Lawyers, Guns, and Money: One Man's Battle with the Gun Industry

Guns are like any other business, says this absorbing study of the nation's gun industry; unworthy of ""special legal protections,"" they should be regulated like automobiles and tobacco, even though they are designed to kill and have long been protected by the gun lobby's dubious interpretations of the Second Amendment. The crusader of the subtitle is Tom McDermott, a lawyer who survived the 1993 Long Island Railroad shooting rampage and afterward devoted himself to prosecuting gun manufacturers who had taken advantage of loopholes and feeble regulations to flood the country with vast quantities of cheap weapons. Journalist Vinzant is a vivid storyteller with a flair for thumbnail sketches of people and situations and an entertaining guide to the labyrinthine worlds of product liability laws, insurance scams, low-end gun production and the surreal aspects of the NRA. McDermott's painstaking progress is enlivened with many startling facts (America has more licensed gun dealers than gas stations, for example) and useful capsule summaries of the legal and technical issues involved. Occasionally these grow too clotted and the story slows to a crawl, but there is enough drama here that the book reads like the real story behind a bestselling legal thriller. There is no convenient happy ending, nor is it a black and white morality tale. This is a balanced, intelligent and scrupulously researched portrait of a controversial industry.