Advocates Determined to Close Gun Show Loophole in Commonwealth

On January 13, staff from the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence was honored to join victims and survivors from the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech; concerned students from Longwood University; and representatives from Protest Easy Guns, the Virginia Chapters of the Million Mom March, the Virginia Center for Public Safety, and Students for Gun Free Schools as they attended a hearing of the Virginia State Crime Commission in Richmond.

The Crime Commission was scheduled to make a recommendation to the Virginia General Assembly on the Gun Show Loophole issue. The loophole allows individuals to sell firearms at gun shows without conducting criminal background checks on purchasers. The ATF has identified gun shows as the second leading source of illegally trafficked firearms in the United States, stating that “prohibited persons, such as convicted felons and juveniles, do personally buy firearms at gun shows and gun shows are sources of firearms that are trafficked to such prohibited persons … Firearms [are] diverted at and through gun shows by straw purchasers, unregulated private sellers, and licensed dealers.” An ATF investigation in Virginia found that between 2002 and 2005 more than 400 firearms sold at Richmond-area gun shows were recovered in connection with criminal activity.

The Virginia Tech Review Panel, the Virginia State Police, and an overwhelming majority of Commonwealth residents have called for the loophole to be closed. Omar Samaha, brother of Virginia Tech victim Reema Samaha, also made it clear to the Crime Commission how easy it was for him to buy handguns and assault weapons at a recent Virginia gun show from private sellers—no questions asked. “It’s like going to the store to buy a jug of milk or a candy bar,” Samaha said. “I had 10 guns in under an hour.”

Unfortunately, the Crime Commission failed to heed these recommendations, and deadlocked 6-6 on a vote to recommend that the Gun Shop Loophole be closed. The key vote was cast by House Minority Leader Delegate Ward L. Armstrong (D-Henry), who had joined the commission only days earlier. He claimed his NO vote was because of the high unemployment rate in his district, and the importance of the annual Carroll County Gun Show. This logic was not immediately clear—background checks are inexpensive and gun shows continue to thrive in states that have closed the Gun Show Loophole, such as California. Armstrong also complained about not being well briefed on the issue, but decided to vote NO anyway even after Commission Chairman David B. Albo (R-Fairfax) recommended he abstain.

Gun violence prevention advocates were undeterred, and gathered by the Bell Tower on the State Capitol grounds immediately after the Commission hearing to conduct a Lie-In in remembrance of past victims of gun violence. Courtney Edwards, a Longwood student who lost her best friend, Nicole White, during the Virginia Tech tragedy, spoke and said, “I can't believe that they are even questioning this. I don't even understand what the question is about it." Nicole’s father, Mike White, was more blunt: “Indecision is what caused the murder of my child,” he said. “Indecision today is what will cause convicted felons, [the] mentally ill and others to walk into the next gun show and purchase a weapon in order to wreak more harm.”

The issue will now move to the Virginia General Assembly, where Senator Henry Marsh (D-Richmond) and Senator Janet Howell (D-Reston) have already introduced legislation, SB 1257, to close the Gun Show Loophole.

Advocates are committed to passing the legislation and ready for a tough fight. “I don’t care if it takes a decade,” said Lily Habtu, who was shot multiple times at Virginia Tech but survived. “No one should have to go through what I went through.” Omar Samaha agrees. “We are going to keep going until this law is changed,” he said.

Microstamping Proves its Worth...Again

For years, law enforcement has been stymied by an inability to draw significant leads from ballistic evidence recovered at crime scenes. When a crime gun is not physically recovered at a crime scene, investigators receive return hits from bullet and cartridge evidence entered into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network only 1.5% of the time. In many cases, these “hits” are only matches to cartridges found at other crimes scenes—letting investigators know that the firearm has been used in another crime without actually identifying the weapon. The national “clearance” rate for homicide cases in 2005 was only 62%.

Thankfully, “microstamping” technology has been developed to address this problem. Microstamping utilizes lasers to make precise, microscopic engravings on the internal mechanisms of a handgun, such as the breech face and firing pin. As the gun is fired, information identifying the make, model and serial number of the gun is stamped onto the cartridge as alphanumeric and geometric codes. The technology allows law enforcement to trace firearms directly through cartridge casings found at crime scenes, without any need to recover the crime gun itself.

