Civilians, Horn said, “have no business with magazines this size.”
Despite what Handgun Control and newspaper editorial boards might have assumed, continuing attacks on the Glock only seemed to enhance its image in the eyes of potential buyers. Whenever gun-control advocates announce that citizens should not have access to a certain handgun, firearm enthusiasts are prone to take a closer look. “This kind of media reporting does not hurt sales,” Karl Walter asserted.
The Killeen killings actually inspired some people to consider buying a gun for the first time. Two months after the massacre, the
Suzanna Gratia Hupp, too, became a pro-gun activist as a result of Killeen. A chiropractor, she was eating lunch at Luby’s with her parents when Hennard crashed through the restaurant’s glass front. After Hennard started shooting, Suzanna and her seventy-one-year-old father flipped their table to provide cover. She reached into her purse for the .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special she usually carried. After groping around for a few seconds, she realized that on that day, of all days, she had left the revolver in her car. Suzanna’s father, a World War II vet who didn’t own a firearm, charged at Hennard. The gunman shot him fatally in the chest. And when Suzanna’s mother tried to comfort her dying husband, Hennard killed her, too. Suzanna survived, and in the wake of the tragedy, she became an advocate for relaxing laws on when and where civilians may carry concealed handguns.
In testimony before legislatures in Texas and other states, she spoke of her painful regret at leaving her revolver in her parked automobile at Luby’s. “My state has gun-control laws,” she told lawmakers in Missouri in March 1992. “It did not keep Hennard from coming in and killing everybody.” Elected to the Texas House of Representatives, Hupp became a nationally known gun-rights activist who appeared on television programs such as the
CHAPTER 11
Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Richard Feldman learned about Killeen during a telephone conversation with a friend who owned a gun store and had seen a television bulletin about the massacre. The police had identified the killer’s gun as a Glock. Feldman flipped on CNN with one hand and hit the speed-dial on his desk phone with the other, calling his old law school buddy Paul Jannuzzo. He suspected Glock’s general counsel might appreciate some public relations advice.
Jannuzzo, speaking from his office in Smyrna, confirmed the dire nature of the situation. “Richie, the phone lines are already lighting up: reporters, TV. How should we respond?” Jannuzzo didn’t have any experience with a media frenzy of this magnitude.
Feldman’s history with Glock went back almost to the company’s arrival in the United States. Like other NRA staff members, he had defended Glock against gun controllers’ attacks in 1986. Five years later, he took a new job as executive director of a fledgling gun industry organization called the American Shooting Sports Council. Killeen was the first crisis on his watch running the trade group.
“Make sure to say that this was a terrible tragedy,” Feldman said. “Whatever you do, Paul, do not say ‘no comment.’ ” It was Feldman who insisted that Glock hold a press conference, even as members of Congress were castigating the Glock in Washington. “Empathize with the victims and the community of Killeen,” Feldman advised. “Obviously the killer was another crazy. Be sure to stress it was the criminal, not the gun. Tell the press how many police and law-enforcement agencies are now armed with Glocks.”
Jannuzzo passed this advice along to Karl Walter, as well. Together they followed Feldman’s script, and, for the most part, it worked. The media emphasized the Glock 17 as the murder weapon but also pointed out how popular it was with cops. Democrats in the House of Representatives kicked the Glock around during the floor debate, but pro-gun forces in the House prevailed by a wide margin. Though he knew gun-control proponents in Washington would not give up, Feldman considered the immediate legislative response to Killeen at least an interim victory. “Richie,” Jannuzzo recalled, “always had a good feel for how things would play in the media.”
In the Northeast, Feldman had become Glock’s top defender at the NRA in the 1980s. When Sheriff Eugene Dooley of suburban Suffolk County, New York, banned the gun by name, following the lead of the NYPD, a local Long Island gun dealer and shooting enthusiast named Dean Speir appealed to the association. It was Feldman whom the NRA dispatched to speak with Sheriff Dooley. When polite persuasion didn’t work, Feldman delivered a blunter message: “Let Speir and other dealers transfer Glocks to licensed individuals, or we’ll take you to court and pull your pants down.”
Within the month, Sheriff Dooley folded, and Glocks were legal on all of Long Island. “Richie Feldman got it done,” Speir recalled.
Feldman did his job as a gun lobbyist with a zeal the NRA famously inspires in its employees and members. Over the years, though, he grew to resent the organization’s top officials. NRA management, Feldman concluded, cared just as much, if not more, about getting members to make financial contributions as it did about protecting gun owners’ rights. “That was one reason that we were all pleased when the anti-gun groups and their media and congressional allies made so many embarrassing technical errors in the protracted ‘plastic gun’ controversy,” Feldman wrote in his spirited memoir,
The NRA’s leaders, Feldman realized, “don’t really want us to educate people on this issue. The association wants to use it as a club to beat the antigunners.” The NRA “had no interest in compromise. It would have been relatively easy to demonstrate to the public that the Glock pistol was no more dangerous than any other weapon. But educating the public—either through elected officials or the media—was not the association’s paramount goal. Its overriding aim was preserving its dominant position as protectors and guardians of the faith, a sort of Knights Templar extraordinaire, of the Second Amendment.”
Opinions like that did not endear him to the NRA’s inner circle. They were weighed with suspicion against the victories he won for the gun lobby. Feldman, for example, had orchestrated an imaginative media campaign on behalf of Bernard Goetz, the New York “Subway Vigilante” who shot four black young men armed with sharpened screwdrivers after they threatened him. Acquitted of serious felonies, Goetz was convicted of a single firearm charge for which he served just eight months in jail. But for every pro-gun public relations triumph, Feldman had two run-ins with his NRA bosses. Forced off the full-time NRA payroll in the late 1980s, he continued to work from time to time as a paid consultant for the organization, finding other employment defending the interests of gun manufacturers and firearm owners.
Part of what made Feldman a bad fit within the NRA was his upbringing in a politically moderate middle-class Jewish family on Long Island. He understood that many patriotic Americans—like his parents—felt little affinity for hunting or guns. As a young man, Feldman supported strong gun control. His views began to shift after college, when he took a job as a deputy tax collector and auxiliary police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The city issued him a .38 Smith & Wesson for making his rounds. He met store owners and other working-class people who kept guns to protect themselves. Feldman decided that their down-to-earth desire for self-defense seemed
