The Last Gun (2 page)

And finally, why has the subject of gun control become, even among influential “moderate” Democrats, the “third rail” of politics?

This book examines and answers those questions. It documents in detail each of the following factors that contribute to the unique position of the United States as the world's dark archetype of gun violence:

       
•
  
Levels of gun death and injury that mark the United States as a frightening aberration among industrialized nations.

       
•
  
Deliberate suppression of data regarding criminal use of firearms, gun trafficking, and the public health consequences of firearms in the United States.

       
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The almost universal failure of the American news media to report on, even to understand, the continuing hurricane of gun violence in America.

       
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Aggressive “hypermarketing” of increasingly lethal weapons by a faltering industry.

       
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Militarization of the civilian gun market as the driving force in that marketing.

       
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Indifference by policy makers who might be expected to lead on gun control, and widespread acquiescence by elected officials to the gun lobby's unrelenting legislative campaigns.

The intricate interweaving of these factors is aptly illustrated by an incident that occurred on Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado on November 21, 2011. On that date, at about ten o'clock in the morning, Airman First Class Nico Cruz Santos barricaded himself in a building, armed with his personal handgun.
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The base, located near Colorado Springs, is home to the Fiftieth Space Wing, responsible for operating U.S. Department of Defense space satellites.
¹⁶

Santos was serving in a squadron that “provides physical security, force protections measures and law enforcement services”
to the wing.
¹⁷
He appears to have been a troubled person, reacting to his imminent discharge from the air force and possible imprisonment after having pleaded guilty in a civilian court to a charge of attempted sexual exploitation of a child.
¹⁸
Airman Santos surrendered without violence at about eight
P
.
M
.

The building in which Santos barricaded himself was a personnel processing center, a facility in which airmen are prepared for deployment. That fact brought immediately to mind the events of November 5, 2009, when U.S. Army Major Nidal M. Hasan is alleged to have gone on a rampage with his personal handgun in a similar deployment center at Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan left a total of thirteen dead and thirty-two wounded.
¹⁹
Major Hasan was subdued only after he was shot several times by police.

In the interval between the two events, and as a direct consequence of the Pentagon's reaction to Major Hasan's attack at Fort Hood, Congress imposed a significant restriction on the Department of Defense. Sandwiched between two sections of the defense authorization bill for fiscal year (FY) 2011, mandating public access to Pentagon reports and establishing criteria for determining the safety of nuclear weapons, was a new provision, Section 1062, “Prohibition on infringing on the individual right to lawfully acquire, possess, own, carry, and otherwise use privately owned firearms, ammunition, and other weapons.”
²⁰
As a result of that change in law, General Peter Chiarelli, the army's second-in-command, told the
Christian Science Monitor
in November 2011, “I am not allowed to ask a soldier who lives off post whether that soldier has a privately owned weapon.”
²¹
The prohibition covers both members of the military and civilian employees of the Defense Department.

The massacre of which Major Nidal Hasan is accused generated a great deal of attention from the news media, policy makers, and politicians. However, most of this attention focused on two points: whether the mass shooting should be classified as a terrorist attack by “violent Islamist extremism,”
²²
and where blame should be assigned within the nation's military and intelligence apparatuses for failure to anticipate and head off the rampage.
²³

Little media reporting and virtually no official scrutiny has been devoted to the singular implement with which Major Hasan is accused of mowing down forty-five of his comrades-in-arms within ten minutes. This was an FN Five-seveN, a 5.7mm high-capacity semiautomatic pistol manufactured by the Belgian armaments maker FN Herstal (FN).
²⁴

In one significant example, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a report purporting to address the “counterterrorism lessons” to be drawn from the Fort Hood matter. But the committee's report emphasized that it had not “examined . . . the facts of what happened during the attack.”
²⁵
The word
gun
or
firearm
appears nowhere in the committee's report, much less the make, model, and caliber of the efficient killing machine Major Hasan is accused of using. The committee described the incident itself in two sentences, as a “lone attacker” striding into the center, and “moments later,” thirteen “employees” of the Defense Department “were dead and another 32 were wounded,” all by some unnamed cause.
²⁶
This is the remarkable equivalent of issuing a “lessons learned” report on the notorious 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City without mentioning the truck bomb by which its principal perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, carried out his attack, or presenting a lecture on the implications of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, without addressing the use of commandeered jetliners as flying bombs. The omission is all the more remarkable because the committee chairman and co-author of the report, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, had stated in a May 2010 hearing on terrorists and guns that “the only two terrorist attacks on America since 9/11 that have been carried out and taken American lives were with firearms.”
²⁷
he cited the Fort Hood shooting and the 2009 murder of an army recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas, as the two attacks.

But according to testimony at a pretrial hearing, Major Hasan
himself paid keen attention to selecting the weapon he used. He chose the FN Five-seveN pistol, and the accessories of laser aiming devices and high-capacity ammunition magazines, precisely because they suited his purpose of efficiently attacking a large number of people.
²⁸
Thus, before buying the handgun on August 1, 2009, Hasan asked a salesman at the Guns Galore gun dealer in Killeen, Texas, for “the most high-tech gun” available. Another witness, Specialist William Gilbert, a soldier and self-described “gun aficionado” who was in the store when Major Hasan made his inquiry, testified that the accused also sought maximum ammunition magazine capacity. Specialist Gilbert further testified that he owned an FN Five-seveN himself, and that he had recommended that model to Major Hasan because it met the officer's stated specifications. “It's extremely lightweight and very, very, very accurate,” said Specialist Gilbert. “It's easy to fire and has minimum recoil.”
²⁹
The soldier testified that he gave Major Hasan a forty-five-minute “full tactical demonstration” of the handgun's capabilities.
³⁰
According to the manufacturer, those capabilities are considerable. “Five-seveN Tactical handguns and SS190 ball ammunition team up to defeat the enemy in all close combat situations in urban areas, jungle conditions, night missions, etc. and for any self-defense action.”
³¹

Specialist Gilbert and the salesman both noted that Major Hasan seemed to know nothing about handguns. The accused officer videotaped on his cell phone the salesman's demonstration of how to load and clean the weapon so that he could review these procedures later.