Seeking to avoid reform at all costs, the gun lobby has repeatedly attacked microstamping technology as unproven and unreliable. A recent test of the technology, however, has once again discredited that claim.

Microstamping’s co-inventors, Todd Lizotte and Orest Ohar, presented a research paper at the SPIE Optics & Technology Conference in San Diego in August 2008 covering the testing of a .45 Cal Colt 1991 A1 Commander semiautomatic pistol. This represented the first peer-reviewed publication of fully optimized and current state-of-the-art microstamping technology as applied to firearms.

During the stress test, Lizotte and Ohar fired 1,500 rounds from the Colt handgun. This firearm was purchased as a used model and equipped with microstamping technology. Using simple Optical Microscopy, Lizotte and Ohar achieved identifiable marks from the Colt’s expended cartridges over 95% of the time. The rounds were fired consecutively and each cartridge was collected and meticulously catalogued, allowing future researchers to review the evidence for themselves.

This followed a previous test in May 2007 that demonstrated the endurance and durability of the technology. During that test, Lizotte and Ohar fired over 2,500 rounds from a microstamped Smith and Wesson .40 caliber semiautomatic handgun using five different brands of ammunition. Microstamped markings from the firing pin were transferred successfully 97% of the time using both Optical Microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy. Additionally, breech face markings transferred to cartridge casings 96% of the time.

These tests demonstrate the viability of microstamping under even the most extreme conditions, but very rarely are handguns fired thousands of times before being used in crimes. A 2000 ATF study found that semiautomatic handguns have the shortest median “time-to-crime” of any firearm type, 4.5 years. This marks the length of time from a firearm’s first retail sale to its recovery by law enforcement as a crime gun. Furthermore, Joe Vince, a former Chief of ATF’s Crime Gun Analysis Branch, has noted that crime guns are frequently recovered with fewer than 20 rounds fired.

In October 2007, California became the first state to enact a microstamping law for semiautomatic handguns. Several other states, and the District of Columbia, are now considering microstamping legislation, and microstamping bills have been introduced at the federal level in both the House of Representatives and Senate. Lizotte and Ohar are also promoting the technology’s application for border security (more than 90% of illegal firearms seized in Mexico come from the United States) and counterinsurgency/counterterrorism in war zones.

For more information, visit the Microstamping Technology Exchange blog and read CSGV’s “Microstamping Technology: Precise and Proven” memo.

“I still see the faces of the people…that died that day…”

Here at Bullet Counter Points we like to highlight the exceptional work that everyday Ameri Today we focus on the victim of a horrible shooting tragedy that has turned his grief and trauma into a determination to help others.

On the evening of February 7, 2008, Todd Smith, a reporter for the Kirkwood-Webster Journal, was covering a city council meeting at Kirkwood City Hall in Missouri. Just after the meeting began, Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton—a local resident who had been embroiled in a long running property dispute with the City of Kirkwood—entered the chambers and opened fire with two handguns, a .44 Magnum revolver and a .40 caliber handgun (the latter of which had been taken from a police officer Thornton killed in the parking lot outside the meeting). Before he was stopped by police, Thornton killed a total of five people (two police officers, two city council members, and Kirkwood’s public works director) and wounded two others. One of the wounded was Kirkwood Mayor Mike Swoboda, who would finally succumb to his head injuries and pass away seven months later. Also wounded was Todd, who was seated in the front row at the meeting and shot in the hand. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “[Thornton] was completely possessed … He looked at me directly and I felt complete rage.”

Like most of those present at the meeting that night, Todd was familiar with Thornton and his grievances. “I had seen him before at other city council meetings, and on one occasion he decided to speak at a council meeting and I decided to ask him what his issues were,” he recalls. “I had trouble understanding him and what he was wanting—he seemed angry and I had just started on Kirkwood beat and did not know his whole history. Even at this particular meeting he was somewhat incoherent and erratic and wearing a sign on his body in protest of the Kirkwood City Council.”

