This devastating book begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: on December 16, 1988, sixteen-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked in his backpack. By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another.
In Lethal Passage Erik Larson shows us how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as "the gun that made the eighties roar." In so doing, he not only illuminates America's gun culture — its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists — but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. The result is a book that can — and should — save lives, and that has already become an essential text in the gun-control debate.
In this compelling book, centered around a devastating act of violence perpetrated by a 16-years-old boy with a machine gun, Larson not only illuminates America's gun culture — its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists — but offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearms.
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