In the several months between his purchase of the handgun and the shootings at Fort Hood, Major Hasan also bought several extra ammunition magazines and magazine extenders that increased to thirty the number of rounds available to be fired in each loading of the gun, from the usual twenty.
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He bought two expensive laser aiming devices, a green one for use in daylight and a red one for use at night. The major also bought hundreds of rounds of the 5.7x28mm ammunition the gun fires, including
boxes of a variant specifically designed to penetrate body armor. According to testimony at the hearing, the line of ammunition in question had been ordered off the U.S. civilian market, but dealers were allowed to sell their existing stocks.
³³

Major Hasan was a frequent visitor to Stan's Outdoor Shooting Range, near Fort Hood, where he took a course to qualify for a concealed-carry permit. Witnesses said Major Hasan practiced at the range repeatedly. He specifically sought training in shooting at human targets from as far away as a hundred yards. Instructor John Coats testified that after one afternoon's tutelage, Major Hasan progressed from being an erratic shot to routinely hitting each target's head and chest. This is consistent with FN's boast that “the flat trajectory of the 5.7x28mm ammunition guarantees a high hit probability up to 200 m. Extremely low recoil results in quick and accurate firing.”
³⁴

On the morning of November 5,2009, Major Hasan allegedly put his high-tech weapon and training to use when he opened fire with his FN Five-seveN in a crowded waiting area near the entrance to Building 42003, a facility for processing soldiers being deployed. Ten minutes later, he lay paralyzed from the chest down, shot by police. When the bloodbath ended, twelve soldiers and one civilian had been shot dead. An additional thirty-one soldiers and one police officer were wounded. A number of other people were injured in the scramble to escape the methodical shooting. Army investigators found more than 200 spent 5.7mm rounds in and around Building 42003. So many rounds were fired that shell casings lodged in the tread of the shooter's boots, survivors testified, so that they could hear a clicking noise at every step he took. “You could hear the clack, clack, clack at the same time you could hear the bang, bang, bang of the guns,” one testified.
³⁵
Major Hasan had another 177 unfired rounds in high-capacity magazines when he was stopped.

Witnesses testified that the defendant reloaded often and effortlessly as he calmly walked though the building. One survivor, Specialist Logan Burnett, tried to rush the shooter when he saw
an expended magazine fall from the pistol, but was shot in the head before he could reach the gunman. Another soldier contemplated also charging, but testified that the shooter reloaded magazines too quickly for him to act.
³⁶

Virtually none of the detailed testimony at Major Hasan's pretrial hearing has been reported in the news media. With the exception of newspapers in Texas and a handful of articles in other states, the details of Major Hassan's alleged massacre were not “newsworthy.” And although mass shootings, cop-killings, and family annihilations have become virtually weekly events in the United States, their coverage by the news media is spotty. For all of the attention the Fort Hood affair generated in the media and particularly in the Congress, its toll of dead and injured was no greater than a number of civilian mass shootings involving handguns. These include the April 2009 shooting at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, New York (thirteen dead, four wounded), the April 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia (thirty-two dead, seventeen wounded), and the October 1991 shooting at Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas (twenty-three dead, twenty wounded). Many other civilian mass shootings have taken somewhat lesser tolls, such as the January 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in which U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was gravely injured (six dead, thirteen wounded).
³⁷

Like the news media, the Department of Defense also appears to have missed the significance of the incredible level of firepower that was easily available to Major Hasan. After the Fort Hood shooting, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates appointed Togo D. West Jr., a former secretary of the army, and Admiral Vernon E. Clark, a former chief of naval operations, to conduct a review of the incident. The review focused primarily on how well the Defense Department was prepared to meet similar incidents in the future and how the department's policies might better deal with personnel like the alleged shooter. Aside from a single reference to an unnamed “gunman” having “opened fire,” the report
of the review neither described nor inquired into the means—the FN Five-seveN pistol, the high-capacity ammunition magazines, and the laser aiming devices—by which Major Hasan allegedly wreaked such great havoc in so short a time.
³⁸
An appendix to the report, however, stated the finding that “the Department of Defense does not have a policy governing privately owned weapons,” and recommended that the department “review the need for DoD privately owned weapons policy.”
³⁹

Three months later, the Department of Defense announced its follow-up action on twenty-six of the seventy-nine recommendations of the independent review.
⁴⁰
A detailed list accompanying Secretary Gates's action memorandum noted with respect to privately owned weapons that each of the individual armed services had developed its own policies and had delegated authority to base commanders to generate specific rules.
⁴¹
According to media reports, the commanders of some bases—including Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Fort Bliss, Texas; and Fort Riley, Kansas—required personnel living off post to register their personal firearms. In the case of Fort Riley, civilian dependents were also required to register their firearms.
⁴²
The list attached to Secretary Gates's memorandum stated that the undersecretary of defense for intelligence was tasked to prepare department-wide guidance on personal guns, which would then be incorporated into the department's physical security regulations.
⁴³