This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture - its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists - but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. It begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: on December 16, 1988, sixteen-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked in his backpack. By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another. In Lethal Passage Erik Larson shows us how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as the gun that made the eighties roar. The result is a book that can - and should - save lives, and that has already become an essential text in the gun-control debate. With a new afterword.Touches on all aspects of the gun issue in this country. Gives great voice to that feeling...that something real must be done. -San Diego Union-TribuneOne of the most readable anti-gun treatises in years. -Washington Post Book World | Lethal Passage by Erik Larson, Paperback | Indigo Chapters