Why are so many atrocities committed with an assault rifle that was originally designed for the Vietnam war?
Gena Hoyer’s Nissan has 304,166km on the clock. Her local mechanic has gently suggested it’s time to get a new one. But she’s not yet ready to: she used to drive Luke, her youngest son, to school in it. “It’s the last place he was with me,” she explains.
That was on Valentine’s Day, 2018.”I dropped him off at school. I said, ‘I love you Lukey bear,’ and he said, ‘I love you too,’ " she recalls. “And that was the last time I saw him.”
In the afternoon, Luke, 15, was shot dead, along with 13 classmates and three staff members, by a 19-year-old former pupil, Nikolas Cruz, who said in a message recorded on his phone before the killing: “My goal is at least 20 people.”
I am sitting with Gena, 58, and Tom, 59, her husband, at their home in Parkland, Florida, a sun-baked enclave of manicured lawns and swimming pools about 80km north of Miami — and just down the road from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where their son was killed.
A photo of Luke, a tall boy with a bright smile who loved basketball and chicken nuggets, hangs over the sideboard. His parents have kept his bedroom just as it was. The backpack Luke went to school with on the day he died stands by the door. His clothes are still where he left them, his phone charger by the bed.
Tess and Casey, two large dogs, cuddle up to the couple on the sofa. “They go up to his room all the time to lie on the bed,” Gena adds. “They spent a lot of time with him.” Tom laughs at the memory: “Luke was always snacking on stuff, so they’d follow him around to see if they’d get a bit.”
We are meeting just as Luke’s killer is about to be sentenced: his guilt was never in question, but the jury must unanimously decide if he serves a life sentence or is executed by lethal injection. The trial is unusual: no gunman who has killed so many people in a single attack has survived to face justice. His crime, though, is no rarity. On the contrary, mass shootings have risen steeply in recent years in what has become a uniquely American epidemic.
Next week marks the tenth anniversary of one of the most horrifying, in which a 20-year-old with a rifle murdered 20 six and seven-year-olds and their six teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. The grief of parents has been magnified since then by right-wing conspiracy theorists who claim the murders did not take place and were a Democrat “hoax”, in which actors played parents to justify tougher gun controls.
Few have suffered more from this lunacy than Lenny Pozner, who lost his son, Noah, in the shooting: he has had to move home several times to escape harassment in the street over his tireless battle to discredit “hoaxer” claims online and in court. In one case, Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of pounds to a group of Sandy Hook parents in compensation.
No amount of money will relieve Pozner’s torment over the loss of his six-year-old son. He often replays in his mind the evening before the killing, when Noah abandoned a video game and walked over to him. “It was most unusual,” he tells me. “He climbed onto my lap and said, ‘I love you, Dad.’ " It felt almost as if he was saying goodbye.
It is hard to imagine what might possess someone to commit such atrocities. Whatever psychological disorders they may share, though, one thing that links many of these mass killers is their weapon of choice. Armalite, a small-arms manufacturer, created the AR-15 — short for Armalite rifle — in 1957, at the invitation of the US military, which wanted a light but lethal battlefield weapon. A military report on the rifle in 1962, during the early stages of the Vietnam War, expressed satisfaction, calling the gun’s lethality “particularly impressive”: an American soldier had fired it at a range of 49ft into a Viet Cong soldier’s head and “took it completely off”. A version of the gun has served as the US military’s standard rifle ever since.
In recent years the industry has been pushing sales of what it calls “modern sporting rifles” to civilians too, making the AR-15 America’s best-selling rifle. That they have featured so regularly in horrifying acts of violence against children has had little impact on the business: on the contrary, fears that the government will try to stop such tragedies from occurring in the future have pushed up sales after most massacres, including this year’s murder of 19 pupils and two teachers by an 18-year-old at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Shooting deaths — more than 45,000 in 2020 — have never been higher. Nor have gun sales, at about 20 million in 2021. The manufacturers are posting record profits: US$280 million last year for Sturm, Ruger & Company, while Smith & Wesson reported sales of more than US$1 billion.
