Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

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ON A BITTER, COLD DECEMBER MORNING, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into the Atlantic Shores Christian School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with a semiautomatic handgun and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked into his backpack. His name was Nicholas Elliot. By midmorning, a forty-one-year-old teacher had been shot dead, and another teacher, struck by two nine-millimeter bullets fired at point-blank range, was extraordinarily lucky to be alive. Two other teachers narrowly escaped Nicholas’s bullets. One found herself running a zigzag pattern through the schoolyard as Nicholas fired round after round at her back. The other, a man who tackled Nicholas and saved the lives of a roomful of crying and praying teenagers, felt a bullet breeze past his head.

In a nation accustomed to murder in large multiples, the shootings received little out-of-state coverage. A single homicide barely rates mention beside the events at Stockton and San Ysidro, two names that ring of casual mass violence the way the names of great battlefields ring of valor. But the story of how that gun wound up in Nicholas’s backpack, how the gun came to exist at all, constitutes a cultural detective story that tells a great deal about the roots of America’s gun crisis. Nicholas in effect carried with him the good wishes of an industry and a culture whose institutions and mores have helped make the things he did that morning so commonplace in America.

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