reading, but Nielson, as usual, was too keyed up to rest. A trick-shooting enthusiast and collector of antique firearms, he was eagerly examining the small arsenal of handguns Hunter had obtained in the 20th century.
‘A Cz-75.” he said admiringly, picking up a black 9 mm. Czech-made semiautomatic. “This one’s a collector’s item. And a 45 Colt Combat Commander; a couple of Berettas, a Model 84. 380 and a 9 min. 92F; a snub-nosed Colt King Cobra. 357 Magnum; a couple of small double-action Walther. 22s: a 10 mm. Springfield with convertible barrels and magazines; and Christ, look at this thing!” He picked up a huge cannon with a dull black steel frame. “An Israeli Desert Eagle. 44 Automag with a ten-shot clip! He’s even got a reloading press complete with dies! You’d think he was expecting an assault team!”
“He was,” said Chavez. without looking up from his book. “Us.”
“Us?” said Nielson, puzzled. “Well, not us specifically,” Chavez said, “but he didn’t trust Priest and the others any more than they trusted him. Not that I can blame him. If I were in his shoes, I’d have done the same thing. Prepared a safehouse and laid in some weapons, just in case. Looks like he picked some good ones, too.”
“Why only lead projectile weapons?” Linda asked. “If he thought he might have to go up against the agency, we’d have him easily outgunned.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Chavez. “Never underestimate any sort of firearm,” he said. “I’d sooner go up against a street punk armed with a laser than a good shooter armed with a. 22 rimfire. In the hands of somebody who knows what they’re doing, it would kill you just as dead. In the 20th century, where Hunter picked these up, a semiauto. 22 rimfire was frequently the chosen weapon of professional assassins. It’s a very high-velocity round, and soft, so you get good expansion with practically no recoil. Light and very accurate.”
“No stopping power, though.” said Neilson.
Chavez chuckled. He made a “gun” with his thumb and index finger and pointed it at Neilson. “I know what you’re thinking.” he said in a slightly breathy, menacing voice. “This here’s only a. 22 rimfire, a piddly little round with no stopping power to speak of. So I’m just going to have to shoot you six times in the head.”
Neilson grinned. “I see your point.”
“Actually.” said Chavez, “what the pros used to do with those things is a technique they called ‘the zipper ‘ They’d start at your midsection and work up in a straight line, rapid fire-bang, bang, bang, hang, bang.’ he demonstrated with his finger gun, moving up an imaginary line along Neilson’s body. “That way, even if none of the individual shots proved fatal, the cumulative effect of the trauma would be. All this talk about stopping power you antique collectors get into is just a lot of nonsense. Shot placement is what counts. Of course, you don’t have that problem with lasers, plasma pistols, or disruptors. You don’t need to be as accurate, but then it would have been difficult for Hunter to get his hands on those without some connections. Hell, even the regular troops don’t get issued disruptors, they’re so paranoid of letting those get loose. And they’re not easily concealable. Let me see that automag,” he said to Neilson. Neilson picked up the Desert Eagle, made sure the safety was on, and handed it to him.
“Jeez. heavy sucker, isn’t it’!” said Chavez, hefting it experimentally. “Never fired one of these myself. Must have one hell of’ a kick.”
“About the same as a compensated. 45.” said Neilson. “I have a. 44 Magnum in my collection, but it’s a revolver. Kicks about twice as much as that thing. But the nice thing about that round is that it gives you a lot of versatility it you load your own cartridges, which is what that press is for. See, depending on what kind of bullet you use and how much powder, you can pretty much tailor-make your ammunition to suit your purpose. You can load a soft-point bullet that’ll spend most of its energy on impact and hit like a sledgehammer or you can load for penetration. Use a copper-jacketed hollow-point bullet, stoke the casing with enough powder, and you can shoot through walls or vehicles.”
“Primitive, but nasty,” Chavez said. “I wouldn’t underrate them.”
He gave the pistol back to Neilson.
