Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
First let's address the fundamental question: Where could two disturbed teenagers with a criminal record (Klebold and Harris had been caught breaking into a van) get guns?
Turns out the answer is: almost anywhere. And you needn't drive down a dark alley in the worst part of town to make such a purchase.
"Guns are everywhere," Littleton's district attorney, David J. Thomas, told the Dallas Morning News. "You can buy them on the street. You get them anywhere you want. You can steal them. They are readily available. You can go to gun shows. You can have your friends go to gun shows if you're underage. They're very easy to acquire."
Especially if you make use of friends who are familiar with the hassle-free shopping for firearms present at gun shows.
"I'd like to make a thank you to Mark and Phil," Klebold, 17, says on the videotape.
"Mark" is Mark Manes, 22, whom Harris and Klebold were introduced to by "Phil," Philip Duran, 22, a fellow co-worker at Blackjack Pizza Parlor. Duran introduced them to Manes at the Jan. 23 Tanner Gun Show in Denver, the conduit of the Columbine shooting.
Make no mistake: At the heart of the Columbine shootings were two sick boys, and many things played a part in bringing their madness to life. But the Tanner Gun Show is how the twisted nightmares of Klebold and Harris went from the dark recesses of their warped minds into the horror that appeared on our televisions on April 20. And without the National Rifle Association and its allies in government protecting the right of the Tanner Gun Show to be an anarchic flea-market for weapons of murder, it's quite possible that neither Klebold or Harris would be names we know.
There are about 5,000 gun shows a year, in which anyone claiming to be a hobbyist or collector can sell a gun to anyone else. No background check, no questions asked.
"If they [Mark and Phil] wouldn't have fucking helped us out, then we would have found someone else," Harris says on the videotape. "We would have gone on and on. We would have found some way around it, 'cause that's what we do."
In the fall of 1998, Manes bought a TEC-DC 9 at a gun show, where almost anyone can buy a gun from almost anyone else. Licensed gun dealers have rules they must abide, but unlicensed dealers can pretty much do whatever the hell they want to do -- a provision fought for by the NRA and its allies in the House and Senate.
It certainly can be argued that Manes shouldn't be able to buy a gun. Since he was 13, he had been arrested and charged with crimes nine times, for offenses ranging from threatening a classmate to owning brass knuckles to dealing pot, coke, LSD and amphetamines. In 1991 and 1995, the courts labeled him a juvenile delinquent.
But a guy like Manes is as welcome at a gun show as is Norm at "Cheers."
The NRA has worked to make sure that "private" gun show dealers don't have to conduct background checks. The NRA has worked to maintain the ability of people who committed violent crimes as minors to buy firearms as adults. Thus, as the NRA points out as if it ain't no thang, Manes had every legal to right to buy a gun that day.
He bought a TEC-DC 9.
On Jan. 23, Manes sold his TEC-DC 9 to Klebold and Harris for $500. He threw in two clips of ammo. Klebold and Harris were both 17. This act was illegal, and Manes was sentenced to six years in jail as a result. But effective gun laws would focus on keeping firearms out of the hands of a guy like Manes to begin with.
A few months later, Klebold's girlfriend, Robyn Anderson, went to the Tanner Gun Show to buy a bunch of guns for her beau and his friend. It was smart thinking by Anderson, an honors student at Columbine High. After all, gun shows are one of the easiest places in the world to get guns.
As long as you claim that you're selling guns from your "private collection," you don't have to get a federal license to sell a gun -- even if you sell as many guns as many licensed dealers. And as long as you're not a licensed dealer, you don't have to conduct background checks, keep records, or abide by any of the other requirements imposed upon dealers.
It was at the Tanner Gun Show a year before that Denver Rep. Dianne DeGette, a pro-gun control Democrat, had sent a staffer to see how easy it was to get a gun. The staffer was able to buy an SKS assault rifle, no questions asked. The SKS is a military rifle imported from China that came into the U.S., was sold dirt cheap, and shot to the top of the crime charts before its importation was stopped.
The SKS is light and easily concealed.
And it was at the Tanner Gun Show that, in 1995, Albert Petrosky bought an assault rifle he used to kill three people -- his wife, a supermarket manager and a deputy sheriff.
You don't have to be Sarah Brady to think gun shows need to be better regulated. According to Bob Glass, owner of Paladin Arms in Longmont, Colo., as paraphrased in the Rocky Mountain News, "Colorado gun shows are rife with unscrupulous dealers who make it easy for felons, teen-agers and others prohibited from buying firearms to snap them up if they have the cash."
Anderson bought Klebold and Harris two old shotguns -- a Savage Arms Model 67 pump shotgun and a Model 31D double-barrel shotgun -- as well as a 9 mm Hi-Point carbine rifle.
This was perfectly legal. Any 18-year-old can buy shotguns and rifles, as long as she doesn't have a felony record. And it's perfectly legal for that 18-year-old to give those guns to others, including minors -- in what is known as a "straw purchase" -- as long as she purchased the gun from a private citizen and not a licensed gun dealer.
And since Anderson was buying from an unlicensed dealer, she didn't have to fill out any forms and no records were kept. These are all legal loopholes that the NRA has fought hard to maintain.
''The classic M.O. is a young woman and four or five gangbangers [at a gun show] pointing out the gun they want her to buy," gun dealer Glass said. "It's classic, classic. I see it all the time."
So, using the chasm of the gun show loophole -- which the NRA has fought and continues to fight for, tooth and nail -- Klebold and Harris were able to get the guns no problem.
They sawed off the shotguns, making them more lethal. Harris called his "Arlene."
"I don't support the notion that criminals are getting guns at shows," said Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president, in the fall of 1998. "I don't believe more regulation is the answer."
Manes and Anderson are in good company -- noted gun show frequenters include David Koresh, Timothy McVeigh and serial killer Sam Dillon.
Now for the ammo.
They still had the two clips for the TEC-DC 9. But they needed more for the other guns. So they put in an order at Green Mountain Guns for 13 10-round clips for the Hi-Point carbine rifle.
The jig was almost up when a clerk called Harris' dad, Wayne, and told him his order was in.
Wayne Harris told the clerk that he'd never ordered any clips. But apparently he never asked his son any questions about the call. If the clerk or Wayne Harris had even been remotely curious about the misunderstanding, according to Klebold on the videotape, ''We wouldn't be able to do what we're going to do."
They were also helped by their friendship with Manes.
Three times, Manes would go shooting in the woods with Harris and Klebold. Manes told investigators that Harris fired one of the sawed-off shotguns into a tree and said, "Imagine that in someone's fucking brain."
The two were intense, Manes observed. Their hands would bloody up after an afternoon of firing the shotguns. Manes would later testify that he knew his friends were "unstable."
That observation didn't stop him from, on April 19, buying Harris 100 rounds of 9 mm ammunition and selling it to him for $25.
The next day, April 20, Harris and Klebold took all the weapons and ammo that we all have made it so easy for them to get, and they went to school and enacted the largest schoolyard gun massacre in our nation's history.
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