-Caveat Lector-
August 16, 1999
Cities That Are Suing Gun Firms
Are Often Suppliers Themselves
By VANESSA O'CONNELL and PAUL M. BARRETT
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Since last fall, 26 municipalities have sued the gun
industry, accusing it of flooding the market with
handguns, many of which end up in criminal hands.
There is an incongruity in the municipalities' position,
though: Most of the cities suing the industry are
themselves, in effect, gun suppliers -- and some could be
accused of a degree of carelessness in how they unload
used police weapons and confiscated firearms. Major
cities that have taken the industry to court, including
Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco, have together
poured hundreds of thousands of second-hand police
guns into the civilian market.
The cities say they need to sell or trade in the weapons
to cut the cost of obtaining new, higher-power models --
much as old police cars are auctioned off for cash. Yet
the practice incurs a cost of a different kind. Thousands
of these castoff guns have turned up in crimes, such as
last week's shooting rampage in Los Angeles by
neo-Nazi Buford O. Furrow Jr. After wounding five
people in his attack on a Jewish community center, the
confessed killer allegedly murdered a mailman of
Filipino descent with a Glock 26 pistol.
Police traced that gun to the Cosmopolis, Wash., police
department, which in 1996 had traded the pistol to a gun
dealer in the small town. In return, the department
received a larger Glock pistol, says Cosmopolis Police
Chief Gary Eisenhower. The gun dealer sold the Glock
26 to a private individual, and it ultimately wound up at
a gun show before reaching Mr. Furrow's hands.
"It's upsetting," says Chief Eisenhower, that his
five-person department's old gun was used in the killing,
though he says that with a $400,000 annual budget, he
can't afford simply to destroy used service weapons.
But it wasn't an isolated incident. Data obtained by The
Wall Street Journal under the Freedom of Information
Act show that at least 1,100 former police guns were
among the 193,203 crime guns traced last year by the
federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Because of inconsistencies in how the agency compiles
gun-trace data, any such annual count of former police
guns connected to crime "probably represents the tip of
the iceberg," says Howard Andrews, a Columbia
University bio-statistician who assisted the Journal in its
analysis. Citing privacy laws, the ATF won't release the
names of police agencies whose guns were most often
used in crimes.
So many former police guns wind up on the street that
the International Association of Chiefs of Police is
urging all law-enforcement agencies to destroy used
service guns, as well as guns confiscated by police
agencies. In a resolution enacted last October, the group
warned that "the recirculation of these firearms back into
the general population increases the availability of
firearms which could be used again to kill or injure
additional police officers and citizens."
For the same reason, some antigun activists also decry
police trade-ins. But Handgun Control Inc., the nation's
biggest gun-control group, has tried to play down the
issue, at least in part because it is helping organize and
lead the municipal lawsuits against the gun industry.
Dennis Henigan, Handgun Control's top lawyer, denies
that the cities' role in trade-ins undercuts their legal case
against gun makers. Talk of police gun swaps, he says, is
an attempt by gun companies to "launch a counterattack"
against the cities by focusing on "extraneous issues."
In a typical deal, a police department will sell its old
guns to a wholesaler offering the agency new weapons at
little or no cost. Last year, for instance, gun wholesaler
Interstate Arms Corp. of Billerica, Mass., paid the
Boston police $324.87 apiece for old 9mm pistols and
charged the department an identical $324.87 each for
new .40-caliber Glocks. Boston agreed to the deal and
traded about 2,350 guns, for a savings of roughly
$763,000.
A department ships its old guns to the wholesaler, which
resells them at a markup to gun dealers around the
country. For example, Kiesler Wholesale of
Jeffersonville, Ind., recently was offering a $225
"allowance" to police departments looking to unload
their old Smith & Wesson Model 645 semiautomatic
pistols. Dealers looking to buy the used guns paid $299
apiece, according to its catalog.
Dealers, in turn, sell the used guns for as little as half
as much as new models might fetch. For instance, a used
Glock or Beretta might retail for $200 or so, compared
to the typical price of $400 for a new model from these
top-of-the-line gun makers.
