May 19,1986 "This bill will remove bad laws that were passed during a period of hysteria," announced President Reagan as he signed the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986. He made no mention of the Hughes Amendment. This was not surprising, for he was not aware of this last-minute addition to the bill. Virtually the only people in the country who were aware of the ramifications of the measure were those people licensed by the government to deal in or manufacture Title II (National Firearms Act) weapons.

Henry Bowman had been exactly right about how the feds would interpret the new provision: BATF had stated flatly that they would not approve any transfers of weapons made after the cutoff date. The result of this was that before the supply of machine guns was frozen, it was first doubled. Licensed manufacturers had a one-month time period where they knew the cutoff was imminent, and they worked 24-hour shifts manufacturing machine gun receivers and remanufacturing semi-auto guns to select-fire status. Temporary services charged (and got) triple overtime for their stenographers to work round-the-clock typing up Form Is, the federal form that manufacturers of Title II we apons must submit in duplicate for each machine gun made. It had taken fifty years to get 90,000 NFA weapons on the civilian registry. It took another month for that number to grow to just under 200,000.

Doubling the number of machine guns on the NFA registry would not be the only unintended consequence of the Hughes Amendment. Since 1934, a slow trickle of gun inventors had paid the high annual fee and done machine gun development work. It was nothing like what had gone on before the 1934 Act, but a few men, such as the M16's designer Gene Stoner, had produced decent designs. As Henry Bowman had accurately predicted, almost all of the spiritual successors to John Browning doing machine gun development work were put out of business overnight, just as they had been 52 years before. Colonel Chinn, the U.S. Armed Forces' foremost expert on machine guns, was livid, and in private he accused Rep. Hughes of treason.

Hollywood was also affected. The movie industry was the largest non-military consumer of machine guns in the U.S., and the Hughes Amendment made it impossible for the gun rental companies to get new military designs or replace worn-out guns for action films and documentaries.

Prices of existing guns were driven up, and this caused the unintended consequence of government corruption. One ATF examiner in the Washington NFA office became well-known for falsifying documents after the May 19 cutoff, using his access to official approval and date stamps to line his own pockets.

The biggest unintended consequence of 'Black Monday', as the NFA dealers called it, was something else, however. May 19, 1986 was an alarm. Though the alarm did not ring as loudly or as rapidly as that famous one of four-and-a-half decades before, it did its job.

The May 19, 1986 alarm, just like the one on December 7, 1941, awakened a sleeping giant to a terrible resolve.

June 20,1986 Wind's almost gone Henry Bowman thought as scanned the vast prairie. Let's try to end on one that's a real challenge. He twisted the power ring of the Leupold scope up to its highest setting. The optic had originally been a 6.5-20 power variable. It now magnified the target between 14.5 and 35 times, depending on what the shooter wanted.

As Henry rotated the ring, the dots and crosshairs increased in size along with the image of the distant prairie dog. The reticle was in the first focal plane of the variable-power optic, so the relationship of dot size to target remained constant regardless of the power setting. This was not the way the scopes worked when they came from the factory, but it was the way they operated after Dick Thomas in West Virginia performed his magic on them. Thomas also boosted the power with an additional lens, and installed the fine multiple-dot crosshairs with whatever dot size and spacing that the customer requested. The center dot on Henry's scope was 1/2 minute-of-angle in diameter; it covered 1/2" of the target at 100 yards, 1" at 200 yards, 1 1/2" at 300, and so on.

Damn, that's a long ways Henry thought when he saw that the top dot was wider than the prairie dog he was looking at. The body of an adult prairie dog in the standing position was about 2 inches wide. More than 400 yards. He moved the rifle so that the next dot, which was 1/3 minute in diameter, was centered on the squirrel-like creature. A tiny bit of hair showed on either side of the black dot. Henry switched back to the half-minute dot, and extrapolated. Closer to 600 yards than 400. Call it 560 yards he finally decided.

Five hundred sixty yards would be out of range for someone shooting a factory varmint rifle at a full-sized Idaho rockchuck. On a Wyoming prairie dog, it was a tremendous distance to expect to connect on the first shot, even for a varmint hunter shooting the finest handmade rifle. The vital area of a prairie dog was about the size of a playing card. With any kind of crosswind, it would have been ludicrous to hope to make a first-round kill. A five-mile-an-hour breeze would move the bullet Henry was shooting a full eight inches at that range. It was close to dusk, however, and the wind was nonexistent.