Sadly, this was not the first time Todd had been a victim of gun violence. He describes another traumatic incident that occurred more than a decade earlier:

“I had moved to New Castle, Delaware. A few days after July 4, 1997, I went to a nearby 7-Eleven around 9:00 p.m. I purchased a soda and was walking through a shopping center when two teenagers came up behind me with guns in their hands. They asked for money. I ran, and one of them shot at me. They ran away. I kept walking, but noticed there was blood coming from the back of my leg. I made it to a gas station that was across the street. I told the clerk to call 911. A guy getting gas noticed me sitting down in front of the gas station and took off his shirt and it was used as a tourniquet to stop my bleeding. I never saw this man again, and wish I had the chance to thank him. About 30 minutes after the shooting, an ambulance arrived on the scene and took me to a nearby hospital. A doctor came to see me and studied the wound and decided to pull the bullet out. He did numb the area, but I remember it being a painful process. I was in the hospital for three days before being released. The African-American teenagers that committed the act were never found. A police officer did come by once, I looked at pictures, but it was hard to tell who it was. I only saw them briefly, it was dark out, and their faces were partially covered.”

Todd’s recovery from these violent episodes has been difficult. The injuries he sustained in the Kirkwood shooting required two surgeries, the second of which involved a joint replacement. “I will never fully recover from this incident,” he says. “Emotionally, I have come a long way, but have a ways to go. I still have a fear of being alone at night and have fears of being in a setting with a large group of people.”

Despite the trauma he has been through, however, Todd wants to create something positive from his experience. “I feel the need to be a spokesperson on gun control,” he says. “The victims in Kirkwood were expecting to leave the meeting to go home and be with their families, like any other night. Instead, they never had a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones. I think there is something to be said about stronger gun control measures so people can go on living with the people they care about.”

Todd notes, “I am not against guns. I grew up around guns. I lived in a rural area, where people hunted and worked at a gun club. I would not like to see people’s right to have a gun taken away. I just believe in properly screening those who want to purchase guns, and developing ways to identify guns so that we know where they came from and where they were originally purchased.”

He has contacted the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and become involved in their Program for Victims and Survivors. Todd will take part in legislative advocacy efforts at the federal and state level, and reach out to other journalists to educate them about gun violence prevention.

Still, some memories do not go away easily. “I still see the faces of the people that were friends of mine that died that day in Kirkwood,” Todd says. “One did her best to help people like Thornton. She worked to make sure that the council considered the views of constituents so their concerns were always heard and represented. I also will never forget Kirkwood Police Officer Tom Ballman. He stood up when Thornton pulled out his guns and in that instant he was killed. This image will haunt me for the rest of my life.

“The instantaneous ending of a human life—which guns allow for—should not be allowed.”

A Fine Example

Tragedy was averted on December 9 when police arrested 15-year-old Richard Yanis, who planned to carry out a mass shooting at his high school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

Yanis was going to “shoot everyone he did not like” at Pottstown High School. He planned to tell friends to leave the school’s grounds prior to opening fire on teachers and students. Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman characterized the would-be school shooter as “an outcast, a loner who didn’t have many friends. He was picked on, he felt like he didn’t fit in very well.”

In preparation for the shooting, Yanis stole three handguns and ammunition from his father’s locker and gave them to a friend. The friend was to deliver the weapons to Yanis at the high school on the day of the shooting. However the plot began to unravel when Yanis’ father, Michael Yanis, reported the guns stolen to police, touching off an “intense, month-long investigation.” The friend holding the weapons soon dumped them in a river with the help of his stepmother and alerted school officials. Police intervened and quickly took Richard Yanis into custody. He has been charged with criminal attempt to commit first-degree murder.

The incident touches on a number of hot button issues regarding the role of guns in schools and the responsibilities of firearm owners...

Recent years have seen aggressive efforts by the gun lobby to push concealed weapons into America’s schools. Gun rights organizations have argued that arming teachers and allowing others to carry handguns into schools will enhance children’s safety. The Harrold School District in Texas made national news when it became the first K-12 campus in the country to allow teachers and faculty to carry concealed handguns. Defending the district’s decision, Superintendent David Thweatt stated, “When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying ‘Sic ‘em’ to a dog.”

Not only did Thweatt ignore the facts—a recent study showed that youth ages 5-18 are over 50 times more likely to be murdered when they are away from school than at school—he also failed to consider that a better solution might be to prevent active shooter situations before they even happen. The Pottstown case demonstrates that good investigative work by police, and vigilance by school administrators, can forestall a tragedy without the need to inject guns into a learning environment.

