He was the gun’s last victim, and he is running his fingers over a circular scar on the top of his left forearm. He was the gun’s first owner, who bought it for target shooting. It had been in Massachusetts and New York, Georgia and Maryland, and it had been fired hundreds of times at bottles, at cans, at tar- gets and, in its last weeks, at people. It had been made, sold, traded and given away. At that point, the gun had been in existence for 13 1/2 years. November 1989: That’s when the gun became a piece of evidence, following a series of well-publicized shoot- ings in Prince George’s County. Bring it closer still, to eye level, and the view is of an empty barrel that hasn’t held a bullet in more than a year. Bring it close, and the smell, which should be faintly of oil, is nothing but bitter metal. Take the gun out of the bag, and you can see that its dark finish is nicked and worn down to bare steel in places, especially around the trigger and tip of the barrel. But even in the dimness, it’s obvious the gun has been through a lot. There are no windows and only one weak overhead light. It is in the courthouse’s evidence vault, which used to be a jail cell, locked away. It is tucked into a dirty plastic bag, which is stuffed inside a cardboard box, which is stored in the basement of the Prince George’s County Courthouse in Upper Marlboro.
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