The gun Henry Bowman was shooting was, for legal purposes, the same one that Henry, his father, and Curt Behnke had built in 1963. The rifle had undergone several changes in the ensuing twenty-three years, however. First of all, it was on its fifth Hart barrel. Second, the barrel was larger in diameter and fluted, which made it stiffer without making it heavier. Third, the caliber was no longer .222 Remington Magnum. The modified Remington action was now fitted with a barrel chambered for the .244 Ackley Improved cartridge, and employed a l-in-9" twist, instead of the l-in-12" or l-in-13" pitches favored by top bench rest competitors shooting bullets of 6mm diameter. The fast twist (theoretically) reduced accuracy a tiny bit, but it stabilized long, streamlined bullets that would tumble if fired out of a l-in-12" barrel. These slender, boattailed, 103-grain VLD projectiles (for Very Low Drag) drifted much less in the wind and shot more accurately at extreme distances than the lighter slugs that bench rest shooters used in 100 and 200 yard matches.

Third, although the rifle still wore its original walnut stock that Henry and his father had made when Henry was ten years old, there was now no wood touching the steel of the barreled action. This was because the action was supported on two solid blocks of aluminum that Curt Behnke had fitted into the wood at each end of the receiver and anchored in place with epoxy. It was a technique known as 'pillar bedding', and it resulted in a stock that was just as stable as one made entirely of fiberglass, though about a pound heavier. Everyone used fiberglass stocks in competition classes where there was a weight limit, but prairie dog hunters had no such constraints, and Henry liked the look and feel of the stock he and Walter had made years ago.

Last of all, the Lyman Super Targetspot scope had been replaced with what was now the state-of-the-art in long-range varmint glass, the Dick Thomas-modified Leupold target variable.

Henry Bowman had fired this rifle for group at a measured 600 yards, and had achieved a number of fiveshot groups under 3" in diameter in no-wind conditions.

Henry consulted the trajectory chart he had taped to the side of the stock. His chart told him that he would have to hold 29" high at 560 yards to strike his target. Henry settled in behind the rifle and adjusted it on the sawdust-filled 'sandbags' he carried in the field. The dots Thomas had installed in the reticle had a three-minute-of-angle spacing. At 560 yards, that meant the dots were 16.8" apart. Henry moved the rifle on the bags so that the second dot down from the horizontal crosshair was at the base of the animal, then gently touched the trigger. The sear broke with less than two ounces of pressure, and the rifle cracked.

The report was short and flat-sounding, for there was nothing within ten miles to reflect the sound. Two seconds after the gun fired came the unmistakable whock that told Henry he had connected. When one of the thin-jacketed hollowpoints struck a prairie dog, it made a noise unlike when the bullet hit dirt. It sounded like a paper bag bursting.

Henry repositioned the rifle and peered through the scope. Next to the dirt mound lay two halves of a dead prairie dog, spaced about two feet apart. Henry Bowman opened the bolt, picked the fired case out of the action, and put it in the right compartment of his three-section ammo bag. From the time he had first spotted the distant rodent to the moment he dropped the fired case into his pouch was about twenty seconds.

A good one to end the day on Henry thought. He heaved himself to his feet, picked up his rifle, slung the ammo pouch over his shoulder, and hung the two sawdust-filled leather bags around his neck by the leather cord that connected them. Then he started to walk back to his truck.

"So how'd you do?" Curt Behnke asked when Henry walked in the door of the main house. 'Tommy was afraid you'd decided to stay out there all night." Tommy was Curt Behnke's eleven-year-old grandson. It was his first trip hunting prairie dogs.

"Let's find out," Henry said, dropping the ammo pouch on the table. He scooped out the fired cases in the left-hand pocket and dumped them on the table in front of the boy. "Count the misses for me, and I'll add up the hits." Tommy started counting the empties in the pile in front of him while Henry reached into the righthand pocket of the bag.

"Man, you did a lot of shooting," the rancher said when he saw the pile of brass. He leased the twenty-eight thousand acres of Wyoming grazing land that Curt, Henry, and Tommy had been hunting on all day. Prairie dogs lived in colonies. Left unchecked, the animals multiplied and would strip grazing land of edible grass, drastically reducing the number of cattle a rancher could raise. Most ranchers resorted to poison. Some, like the host, encouraged serious long-range shooters to come try to make a dent in the dog population. Curt Behnke had a permanent invitation to shoot prairie dogs on the property, and could bring whomever he wanted.

"A hundred forty-seven," the boy said finally.

"A hundred eighty-eight kills," Henry replied when he finished counting his pile. The rancher shook his head and grinned. Prairie dogs did not come out of their holes when someone was within a hundred yards of them, and a prairie dog was harder to hit than a beer can. The rancher had often shot at prairie dogs with his lever-action carbine, but he had never hit one. He had watched Curt Behnke (who was now seventy years old) shoot one entire afternoon five years before, and he had never gotten over watching the man connect at what the cattle rancher thought were absurd distances.

"Dinner will be ready in about ten minutes," the host announced. He turned to Curt Behnke. "Looks like your friend's almost as good a shot as you, Curt."