“With weapons like that, I’m surprised they didn’t have stricter firearms regulations in the 20th century.” said Linda.
“The laws varied, but they’ had the same basic problems we’ve got.” Nielson said. “The law of supply and demand. Hell, look at Boston. Right now, the British are enforcing the customs regulations more stringently than ever, with the Royal Navy backing them up, yet at least half the merchants here are into smuggling. If people really want something, somebody will provide it. You could ban weapons manufacture, but someone would simply set up a machine shop and start turning them out illegally.”
“I remember an assignment I had in L.A. back in the 20th century,” said Chavez. “We had to bust up a Network drug-running operation. The kids in the barrio could get just about anything they wanted, but even if they couldn’t buy a gun, they sometimes made their own by breaking a radio antenna off a car, taping it to a wooden handle, and using a piece of metal and a rubber band for a firing mechanism. Stick a. 22 shell in the damn thing and you’ve got yourself a single-shot zip gun. as they called them. Liable to blow up in your face, but it could be surprisingly effective if it didn’t.”
“They tried gun control laws.” said Neilson, “but they only wound up taking weapons out of the hands of honest people who deserved the right to protect themselves. If a person takes it in his head to kill somebody, he’ll manage to find a way. You can control weapons to some degree, but you can’t really control people.”
“So what are you saying, Scott?” Linda said. “Let anyone who wants to buy a plasma gun or a laser? The streets would be a war zone.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, the streets are a war zone.” Neilson said. “Okay. I understand what you’re saying and I’m really not unsympathetic, but consider where we are now. In a few years, these people are going to fight their war for independence and the incident that’s going to kick the whole thing off is when the British troops march on Lexington and Concord. They’ll fail because the farmers of this time have access to muskets and powder and they’ll fight to protect their rights.”
“The old argument about the constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” said Linda. “The founding fathers weren’t talking about the right to own and carry guns, you know. They were talking about a militia.”
“Really? Then why wasn’t everyone disarmed when Cornwallis surrendered?” Neilson said. “What did they mean by a militia, after all? It’s when you gather armed citizens together for defense, like they did at Lexington and Concord. The exact wording in the Constitution is, ‘A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ It doesn’t say that the right of the people to bear arms in a militia shall not be infringed, it says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed because there may be a need to raise a militia. The Minutemen didn’t turn their guns in when they stopped drilling. They took them home with them because they were their own personal property.”
“It would be interesting if we could speak with some of the founding fathers and find out exactly what they had in mind when they framed the Constitution,” Linda said. “Unfortunately, the timing isn’t right, let alone the fact it would be dangerous.”
“I wonder what they’d say if we asked them what they meant when they wrote ‘the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?” said Chavez. “Did they mean the right to live free or did they mean no abortions? And that phrase appeared in the Declaration of Independence, not in the Constitution. In the Constitution, it merely says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. It certainly never occurred to them that it might become necessary to define exactly what constitutes a person. They also guaranteed freedom of religion, but contrary to popular belief, nowhere in the Constitution does the word ‘God’ even appear. ‘One nation, under God’ is only in the pledge of allegiance, which technically has no constitutional authority behind it. Let’s face it, they never realized that things would get so complicated.” ‘“But you have to admit one thing,” said Neilson, “if it wasn’t for the fact that the colonists were able to keep and hear anus. the British would have rolled right over them.”
“Well, maybe so.” said Linda, “but I’d hate to think what would happen if any citizen in the 27th century could walk into a store and buy a plasma weapon. I somehow doubt the founding fathers would have approved of that.”
“Oh. I don’t know.” said Neilson, with a grin. “Just think what the Minutemen could have done with a few plasma guns and laser rifles. And it’s interesting that when you take relative population figures into account, the incidence of violent crime with firearms was far less in times when weapons were not regulated than when they were.”
“Maybe, but you gotta watch that,” Chavez said. “Statistics are always misleading. It depends on what you use for your data. It doesn’t make much sense to compare 19th-century Dodge City, for example, with 21st-century