After the Uvalde killing on May 24, President Joe Biden proclaimed: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” He may well ask: two weeks before, a gunman had murdered 10 people with an AR-15 in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Less than a month ago, on November 19, at least five people were killed and 25 injured when a shooter armed with an AR-15 attacked a bar for LGBTQ people in Colorado. At least six people were shot dead at a Walmart in Virginia four days later. At the time of writing there have been 36 mass shootings in America this year, according to a database run by the Associated Press and Northeastern University — it defines a mass killing as one in which at least four people are killed, excluding the perpetrator.
In 1994, after a spate of mass shootings, President Bill Clinton signed a ban on what Congress called “assault weapons”. These were defined as “semi-automatic” weapons such as the AR-15, which was removed from gun shops.
But attached to the ban was a “sunset clause” allowing it to lapse after a decade unless Congress approved a renewal. George W Bush showed no interest in doing so; Barack Obama, his Democrat successor, tried. His failure, despite his party’s control of Congress, was a testament to the extraordinary power of the National Rifle Association, the lobbying group whose financial contributions are the lifeblood of many a political campaign.
The NRA was founded in the 19th century, modelled on a British organisation of the same name. A week after the Sandy Hook massacre, its president, Wayne LaPierre, said: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
The group has grown rich over the years. But dues account for only one third of its revenues: the rest comes directly from gun manufacturers and a membership programme called “Ring of Freedom” that funnels millions of dollars into the NRA through sponsorship deals. This gives it an incentive to push sales and, to that end, it spends millions of dollars each year on publications and “public affairs”. It has hit upon a perfect pitch for the AR-15, calling it “America’s rifle”.
No one is more alarmed by the trend than Ryan Busse, a former gun industry executive who resigned from Kimber, a pistol manufacturer, in despair over the growing civilian market for weapons of war. “I told my wife, ‘I can’t take this shit any more,’ " he says. “They’ve made buying these guns seem patriotic.” The rifle’s reappearance in shops when the ban was lifted in 2004 coincided with post-9/11 patriotism and the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NRA recruited returning veterans to the cause, inviting them to give speeches at NRA banquets and sign autographs at gun shows, helping to “move metal” — industry slang for selling products. Television images of US troops cradling their AR-15-style weapons in faraway war zones in the first half of the 2000s created a new generation of gun enthusiasts, young men who would never serve but who spent hours playing “shooter” video games on their sofas. Busse says he once asked a colleague where the market was for AR-15s: “Couch commandos,” came the reply.
The gun first hit the civilian market in the early 1960s as the Colt Armalite Rifle-15 Sporter. What made it different from other rifles was the inventor Eugene Stoner’s patented gas operating system, which made for a simple yet fast and accurate gun. When the patent expired in 1977, other manufacturers began producing their own models: AR-15 is now an umbrella term for a family of weapons that look alike and operate in the same way.
The guns are easy to use, require little maintenance and seldom go wrong. They cost as little as US$500, are sold under names such as “Prairie Panther” and “Ultimate Hunter” and come in many shades: one of the most popular is “desert tan”, matching the shade of the “sandbox” — military slang for America’s desert battlefields.
Manufacturers could not believe their luck when Congress passed a law in 2005 shielding them from liability for unlawful use of their weapons. Busse recalls in Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America, his insider’s account of the gun business, how one friend in the industry told him after the signing: “Those f***ing Democrats can’t touch us now.”
Until then, gun companies had focused marketing efforts on weapons for hunting and recreation. Now they began promoting heavier calibre guns for self-defence along with weapons of war such as the AR-15. “Consider your man card reissued” was the caption used to advertise the gun used by the Sandy Hook killer. Daniel Defense, another manufacturer — which sold an AR-15 to Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter — has “Manufacturing freedom” as one of its advertising slogans. Another strikes a biblical note, showing a toddler holding an AR-15-like rifle under the caption: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
For gun rights fundamentalists, the AR-15 has become an almost sacred totem: one far-right Republican congresswoman, Lauren Boebert, from Colorado, has taken this to the extreme, claiming in a speech at a Christian event earlier this year that Jesus Christ could have prevented his crucifixion if he had owned an AR-15. “How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?” she asked the crowd. “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.” She was narrowly re-elected in November.
