three months. The same time limit applied to background checks for the silencer as for the concealed-carry permit; I’d get them at about the