The Pottstown incident also highlights the importance of reporting lost and stolen firearms to the police. One can imagine what might have happened had Michael Yanis failed to make that critical call to law enforcement. As District Attorney Ferman noted, Richard Yanis “had the immediate capacity to commit the crime with the guns and arsenal of ammunition waiting to be delivered upon his word.”

One might think that reporting lost and stolen guns is a common-sense thing to do. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has reported, however, that “most gun owners do not report stolen firearms to the police.” In the state of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh Police recently reported that out of 1,900 firearms recovered on crime scenes in 2007 and 2008, only 231 had been previously reported missing or stolen.

The city of Pottstown recently passed a new ordinance that requires gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms to the police. The National Rifle Association (NRA), remarkably, opposed the ordinance, stating, “It’s not going to end up lowering crime. All it ends up doing is further victimizing someone who’s been a victim of crime.” The NRA, however, has been unable to cite a single instance where a law-abiding gun owner was wrongfully prosecuted under the law in any of the seven states where it has been enacted. At a recent Pottstown City Council hearing, one local gun owner, David Blankenhorn, had a very different view: “[My pistol] turned up in a drug raid in Auburn. Because I reported it in 24 hours, because I cooperated with the law, I was given that gun back. This ordinance can have a major benefit. If you simply follow the law, it works with you.”

Hopefully, municipal officials across the country will look to Pottstown as an example of how to prevent tragedies in their schools without putting students at additional risk of gun violence.

The Unstudied Study

In September, three researchers from the University of Maryland and University of Michigan released a study that examined eleven years of data on the date and location of “every” gun show in the states of California and Texas, the nation’s two most populous states. They combined this with information on the date, location, and cause of every death occurring in these same two states during the same period. They then attempted to determine if the gun shows had an effect on gun-related deaths, with “two important caveats.” They only examined deaths that occurred within 25 miles of the gun shows, and in the four weeks immediately following their conclusion.

They concluded that the results of their study “suggest that gun shows do not increase the number of homicides or suicides and that the absence of gun show regulations does not increase the number of gun-related deaths as proponents of these regulations suggest.” The inference was that the 87% of Americans who want to close the Gun Show Loophole—which allows private individuals to sell guns at these events without conducting background checks on purchasers–are misguided.

The National Rifle Association was ecstatic, and claimed that the study “obliterates Anti-Gunners’ claims” that gun shows are “totally unregulated arms bazaars.”

The NRA’s victory dance might have been a tad premature, however. Just last week, researchers from five universities across America sent the study’s authors a formal and public letter. They had examined the study’s methodology and found it deeply flawed. Two of their main criticisms were as follows:

The geographic and time restrictions in the study reflected a poor understanding of illegal gun markets. The study only looked at gun-related deaths within a 25-mile radius of a gun show, despite evidence that a large portion of crime guns recovered are purchased either out-of-state (19.3% and 27.7%, respectively, for Texas and California in 2007) or in-state but not in the immediate vicinity (For Dallas and Los Angeles in 2000, only half of traced crime guns were recovered within 25 miles of their point of initial sale). Furthermore, the study only looked at gun-related deaths in the four weeks immediately following a gun show. In Texas and California, however, the average time from a gun’s sale to its recovery following use in crime was 9.8 and 12.9 years, respectively, in 2007.

The study failed to account for every gun show in California and Texas. The study used just one publication, the Gun and Knife Show Calendar, to identify gun shows in the two states. Additional listings in publications like the Big Show Journal, however, indicate that the study’s authors failed to identify roughly 20% of the gun shows that occurred in California and Texas during the study period.

The NRA might have also missed a story that came out of Texas just two weeks ago. Gregorio Martinez, a convicted felon, was arrested at the Bell County Gun Show in Texas after attempting to purchase an AK-47 assault rifle. Criminals don’t shop at gun shows? Martinez didn’t get the gun lobby memo. Nor did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which has confirmed that gun shows are the second leading source of illegally diverted firearms in the United States (behind only corrupt federally licensed dealers).