"Not really a fair comparison," the older man said, shaking his head. "His eyes are better than mine ever were, even when I was twenty years old, and the cartridge he shoots has a lot less wind drift than the Improved .223 case I've been using. On the other hand," Behnke said with a smile, "Henry won't take any shots on prairie dogs closer than three hundred yards." The rancher laughed at this and returned to the kitchen.

He thought that Curt Behnke was joking.

September 27,1986 "I can't believe the way all the cops are going nuts about this guy," Stokely Meier said, shaking his head. "They've got such an almighty hard-on right now, you'd think the entire prison population of the three-state area was on the loose, raping and pillaging."

"Papers are telling everyone to stay inside, bolt their doors, say a few 'Hail Marys', and God knows what else," another man added.

"They even called up Ed's department," Tom Fleming said. "See if any of the coppers there wanted to get in on the action."

"Ed Seyffert? From Troy?" Stokely demanded. "Haven't they already got enough guys running around in the woods?" Fleming shrugged.

"They asked anyway. Ed was smart and said no thanks."

It was a typical Saturday afternoon at the gun store, and much of the usual crowd was present, including Henry Bowman. The subject of greatest interest that day was Michael Wayne Jackson. He was wanted in Indiana for a double homicide and had escaped to Missouri. Five days previously, Jackson had killed a local resident. He was still at large.

Jackson had last been seen near Wright City, Missouri, a town in Warren County about forty miles from St. Louis. A massive manhunt was underway to locate and apprehend Jackson, and front-page newspaper articles covered the situation daily.

"What's the big fear, anyway?" Henry asked. "Jackson's still running around in the woods, right? They've checked all the houses, and didn't find anybody dead or tied up. He's no wilderness survival expert. Hell, the guy's probably so hungry right now he's been trying to eat his shoe leather. And he's no danger at all if you're more than a hundred yards away from him."

"What do you mean?" Stokely asked.

"Well, he's on foot, and they know what kind of gun he's got. It's a sixteen gauge side-by-side. How much ammo can he have? He can't have more than a handful of shells aside from the two in the gun. I'd bet even money he doesn't have any spares." Henry paused, then went on.

"And remember, it's a sixteen gauge. Nobody carries slug or buckshot loads in sixteen. So the biggest shot size he could have is twos, and that's real unlikely. You got any sixteen gauge twos here in the store, Stoke?" Stokely Meier shook his head.

"So fours or sixes at most, and probably seven-and-a-halfs." Henry laughed. "We got one starving guy running around in the woods with two shells in his gun, and neither one will break the skin at a hundred yards. Hell, guy with a good arm can throw a baseball a lot farther than 7 l/2s will draw blood." Henry snorted. "Way I see it, this Michael Wayne Jackson is practically unarmed."

"Shit, maybe that's what they ought to do," Stokely said with a huge grin. "Send the outfielders and the pitchers from the friggin' Country Day varsity baseball team out to Warren County on the weekend. Make sure they got shooting glasses, so their eyes don't get hurt, and a couple bushel baskets full of old baseballs. Have 'em throw at this peckerwood 'til he wastes his ammo and has to surrender 'fore they charge in and all start throwing at his head."

"The school would probably charge the parents for extra coaching hours," Adrian Baker added drily. This idea made Stokely Meier double up with laughter. He and Adrian were alumni of the local high school, and were forever receiving letters from the institution asking for money.

"That many cops running around, it'll be a miracle if none of them get shot," Tom Fleming threw in. "You get a few hundred cops all looking for one guy, two things happen: One, chances of any particular cop running across the guy are really small, so they all just go through the motions. Two, the chances of somebody running across him are very high. Mr. Jackson is in what the army refers to as a 'target-rich environment' right now."

"Good thing for the cops the guy isn't a prairie dog hunter wi th a decent varmint rifle, Henry Bowman commented. The other men were silent for a moment.

"Man, isn't that the truth," Stokely breathed. "Coroners wouldn't get any sleep at all."

"The police are also fortunate that the fugitive Mr. Jackson is a murderer wanted for double homicide," Tom Fleming said, "and not someone with whose plight folks like us might empathize." "You mean, like if Jackson was just some guy who didn't fill out a stupid yellow form, or maybe a Monsanto executive with an M3 that he brought back from Korea stashed in his closet?" Henry asked. "Right."

"Holy pecker," Stokely said with feeling. "He'd have a couple thousand folks running interference for him then."

Everyone in the shop was silent as they pondered these last few comments.

"So you're really going to vote for him? Guy that teaches his kids at home 'stead of sending 'em to school?"

"Yeah, I am. Don't see that the teachers we got 'round here are so all-fired great a fella couldn't do as well himself. Maybe even better." The man smiled. "Also says he'll only enforce the laws people want him to enforce. That sounds pretty good to me."

"You mean, no speeding tickets, rolling stops, stuff like that?"

"Right."