Mat Best appears to have taken the NRA’s “America’s rifle” messaging to heart. The former US army ranger launched the Black Rifle Coffee Company, which celebrates gun ownership as part of an American lifestyle and component of manhood and patriotism. Besides offering ground coffee with labels such as Murdered Out, Silencer Smooth and Freedom Fuel, his company sells shirts and hats decorated with the outline of an AR-15. The clothes are popular among the gun-toting “militias” that have proliferated in recent years; and one of the hats was worn by a rioter who, alongside many others, stormed the US Capitol in January 2021 in defence of the former president Donald Trump’s claims that Biden had “stolen” the election.
Best, who often posts pictures of his weapons on social media, popularised the term “pew pew” to describe the sound of distant gunfire: the same words were used by Cruz, the Parkland killer, to signal his macabre intentions: “You’re all going to die — pew pew pew. Oh yeah. Can’t wait,” he said in his pre-massacre message. “With the power of my AR you will all know who I am.”
To find out more about “America’s rifle” I visit Manny Alvarez, 65, a retired cameraman. He has spent years roaming the world’s hotspots for the American CBS television network. We met years ago in Nicaragua, where I lived as a journalist in the mid-1980s. Alvarez is a Republican, a member of the NRA and an ardent defender of the constitutional right to bear arms — of which he has many, including various rifles, among them an AR-15.
Like most ordinary gun-owning Americans, he regards the mass killers as “sickos” and would never dream of shooting anyone — except in self-defence. His love of guns developed as a child hunting deer. Now he hunts with his son: the walls of his “man cave” at home are adorned with various trophies.
At the same time, like so many of his fellow citizens, he strongly believes the government might one day pose a threat to him requiring armed resistance, just as the “founding fathers” had envisaged in the Second Amendment, he explains. His Cuban-American background may have helped to spur such fears — he came to Miami at the age of three when his parents fled the Cuban dictatorship: “They could have stayed behind and fought if they’d had guns,” he says.
So while his AR-15 is not much use for hunting, it could come in handy defending the home — as could his Kalashnikov. “I reckon I could hold out for a while in case of societal meltdown,” he says.
On a more banal level, Alvarez worries about burglary. He keeps a .357-calibre revolver by his bed and, like a growing number of his countrymen, he has a special permit allowing him to carry a concealed weapon in public or in his car. “There’s a lot of carjacking round here. They smash the window, try to grab you, but once they do that you can kill them.”
We drive to Bass Pro Shops, an emporium for fishing and gun enthusiasts in Miami’s suburban sprawl. Dozens of AR-15s, some painted in desert camouflage, are on display on a wall behind the counter. The salesman tells me only US residents can buy them. He adds, however, that a “special dispensation” might be available if I can prove I need the gun to go hunting — so long as you don’t mind metal-infused meat: the AR-15 fires bullets at such velocity that they often disintegrate on impact.
But Alvarez and I are not going hunting: he has invited me to the range. This is where millions of gun owners go for fun in their spare time — and where many learn to shoot: Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, was taught by his mother, Nancy, at their local shooting range. She was his first victim before he set off for the elementary school.
We pull up in a car park next to what looks like a warehouse. Loud thuds echo through the building. An armed employee leads us into the range and allots us a “lane”. “Hey, that’s a nice gun, bro,” he says as Alvarez gets out his black AR-15, an antique he bought from a “kid” in the 1990s for US$400 after reading an ad on Craigslist. I am surprised by how heavy the gun is when Alvarez invites me to give it a try. I empty a 30-bullet magazine in a storm of smoke and thunderous detonations, and Alvarez gives me the thumbs up.
“That’s a dead Russian there,” he says as the smoke clears, examining the cluster of holes in the human-shaped target’s liver. By the time I have fired another 30 rounds, this time from the Kalashnikov, my shoulder is beginning to ache and I’m glad when I’ve run out of bullets.
Attached as he is to his guns, Alvarez thinks it should not be so easy for “crazy f***in’ bastards” to buy them. He favours a 30-day waiting period on sales to allow better background checks to sniff out the criminally insane.
In most states, 18-year-olds are free to buy AR-15s in shops or online if they do not have a criminal record. “Most states don’t even have any registration unless you want to carry a gun in public,” says Frank Smyth, author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History, about the radicalisation of the gun lobbying group. “It’s like checking your ID at the door — they don’t write your name down. To get on a banned list, you have to have been convicted for a felony.”
Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland killer, was known to local social services and police for his anger management issues. In school, he wrote obscenities and gay slurs and drew photos of stick figures shooting each other and having sex. He had a swastika on his backpack and once wrote to one of his teachers: “I hate you. I hate America.” A local gun shop sold him an AR-15.
Among his first victims was Chris Hixon, the school’s wrestling coach and one of its security monitors. He was shot dead as he ran towards the sound of the shooting, apparently planning to tackle the gunman in a corridor. The coach was a strong believer in the Second Amendment and owned a pistol. “I was against it at first, when the kids were little,” says Debbi, his widow, when we meet at her home near Fort Lauderdale. “There were so many accidents happening with kids and guns. But we made sure the kids understood it was not a toy — it was for defence.”
Her voice hardens, though, when talking about the proliferation of AR-15s. “I think Chris would have agreed — no one should be allowed to own a weapon of war,” she says. “There’s no way a gun like this is needed for hunting or protection. People see these weapons as powerful and sexy. They’re advertised in a way that makes them enticing. To me, though, it’s a weapon of mass destruction, designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.”
The bullets fired by AR-15s are relatively small, so soldiers can comfortably carry several magazines into battle. But they are fired with enormous power, sometimes tumbling around inside a body to cause horrific injuries. “It’s a gun designed to create maximum damage — and it does,” says Luke Hoyer’s father, Tom, a former healthcare executive. “When they hit the body, they can sometimes explode into a thousand pieces of metal, looking like snow on the x-ray.”
Down the road, in another gated community, is the home of Tony and Jennifer Montalto, parents of Gina, who was shot dead as she huddled next to Luke, trying to hide as the killer ran amok in the school. Their house looks out over a brackish lagoon where two cormorants are perched on a log, fishing. “Sometimes we’ve had alligators,” says Montalto, an airline pilot who met Jennifer when she was a flight attendant.
His activism with the Hoyers and their Stand with Parkland group has persuaded the state of Florida, to howls of outrage from the NRA, to raise the age at which a person can buy an AR-15 from 18 to 21. “I don’t think you should be selling AR-15s to 18-year-olds — or any other weapon for that matter,” Montalto says.
Along the corridor, Gina’s bedroom, like Luke’s, has been left as it was. In the trial it emerged that the killer had put the muzzle of his AR-15 against Gina’s chest before pulling the trigger, Montalto tells me. “Shooting a girl in the chest” was one of his Google searches before he carried out the attack. Montalto wants him sentenced to death.
The next day, when I accompany the Hoyers and Montaltos into court, Mike Satz, the lead prosecutor, relates how one victim, Peter Wang, was shot repeatedly: “Then he shot him again, four times, in the head,” Satz adds. Cruz sits hunched over, avoiding eye contact. He has told friends on the phone from jail that he feels like the “most hated man in America”.
Then Melisa McNeill, his attorney, addresses the jury, claiming that he was “poisoned in the womb” and suffers from foetal alcohol spectrum disorder because of his birth mother’s alcoholism. “Do we kill brain-damaged, mentally ill and broken people?” she asks the jury. “Sentencing him to death is not justice but revenge.” The Montalto family shake their heads in disagreement.
In the end, the jury decides against death. Cruz is sentenced instead to 34 consecutive life terms, one for each of the victims — including the 17 injured, meaning he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Many of the relatives, though, are upset. “If this doesn’t merit the death penalty, what does?” asks Debbi Hixon, the wrestling coach’s widow. Montalto is furious. “This case is why we have the death penalty in Florida,” he says. “Sadly, the jury worried about how they would feel if this murdering bastard was put to death.”
The Hoyers, as well, are disappointed. “The verdict was a gut punch for Gena and I,” Tom says. “We value something by what we’ll take in exchange for it. In this case, a life for a life. Anything less devalues the life that was taken.” The jurors, he added, had “devalued Luke’s life”.
All they have of Luke now are memories, but sometimes these can be agonising: they never got to see him off to the school prom; they never got to witness his graduation. “What’s so hard about this is that we’re never going to get to see what Luke would have grown into,” Tom says. “I think he would have been a fantastic young man.”
Written by: Matthew Campbell
© The Times of London