The Fringe's Death Benefits • 95 from plumbing pipe. Another old boy shapes bolts, while another makes stocks from the native Quiche pine. One of the smarter ones has made a trigger group from springs and pins and odd bits of metal. Then they gather and assemble guns to defend their settlement and to use for hunting." I asked where they got ammunition and was told, 'Sometimes a case or so of our 12-gauge field loads might fall off the back of my jeep . . . someone's gotta help these poor bastards if their own government won't." There was one humorous bright spot in all of this. That would be the attack of the deadly nail guns in 1982, when the New York news media, never a boring or objective lot at best, went ballistic following a freak accident in a local restaurant where a female construction worker was injured when struck by a nail driven by a power nailer. The New York Post, that city's version of the infamous tabloid. The National Dumper, editorially shrilled that the 'easy availability of deadly cartridge-fired nail guns ... can be obtained with nightmarish ease by anyone who wants one." With language bordering on hysteria, as if the entire population of Crips gang members, all armed with the deadly nail assault guns, were looting and raping their way through the five boroughs, the Post described how one of its reporters went out on a serious undercover mission ... to rent a nail gun. And, in this episode of award-posturing investigative journalism, the reporter managed to rent one on her first try. The Post continued in prose I could not have invented: This deadly assault weapon would shatter a block of concrete and drive a nail through 8 inches of weathered pine. . . . The ease with which they can be obtained, at hardware stores and tool rental firms, makes a mockery of state and city gun control regulations they are a mugger's dream come true When not firing nails they can easily be converted into a zip gun with materials found on the average handyman's workbench, and owning one is perfectly legal. According to several New York City police information