Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

Authors: Larson, Erik
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
BISAC/Subject: SOC004000, SOC051000, POL014000
ISBN: 9780307803313, Related ISBNs: 0307803317, 0517197855, 0517596776, 0679759271, 9780307803313
Classification: Non-Fiction
Number of pages: 304,
Audience: General/trade
Synopsis: 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-Tribune

"One of the most readable anti-gun treatises in years." --Washington Post Book World
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