Murder is banal.
You tell yourself it's beyond your ken, but given the right circumstances, you could do it. Anyone could do it.
The Army says it takes five pounds of pressure to pull a trigger. Some triggers resist less. Anything that requires less than 2.5 pounds of pressure is probably unsafe, what they call a "hair trigger." There are also two-stage triggers with a four- to five-pound first stage that stops at a break point, then requires another one to two pounds to fire the shot.
Target shooters like these because the lighter the trigger pull, the less likely the gun is to move when it's pressed. There's a release trigger that doesn't fire when pulled, but when the shooter releases it. They were originally designed for single-shot shotguns used in skeet shooting.
Police aren't saying what kind of guns they took from the 18-year-old who allegedly murdered those people in Buffalo. In his plagiarized online "manifesto," he mentions a Bushmaster XM-15, an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle that is typically chambered for .223-caliber rounds; we might presume that was the weapon he surrendered with. Police said they recovered a second rifle and a shotgun from his car.
The kid bought the Bushmaster at a store in Endicott, N.Y. that specializes in selling vintage weapons. The 75-year-old owner of the store, a retired schoolteacher, says he doesn't remember the kid, even though he only sells a few of those kind of rifles a year.
His records show he ran a background check. His records show the kid came back clean.
When I was in high school, I had a job in a sporting goods store. Joe Rasco ran the gun department there, and he wouldn't sell you a gun if he didn't like the look of you. He'd tell you to go down the street. I saw him do it more than once.
I remember thinking that wasn't fair, and probably wasn't good business. You couldn't tell someone's character by the way they looked. And they would go down the street, and the company that paid me $1.75 to string tennis racquets and sell Nike waffle trainers would be out a bit of profit.
But Mr. Rasco was a good man, an elder in his church. He sold me a nice set of Ben Hogan Director blades for cost that I wish I still had. He didn't want to sell guns to the wrong people. I understood that, though even then I wondered how he could be so sure that he only sold guns to the right people.
I never worked directly for Mr. Rasco, though I spent a lot of downtime on his side of the store, asking questions about guns. I was gun-curious, in part because I knew I could make a lot more money selling guns on commission than I could sneakers.
Even in the 1970s there were probably laws against 16-year-olds selling guns. Mr. Rasco's gun clerks were grown men, in their 30s, with kids and mortgages. On our side of the store, in "athletics," we were all young and feckless, high school and college students mostly. They made me athletics manager when I was 17.
A few years later, when I was a police reporter in the same town, I had a conversation with a detective in which my work history came up. When I told him where I had worked, he side-eyed me.
"They sell more murder weapons than anyone in the state," he said.
As I sit here almost 40 years later, I don't know if that statement was true. I hope it wasn't, because it would have broken Mr. Rasco's heart to know that he played a role in something horrible.
It was often said around our shop that we sold more guns than anyone else in the state, and I feel safe in saying that there was no way for us to know what a lot of those gun owners got up to.
There are some things we never say out loud but sincerely believe. Some of us, like Mr. Rasco, think we can know a lot about a person in just a few seconds, that we can take them in and note certain details, the state of their shoes, what kind of watch they wear, the way their eyes throw light.
I believe this to a certain extent--some people feel good to me, others not so much. The algorithm is too complex to parse, and it's not something I would trust to make important decisions.
My point is not that my instincts are right; just that I believe they are. As Mr. Rasco believed his were. And as the kid who murdered people in that grocery store in Buffalo believed his were. This is one of the scariest things about human beings: We all have the capacity to believe deeply, even in the absence of evidence. Most of us have faith in our own instincts.
A lot of us probably believe that if we'd been in the shoes of the 75-year-old vintage gun dealer in Endicott, N.Y., when the 18-year-old presented himself as a potential buyer of a weapon of the same sort used in 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., the 2002 Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks, and the 2018 Waffle House shooting in Antioch, Tenn., that we'd have Joe Rasco-ed the punk and told him to go down the street and get the weapon that the Remington Outdoor Company marketed as being "for the free."
But the kid filled out his Form 4473 and the FBI approved it. And he had the cash in hand. ("Credit cards walk" at Vintage Firearms, LLC. "Bring cash!")
If you can imagine yourself selling firearms, that you would have likely taken the kid's money and rung him up. Because even if you got the heebie-jeebies off him, you'd probably defer to the judgment of the FBI. Because you might think that it's their responsibility to identify potential murderers in our midst, and because if you denied him a gun he'd probably go down the street and get one.
And maybe he'd come back and shoot you.
Because murder is banal. A kid could do it. Anyone could. Some triggers just fire easier.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com