To experienced law enforcement officers, the fact that the RG 14 caused so much mayhem, both intended and incidental, came as no surprise. It and similar models, distributed by RG Industries, Inc. of Miami, are classic "Saturday night specials," among the cheapest and least dependable firearms in the world. Handguns are used in the commission of more crimes in this country than any other weapon. Every year, according to Handgun Control, Inc., about 22,000 American deaths are caused by firearms. Of that total, an estimated 1,000 die in handgun accidents, 1,000 by suicide, and more than 10,000 are killed by handguns.
Eighteen months after John Hinckley's assault, James Brady still struggles to overcome the disabling effects of his wound. Although his White House post has been kept open for him, he is not expected to return to it any time soon. Now, in what could become a landmark legal case, Brady is seeking restitution from the manufacturers of Hinckley's revolver. In addition to his suit against Hinckley, Jim Brady and his wife, Sarah, are claiming $100 million in damages from RG Industries, which assembled the gun, and Rohm GmbH of West Germany, which supplied the parts. The Brady suit claims that the RG 14 is "an inherently dangerous product." If successful, the Brady suit in Washington's U.S. District Court and 49 like it now pending elsewhere in the U.S. could put some gunmakers out of business. Jacob Stein, attorney for the Bradys, says his investigations "raise some very serious questions as to whether [gun manufacturers] should be permitted to pump millions of snub-nosed handguns into the population."
The weapons produced by RG are cheap throwaway guns with short barrels that make them easily conceal-able—and therefore attractive to criminals. There are an estimated 55 million handguns in the United States, and at least 1 million of them are RG "Saturday night specials." The Brady suit alleges that "the unreliability and poor construction of RG and Röhm's handguns would, in almost all cases, preclude their use by those who wished to use a handgun for a proper use." Indeed, in 1971, an RG gun like the one that felled Brady misfired 172 out of 1,300 times in tests commissioned by the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, indicating that the RG weapons tested "were of very poor quality." In addition to charging poor workmanship, the suit also blames RG and its German supplier for failing to make "reasonable inquiry" into Hinckley's fitness to own and use the weapon he purchased. Hinckley, of course, was later judged insane at his trial.
RG began marketing its low-cost guns in 1968, shortly after passage of a federal statute that outlawed importation of cheap foreign handguns. RG complies with the law by attaching German parts to $1 American frames. The company's snub-nosed revolvers are assembled behind the barred windows and barbed-wire fences of a stuccoed cinder-block factory in Miami's Liberty City, a high-crime black ghetto that was the scene of three days and nights of rioting in May 1980. All visitors are screened at the gate, and journalists are routinely turned away. "The people in Germany don't want any publicity," RG's chief executive in Miami explains.
In fact, handguns—and the carnage they cause—often receive precious little publicity. Day after day in this country they are used in casual killings of people too obscure to be of much interest to newspapers even in death. To assess the toll that handguns take on American society, PEOPLE has attempted to document every handgun death that occurred in the nation from 6 a.m. on a typical Saturday to 6 a.m. the following morning. September 18, 1982 was not extraordinary; 62 handgun deaths were recorded across the country during the 24 hours—more than on some Saturdays, fewer than on others. On the pages that follow, PEOPLE reports the way these ordinary Americans met their separate but similar ends.
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