"It's the gun equivalent of a pre-owned Lexus," says
Joseph Vince, who retired last year from his position as
the chief of crime-gun analysis at the ATF. "You get a
high-quality gun, but one you maybe couldn't afford when
it was new."
Police trade-ins first became common in the mid-1980s,
when many law-enforcement agencies began switching
from six-shot revolvers to semiautomatic pistols that can
accommodate more ammunition and can be reloaded
more quickly. At the time, police budgets were tight, and
gun makers were pitching semiautomatic pistols as an
improvement over the Smith & Wesson six-shot
revolvers most departments had used since the 1970s or
earlier.
Gun makers such as Glock encouraged wholesalers to
bid for a department's old revolvers and resell them to
dealers throughout the country. Even though revolvers
are generally less popular than semiautomatics, old
police guns retain a certain mystique in the eyes of many
shoppers and sell quickly, says Wain Roberts, a dealer
in Pinellas Park, Fla.
Despite the anxiety expressed by the international police
chiefs' association, the pace of trade-ins has picked up
recently, thanks largely to more aggressive marketing by
Glock, a leading supplier to the law-enforcement market.
Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans says that over
the past two years, his department has switched to the
Glock .40-caliber pistol from the company's 9mm
model, partly because Glock suggested that larger
.40-caliber bullets were less likely to pass through a
suspect's body and hit an innocent bystander. "There are
liability issues," Commissioner Evans explains.
Apart from the characteristics of particular guns, the
1994 federal crime bill created separate incentives to
pursue police trade-ins. The law included a ban on the
manufacture of magazines that can contain more than 10
rounds. (A magazine is the part inserted into a
semiautomatic weapon that holds the ammunition.)
Congress created an exception, however, for guns sold
to law-enforcement agencies, which could have
magazines exceeding 10 rounds.
As often happens in response to a new gun regulation,
demand among gun enthusiasts for larger magazines
jumped beginning in 1994. Gun wholesalers saw an
opportunity to profit. The wholesalers offered police
departments financial enticements to trade in their used
service weapons and the large magazines that came with
them. The wholesalers thus got their hands on many
thousands of extra "high-capacity" magazines, which in
the years since they have resold on the civilian market
for twice or three times their original "pre-ban" value.
A common incentive that wholesalers have offered
police departments is an even swap of new guns for used
service weapons with large-capacity magazines. "Here's
an offer you can't refuse!" blares a recent flier from
Interstate Arms, promising to trade new Glocks for old
at no extra cost to police departments.
But as police trade-ins grew more common in the
mid-1990s, so did the number of former police guns
showing up at crime scenes. The ATF started noticing
that so many guns once owned by police were being
used illegally that the agency created a special computer
code -- S5 -- for the guns it traced back to
law-enforcement agencies. But while the ATF now tries
to compile traces of former police guns, it hasn't worked
out kinks in its database to allow for a comprehensive
accounting of the problem.
Recently, a backlash has begun to build. After used
police guns were recovered in several high-profile
crimes, a number of states, including New York,
Connecticut and Wisconsin, enacted laws mandating the
destruction of old police guns, or requiring that the guns
be sold overseas. Such laws force cash-strapped police
departments to hold on to their guns for longer than they
might have. "I would hate to see 20 nice-condition
Glocks get ground up" just because they can't be traded
in, says Captain Daniel Crawford of the Ashland, Wis.,
police department. He says his department plans to use
its current Glocks until they wear out.
Since last fall, officials in a number of cities that were
filing or planning to file suit against the gun industry
have worried that their own police departments' methods
for getting rid of old service weapons would expose the
cities to allegations of hypocrisy. The municipal suits
accuse the industry of failing to oversee aggressively
how guns are distributed and sold; the municipal
officials fretted that the cities, too, could be accused of
negligence if there was a risk that guns they were getting
rid of might end up in criminal hands.
In San Francisco, for example, the police department
since 1995 had sold or traded obsolete service
revolvers and confiscated guns to out-of-state
wholesalers. Part of the motivation for the sales was to
help finance the purchase of new, more powerful Beretta
semiautomatic pistols that carry more rounds and allow
users to reload more rapidly.
