Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun by Erik Larson

Author:Erik Larson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Politics, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780307803313
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1994-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Soon after the poem was published, police at last caught up with Bonnie and Clyde and killed them both.

One result of all this mayhem was a host of gangster movies, beginning with the 1930 hit Little Caesar. In 1931 alone, Hollywood made fifty gangster films. And once again myth and reality converged. On October 14, 1931, Edward G. Robinson, who starred in Little Caesar, sat in on Al Capone’s tax evasion trial, which would end three days later and result ultimately in his being sent to a brand-new prison built on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

A more significant result, however, was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which regulated the sale and manufacture of machine guns and other “gangster-type” weapons, such as silencers and sawed-off shotguns, and gave responsibility for enforcement to the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Internal Revenue Service. You could still buy a machine gun, but now you had to register the gun and pay a $200 tax. At the time, this was real money, more than the retail price of a Thompson, which Auto-Ordnance had reduced to $175 in its continuing quest for orders from the U.S. military. The tax remains $200 today, no longer quite the disincentive the law’s crafters meant it to be.

In 1938, Congress passed the next round of federal controls with the Federal Firearms Act, which required the licensing of gun dealers and set the cost of a license at a whopping one dollar. (The National Rifle Association had argued even this was too high and should have been something nominal, say fifteen cents or a quarter.)

The next great spasm of domestic violence took place in the 1960s, with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Charles Whitman’s shooting spree from the top of the University of Texas tower, which killed fourteen people; and the overall unrest that tore the nation’s cities apart in the late 1960s. This time the result was a more comprehensive set of firearms laws, called the Gun Control Act of 1968. It boosted dealer fees to $10 and required that they keep detailed records of incoming and outgoing guns. It also forbade the sale of rifles, shotguns, and handguns to felons and others deemed unfit to own guns. And taking its cue from Lee Harvey Oswald’s mail-order purchase of the rifle he used to kill the president, the law banned mail-order sales of guns directly to individuals. Congress assigned enforcement of the act to the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS, which became the Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms Division.

Law-enforcement agents within the ATFD welcomed their new responsibilities. They were accomplished lawmen with a lot of nitty-gritty, dangerous experience in battling the moonshiners of the South. But officially they were employees of the Internal Revenue Service, the nation’s tax collector. The images clashed. “When our law-enforcement officers were asked who they were, they would say Treasury agents,” said Rex D. Davis, a former director of ATF who at the time was an assistant regional commissioner of the ATFD.

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