PAGELAND. – As sheriff’s investigators threaded past the battered cars, cast-off tires and rusted farm equipment cluttering Brent Nicholson’s front yard, there was no hint of the sinister stockpile hidden behind his windowless front door.
Inside, the guns were everywhere: rifles and shotguns piled in the living room, halls and bedrooms; handguns littering tables and countertops.
Outside, when they rolled up the door on the pre-fab metal garage, more arms spilled out at their feet.
“This has completely changed our definition of an ass-load of guns,” said Chesterfield County Sheriff Jay Brooks.
Six weeks after the discovery, officers are still cataloguing the weapons, many of which have proved stolen, and the final tally is expected to be close to 5 000.
“I don’t know if there’s ever been (a seizure) this big anywhere before,” Brooks says.
The question of how one man amassed such a stockpile of guns arises just as there is renewed American soul-searching over the widespread availability of firearms in the wake of a series of mass shootings.
Even in a country where more people own more guns than anywhere else in the world, Nicholson’s cache is extraordinary.
The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives doesn’t rank gun seizures by size, but a spokesman says Nicholson’s hoard probably is among the largest ever.
Yet when and why Nicholson set out to amass such an arsenal remains a mystery. Investigators are trying to determine whether he was simply a gun-obsessed hoarder or a supply valve in the “Iron Pipeline” of illegal firearms flowing from the south to New Jersey, New York and other northern states.
Nicholson, jailed on multiple charges of possessing stolen property, has not entered a plea or retained an attorney, court records show.
His wife, Sharon Nicholson, facing similar charges and free on bond, declined to discuss specifics of the case but stressed in a brief interview that her husband buys his guns legally.
The Nicholson case raises issues that are fuelling an increasingly heated national dialogue on the modern-day implications of Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms, which puts no limits on the number of weapons citizens can own.
The uncertainty over how he got his guns – and what he was doing with them – underscores disputes over private gun sales, gun registration and what the government should know about who owns firearms and how they change hands.
Now, the spate of mass shootings, capped by Wednesday’s spree by a heavily armed couple who killed 14 at an office holiday party in San Bernardino, California, has pushed those issues to the fore in the presidential campaign.
The massacre, which follows an attack that killed three last Friday at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic and an October 1 rampage by a gunman who killed 10 at an Oregon college, prompted Hillary Clinton, leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, to renew her call to “stop gun violence now” with new firearm purchase restrictions.
Conversely, those who top the polls for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, insist the answer to gun violence is to empower citizens to thwart such attacks by making it easier, not harder, to buy and carry weapons.
It wasn’t hard for Nicholson. – Reuters.