"I could go for that," the second man agreed.

"Here's what he's been handing out," the first man said as he reached in his pocket and withdrew a creditcard sized piece of white pasteboard.

The second man looked at it.

Vote Weaver

for Sheriff He turned the card over and looked at the other side.

Get Out of Jail Free "Least he's got a sense of humor," the man said with a laugh. "We could use that again." "You got that right."

Randy Weaver had a definite following among the local residents in his race for sheriff of Boundary County, but not a big enough one to win the election.

"These deadly assault rifles are the weapons of choice for drug dealers and street gangs. The President has shown great courage in standing up to the gun lobby. He has taken an important first step to get these terrible weapons off the streets. Our children are being slaughtered and-"

"Lying scum," Henry Bowman said as he hit the 'OFF' button on his remote. He looked over at his friend who he had invited for dinner. "Irwin, I think we just watched Mr. Bush lose five or six million votes in the 1992 election."

Irwin Mann looked startled. "You believe so?" he asked.

"I may be all wrong, but yes, I think that's what just happened. Americans expect to be lied to about taxes, and how they'll have better jobs, and things like that. All politicians do that. But Americans don't like being told their rights are being rescinded, and they absolutely despise politicians who promise to protect their rights and then sell them out. I don't know who the Democrats are going to run in three years, but whoever they trundle out just got a huge boost today."

"The President has..." Irwin Mann made sure he had the correct metaphor, then smiled and said, "shot himself in the foot, you might say?" Henry Bowman laughed in spite of himself.

"More like the liver."

"All right, we've got almost a half hour before our bus gets here. If you want to walk around in the immediate area, that's fine, but don't go far. You need to be back right here at noon sharp. Everyone clear on that?" The students from the Rolla high school all nodded or spoke their assent.

Like most of her classmates from Rolla, Missouri, Cindy Caswell had never been far from home. She had been south to a few of the lakes just across the Arkansas border, and her family went to St. Louis two or three times a year, but Chicago was a new and fascinating city. Its size and energy dwarfed anything else she had experienced.

The honors students taking the senior-year elective drama history had been offered the chance to go on a three-day field trip to Chicago for the price of plane fare and lodging. TWA had a $64 round-trip shuttle, and the school had arranged low-cost rooms at one of the hungrier hotels. To Cindy's amazement, her parents had agreed without an argument to let her go on the trip. They had not even suggested that she pay for all or part of the trip, which she had been fully prepared to do. Getting their blessing for the trip had been one of the happiest moments of her life.

Cindy Caswell walked slowly down the sidewalk, staring into the sky at the tops of the impossibly tall buildings that lined the street. She had no inkling that her life was about to change forever. "Let's get this done," Eddie Viglisi said to the driver.

"Seen nothin' but skanks so far," the man behind the wheel pointed out. The white van was windowless behind the front doors, and was lettered with the logo of a nonexistent painting contractor. "Sal likes 'em young an' fresh, not these wore-out street kids landed at the bus station a month, two months ago. The AIDS thing has got him all goosy."

"Head up towards the West Side. Around Carson's."

"Bunch a housewives out shoppin' 'round there. Mall would be better." The driver thought a moment. "But yeah, you're right. We could go there after. Carson's is on the way." He made a left at the next light. The two other men in the back of the van remained silent.

"There! That one. She's perfect," Eddie exclaimed. The two men in the back sat up and looked out the front window so they could identify their target. "Look for parents, or a boyfriend, or something," he instructed.

The van circled the block to check for local patrol cars. There were none, and when the driver returned to the original block, he stopped and let the two men out of the back of the van. They were about fifty yards north of Cindy Caswell. The girl was walking slowly southbound along the sidewalk. She was taking in the grandeur of the city itself, thinking of the play they were going to see that night, and ignoring her immediate surroundings. She did not see the two men or the van with the side doors open until it was much too late.

"Almost didn't need the junk," Eddie Viglisi commented as he glanced at the doped-up teenage girl sprawled in the back of the van. Cindy Caswell had been so surprised she had scarcely resisted, and then the synthetic heroin had hit her system like a freight train.

The two men who had pulled her into the van looked on Cindy with undisguised anticipation. Sal Marino would be done with her soon enough, and then it would be their job to kill her and dispose of the body. What they did before she died was their own business.

When the mild dose of heroin worked its way out of her system and Cindy Caswell regained her ability to think and reason, she found that she was handcuffed by the right wrist to a metal bed. She was in a small room with no windows and a single ceiling light, which was switched on. She had no idea what time of day it was. Her head felt woozy and her stomach was heaving. It took all of ten seconds for her to come to the conclusion that immediate escape was pointless to even consider. The bed was sturdy and made of steel pipe. The handcuffs were equally strong, and obviously designed to hold much more dangerous people than drugged, eighteen-year-old high school girls.