No Small Offense

The Second Amendment—as defined by the Supreme Court in the recent District of Columbia v. Heller decision—provides “an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” In the same decision, the Court defined certain areas of firearm regulation that are both reasonable and constitutional. For example, the Court said that its opinion “should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill…”

Such “longstanding prohibitions” were defined in the 1968 Gun Control Act. The Act also prohibited “anyone who is a subject to a court order that restrains a person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of such intimate partner” from purchasing or owning a firearm(s). The U.S. Congress took further action in 1996, adopting the Lautenberg Amendment, which made it a felony for anyone convicted of a misdemeanor crime of “domestic violence” to ship, transport, possess or receive firearms or ammunition. The Amendment also made it a felony for anyone to sell or issue a firearm or ammunition to a person with such a conviction.

Unfortunately, this latter category of domestic abusers could find themselves rearmed after an upcoming Supreme Court ruling in the case of U.S. v. Hayes.

The case originated last year in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4^th Circuit. The defendant in the case, Randy Hayes of West Virginia, abused his wife and pled guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge in 1994. Ten years later, police responded to a domestic violence call from his home and learned that he had owned or sold five firearms (one was found on the premises). In light of this, he was convicted in 2005 of illegal gun possession under the terms of the Lautenberg Amendment.

Hayes challenged the conviction in the courts, alleging that since the West Virginia statute under which he was originally convicted did not have a domestic relationship between offender and victim as an element, he could not be prosecuted under the Lautenberg Amendment. A District Court upheld Hayes’ conviction, citing the United States v. Ball definition of domestic abuse as “needing only to have one element—the use or attempted use of physical force; the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim need not appear in the formal definition of the predicate offense.” The Court of Appeals, however, overturned this decision and ruled that the Lautenberg Amendment applies only to individuals convicted under state domestic violence laws (only 1/3 of the states currently have such statutes on the books). Exempt were individuals convicted of simple misdemeanor assault or battery (even for offenses that occur inside the home).

The case has now been appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on November 10. The Justices’ comments that day suggest that they are leaning toward upholding the Court of Appeals ruling. In one interesting exchange, Justice Antonin Scalia stated that possessing a gun was “lawful conduct” and the wife-beating charge against Hayes was “not that serious of an offense.” The government’s attorney countered that Hayes “hit his wife all around the face until it swelled out, kicked her all around her body, kicked her in the ribs…” Justice Scalia was unmoved, declaring that Hayes therefore “should have been charged with a felony, but he wasn’t.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy (a critical swing vote on the Court) found fault with the language of the Lautenberg Amendment, stating that it was “a mess.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg countered this notion, however, saying: “Wasn’t the statute responding to just that problem, that domestic abuse tended to be charged as misdemeanors rather than felonies? And it was that fact that the Senator [Lautenberg] was responding to when he included misdemeanor. The whole purpose of this was to make a misdemeanor battery count for the statute’s purpose ... All the circuits that had this question before the floor read it the way the Government is urging.”

There is certainly a great deal at stake in the case. According to the Family Violence Prevention Fund, “Access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner homicide more than five times than in instances where there are no weapons, according to a [2003 study entitled “Risk Factors for Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results from a Multi-Site Case Control Study”]. In addition, abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners.” The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence has also pointed out that “about 14% of all police officer deaths occur during a response to domestic violence calls.”

It is disturbing to think that thousands of criminals such as Hayes (who failed to change his spots a full decade after his initial battery conviction) could find themselves rearmed in the near future. Indeed, a High Court ruling in favor of Hayes would force Congress to go back to the drawing table to redraft the language of the Lautenberg Amendment—an uncertain proposition even in an era of Democratic control.

“I don’t keep a gun in my house, because I value my life.”

In August we blogged about an article in Esquire that looked into the background of Steven Kazmierczak, the grad student who shot and killed six people (including himself) and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University on February 14, 2008. The author of the article, David Vann, debunked the media’s simplistic portrayal of Kazmierczak as “an award-winning sociology student and a leader of a campus criminal justice group” who presented “no red flags.” Vann’s research uncovered something strikingly different—a young man with a lengthy and disturbing history of mental illness and volatile behavior.

Vann’s latest work, Legend of a Suicide, is a collection of stories and a novella that explores a more personal topic—the death of his father. Vann’s semi-autobiographical account—which incorporates both metaphor and allegory—is being published this month and has already garnered substantial praise. The book received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler commented, “This is one of the most striking fictional debuts in recent memory.” Legend of a Suicide can be purchased through the University of Massachusetts Press website.