One of the conditions of the sales of the old and
confiscated guns was that the wholesalers would sell the
guns to foreign buyers, says city attorney Louise Renne,
but San Francisco officials were concerned by reports
that some of the weapons may have been turning up in
the U.S. In late May, as Ms. Renne's staff was putting the
finishing touches on the city's suit against the gun
industry, the San Francisco police department announced
that it would stop selling its old and confiscated guns
and instead would destroy them. Less than a week later,
Ms. Renne announced the filing of the suit.
The city attorney emphasizes that even under the
abandoned trade-in policy, San Francisco "attached
strings," such as the overseas-buyer requirement, that
were intended to protect against the city's police guns
ever being used in crime -- at least in this country. That
approach "was a far different thing" from how the gun
industry does business, she adds. San Francisco's suit,
like most of the others filed on behalf of 26 cities and
counties around the country, alleges that the industry
pours handguns into areas with lax gun laws,
encouraging illegal traffickers to siphon off numerous
guns that are then sold to criminals. Gun manufacturers,
says Ms. Renne, essentially "attach no strings" once their
products leave the factory. (Gun companies dispute this,
saying that they do business only with reputable
wholesalers that agree to operate responsibly.)
But Ms. Renne concedes that both governments and the
industry "ought to learn from the lessons of the past" that
gun sales haven't been monitored closely enough. "All
policies" -- public and industry -- "ought to be changed"
in light of what has been learned, she adds.
New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, who filed the first
city suit against the gun industry last October, has since
been embarrassed publicly on the trade-in issue by
Glock's vice president and general counsel, Paul
Jannuzzo. Near the end of a joint appearance earlier this
year on NBC's "Today Show," Mr. Jannuzzo pointed out
that New Orleans is perhaps the biggest distributor of
used guns in Louisiana, having recently agreed to obtain
new Glocks in a swap for 7,300 weapons seized in
crimes, as well as 700 Berettas that had belonged to
New Orleans police.
Mr. Morial tried to justify the deal, claiming that as part
of the agreement, Glock had "agreed not to sell them in
Louisiana." But by late April, a New Orleans newspaper
was running an ad from a local gun shop promoting the
sale of Beretta 9mm pistols once carried by New
Orleans officers. "Own a piece of New Orleans history,"
the ad declared. "All are original duty weapons and are
numbered and stamped N.O.P.D." The guns came with a
bonus: two 15-round "pre-ban clips."
The mayor was unavailable for an interview, according
to a spokesman. But the spokesman says New Orleans
suspended the Glock swap before it was completed, and
as a result, now owes the gun company an unspecified
amount of cash.
Kiesler's Wholesale, which served as middleman in the
New Orleans-Glock deal, has likewise grown more
sensitive to concern about police trade-ins -- without
actually ceasing to participate in them. For example,
Kiesler's has stopped billing the police guns it buys and
resells as "police trade-ins" and now marks them merely
"pre-owned." The wholesaler also has added pages to
its catalog, promising police officials several
"politically acceptable ways to help your department"
dispose of its weapons. These options include arranging
for Kiesler's to resell the guns outside of the
geographical area or state where the agency is based, or
reselling them only to police officers. The restrictions
come with a price; a department will receive a smaller
credit for each gun it trades in to obtain either
limitation.
Boston Police Commissioner Evans discovered a few
months ago that some of the guns his department had
traded in materialized on the civilian market nearby. In
April, Boston agreed to pay $231,525 to the wholesaler,
Interstate Arms, to cover the extra cost of disposing of
its guns overseas, according to a new agreement.
Commissioner Evans calls it "money well spent."
At Glock's U.S. headquarters in suburban Atlanta, the
company says it believes it has worked out a solution for
the trade-in problem: a proposed program under which it
would lease its guns to police departments that lack the
cash for a capital outlay. Because departments wouldn't
technically own the guns, they wouldn't be able to resell
or trade them. Instead, Glock would take the guns back
and resell them. The plan could be seen as relieving city
governments of responsibility for former police guns,
although the weapons would still end up back on the
civilian market.
Glock's Mr. Jannuzzo declines to comment on the new
lease plan, except to say it is something "a lot of people
are contemplating."
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