The young character at the center of Legend, “Roy,” shares a passion for firearms with his father. Vann confirms that this is based on truth: “I grew up in a hunting and fishing family in Alaska and rural northern California, so I was shooting guns at an early age. I was given a pump pellet gun at age 7, a 20-gauge shotgun at age 8, and a Winchester .30-.30 rifle—like in the westerns—at age 9. When I was 11 years old, I killed my first two deer with that Winchester. California law said I had to wait until I was 13 to legally kill a buck, but family law said 11, and killing my first buck included eating the heart and liver.”

Recalling his Esquire article about Steven Kazmierczak, Vann drew parallels between himself and the troubled student: Kazmierczak was trained by the U.S. Army not to have any emotional or psychological response to killing a human being. In the shooting at Northern Illinois University, he killed without any sign of emotion at all…and I do think that hunting trained me in a similar way. We killed everything that moved in Alaska or California, hundreds of animals. The second deer I shot, at age 11, was paralyzed, hit in the spine. My father made me walk up behind it and put the .30-.30 rifle to the back of its head to finish it off, execution style. I still find that tremendously upsetting.”

Vann also remembers his father owning a .300 magnum rifle (for hunting bears) and a .44 magnum pistol. The .44 was kept under the seat of his father’s car for personal protection. Tragically, instead of being used for self-defense, Vann’s father used the handgun to take his own life. “I saw that guns are simply too powerful, too easily misused,” Vann recalls. “My father’s .44 magnum pistol had a hair trigger. I had fired it once, and it went off before I expected it to, with just a faint touch.” Vann is also cognizant of research that shows that many gun suicides are attempted in the heat of the moment, without significant premeditation: “When I think of my father sitting at his kitchen table in Fairbanks, Alaska, alone, with the gun to his head, it bothers me that he only had to want suicide for an instant. It’s just too fast and too easy, and there’s no turning back.”

Nor was this his family’s only tragic experience with gun violence: My stepmother lost her parents to a murder/suicide. Her mother killed her father with a shotgun and then killed herself with a pistol. They were a wealthy couple with a large house on a hill overlooking an entire valley in California. Their lives should have been considered good, but in a moment of anger, guns made killing very easy and quick.”

Ironically, Vann would inherit his father’s gun collection after his suicide. Instead of using these firearms solely to hunt, however, he capitalized on the opportunity to blow off steam and avoid dealing with complicated emotions like shame and rage. “I learned to break the .300 magnum rifle into several parts and stuff them down the back of my jacket,” he remembers. “I’d ride my bicycle into the hills above my suburban Californian neighborhood and shoot out streetlights from hundreds of yards away. That rifle sounded like artillery, but I was never caught.” More ominously, Vann notes: “I also sighted in on our neighbors in the afternoons and evenings, right from my bedroom. I had a shell in the chamber and the safety off, and I’d be looking at someone’s face through the crosshairs as they stood in front of a living room window. I was a straight-A student, would become valedictorian, was in student government, sports, band, etc. No one would have guessed I was living a double life.”

But Vann says that his fascination with firearms is now a thing of the past: “It’s extremely rare that anyone is able to defend their life or the lives of their loved ones with a firearm. If you don’t do drugs or engage in crime, you’re unlikely to ever confront a gun. The only way you’re really put into an increased level of danger is if you own a gun. I don’t keep a gun in my house, because I value my life.”

Vann also has some important advice for families dealing with issues of depression: “One of the most critical steps is to ask for outside help. Right before his suicide, my father convinced our family that he was fine. He sounded reasonable and clear-headed. Professional help, from a therapist or psychiatrist, is necessary.”

It’s been 28 years since Vann’s father’s suicide, so he’s had the time and distance to transform family tragedy into art. The stories in Legend of a Suicide are simply beautiful, reinventing a terrible past and making sense out of chaos.

Zero Tolerance

While the Second Amendment has traditionally been a sacred cow for pro-gun activists, it would appear that the First Amendment isn’t accorded the same degree of respect in their ranks, as evidenced by the unfortunate case of Dan Cooper.

On October 28, USA Today published an interview with Cooper, the president and founder of Cooper Firearms of Montana, Inc., in which he admitted—to the horror of pro-gun extremists across America—his support for Democratic presidential candidate (and now president-elect) Barack Obama. Almost immediately, thousands of angry comments flooded the internet, including missives such as “This guy needs to be crushed as an example to others” and “Cooper Arms is unrepentant, arrogant, and needs to be bitch slapped HARD!” Simultaneously, pro-gun activists obtained Cooper Firearms’ dealer list and posted it online, urging gun buyers to contact these retailers and threaten a boycott if they didn’t stop selling the company’s rifles.

The outrage that Dan Cooper’s endorsement sparked in right wing circles had its genesis in the National Rifle Association’s $15 million political campaign to portray Senator Obama as someone who would ban all firearms and go down as “the most anti-gun president in American history.” Never mind that FactCheck.org and Newsweek, among others, thoroughly debunked these claims. Never mind that Dan Cooper spoke to Senator Obama personally and concluded that “he is a staunch supporter of the right to hunt and the right to bear arms.” His punishment for breaking with gun lobby orthodoxy—for having his own political views—was swift and brutal.

Just two days after the USA Today interview appeared, the Board of Directors at Cooper Firearms asked Dan Cooper to resign. Dan agreed to do so, stating, “There is nothing on this earth I will not do for my employees … we have fought through 20 years of building what I believe to be the finest rifles built in America … When the internet anger turned on these innocent people, I felt it was important to distance myself from the company so as not to cause any further harm.”

This is not the first time that pro-gun activists have attacked one of their own. Last year, Jim Zumbo, staff writer for Outdoor Life magazine and the host of a television show on the Outdoor Channel, saw his career destroyed when he wrote about assault rifles: “Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them ‘terrorist’ rifles.”

It is notable that none of Dan Cooper’s critics have questioned his management of his business, or the quality of the long guns that Cooper Firearms manufactures. Cooper’s only “sin” was to embrace Senator Obama’s vision regarding “the retooling of America, which involves the building of middle-class jobs and helping American small business be competitive with those overseas”…an important issue for Americans across the country who handed the Democrat a landslide victory in the presidential election on November 4.

By forcing a man into resigning from a company that he himself created, the National Rifle Association and its supporters on the far right have provided America with a stark reminder of the lengths they will go to in order to silence debate within the gun industry. Bob Ricker, executive director of the American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA), has said that the campaign against Dan Cooper is “really McCarthyism at its worst.” AHSA president Ray Schoenke has called on “rank and file gun owners who have no political ax to grind…to stand up, reject such underhanded tactics and have their voices heard.”

We hope they will heed this call—and maybe save a good man’s career before it is too late.

Heller Revisited

Four months after the fact, the Supreme Court’s historic District of Columbia v. Heller decision continues to receive national media attention, and some recent developments have cast new light on Justice Antonin Scalia’s controversial remaking of the Second Amendment.

Recently, the New York Times highlighted criticisms of Justice Scalia’s 5-4 majority opinion by markedly conservative jurists. Two federal appeals court judges who were appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, J. Harvie Wilkinson and Richard Posner, have described the opinion as judicial activism akin to the Court’s 1973 ruling in the case of Roe v. Wade.

Judge Wilkinson—who was recently considered for nomination to the Supreme Court—argues in an article entitled “Of Guns, Abortion, and the Unraveling Rule of Law” that the majority opinion in Heller “reads an ambiguous constitutional provision as creating a substantive right that the Court had never acknowledged in the more than two hundred years since the amendment’s enactment. The majority then used that same right to strike down a law passed by elected officials acting, rightly or wrongly, to preserve the safety of the citizenry.” In Wilkinson’s judgment, “it is patently wrong to have an issue that will not only affect people’s lives, but could literally cost them their lives, decided by courts that are not accountable to them.”

Wilkinson recalls that it was Justice Scalia himself who lamented the Court’s treatment of the abortion issue in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, stating that, “by foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.”

Judge Posner, described as “perhaps the most influential judge not on the Supreme Court,” recently wrote in the The New Republic that “the text of the [Second] amendment, whether viewed alone or in light of the concerns that actuated its adoption, creates no right to the private possession of guns for hunting or any other sport, or for the defense of person or property.” Posner argues that “the popularity of the decision and its prompt endorsement by both presidential candidates attests to the political power of the ‘gun lobby,’” and predicts that “the only certain effect of the Heller decision…will be to increase litigation over gun ownership.”

On another front, the plaintiff in the Heller case, security guard Dick Heller, recently emerged from relative obscurity to testify before the D.C. Council on the subject of the District’s gun laws. His public testimony could objectively be characterized as bizarre. Heller—the man who convinced the Supreme Court to overturn a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds for the first time in history—argued that gun owners should not have to undergo background checks or “store [firearms] securely & safely around minors.” He further stated that armed citizens in the District should be the first line of defense against the “large terrorist sleeper army” inside the United States.

Finally, the Heller ruling has even emerged in popular culture and was featured in a recent episode of the ABC series “Boston Legal.” The episode focuses on the trial of lawyer Denny Crane (played by William Shatner), who has been indicted for shooting a mugger with an illegally concealed handgun. Arguing for the defense, attorney Jerry Espenson exclaims, “I mean, no other Supreme Court in our two hundred year history could find a right to bear arms for non-military purposes. But suddenly! Presto! Thank God for the Big Five, I tell ya’! ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’ It turns out that the trick is to just ignore the first thirteen words!”

Crane later takes the stand and puts it in even simpler terms: “You don't have to be a legal genius to know that if you have a president in office who likes guns, and a vice president who likes to hunt lawyers and quail and a Supreme Court Justice who hunts with him, you're going to have a Constitutional right to shoot bad guys in the knee!”

The October 6 episode, entitled “Dances with Wolves,” can be viewed in its entirety here.

Shooting with the Enemy

Recently, CSGV Director of Communications Ladd Everitt met with Brian Borgelt, the former owner of Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply, while spending time in Tacoma, Washington. Bull’s Eye was the source of the Bushmaster XM-15 rifle used by D.C. snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo during their deadly shooting spree. Here is Ladd's recounting of his trip...

I recently traveled to Tacoma for the screening of a documentary entitled “Illicit Exchanges: Canada, the U.S. & Crime.” The film was produced by the School of Arts & Communication at Pacific Lutheran University and a premiere was held on October 4 at Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry. During a post-premiere reception, I was approached by Brian Borgelt, who owned Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply before his Federal Firearms License (FFL) was revoked in 2003 following the D.C. sniper shootings (we both appeared briefly in the documentary). He now runs the shooting range directly above the store.

Brian was surprised that I knew who he was, and I explained to him that being both a gun violence prevention activist and a longtime resident of Washington D.C., I was well acquainted with the specifics of the D.C. sniper case. I told him that I had been thinking of visiting Bull’s Eye during my stay in Tacoma, and he was kind enough to invite me in to see the store and shoot at his range.

The afternoon I spent with Brian two days later was one of the most interesting I have spent working in the gun violence prevention field.

The Gun(s) That Disappeared
The shooting spree perpetrated by John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo in October 2002 terrorized the entire Beltway area and was headline news across America. All told, ten people were killed and three others critically injured by the snipers in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. Subsequent investigation revealed that Muhammad and Malvo were responsible for additional murders that had been committed previously in Alabama, Arizona, and their home town of Tacoma, Washington.

When Muhammad and Malvo were finally apprehended, the Bushmaster XM-15 rifle they used in the Beltway shootings was traced to Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply, which was owned at that time by Brian Borgelt. Brian told authorities he didn’t know how the gun left his shop. And it wasn’t just the Bushmaster. All told, Brian could not account for 238 missing guns in his inventory and indicate whether they had been lost, stolen, or sold off the books. In fact, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had been investigating Bull’s Eye since 1994 because guns from the store were repeatedly ending up on crime scenes.

In July 2003, ATF finally revoked Brian’s Federal Firearms License, citing “willful” violations of federal gun laws (the required standard thanks to a 1986 law written by the National Rifle Association). Undeterred, Brian simply transferred ownership of the business to a longtime friend, Kris Kindschuh, and moved upstairs to run the Bull’s Eye Indoor [shooting] Range. The store never lost a day of business and Bushmaster, describing Bull’s Eye as a “good customer,” continued to supply them with firearms.

Straw Man’s Boon
When I visited the Bull’s Eye Indoor Range on October 6 to meet with Brian, he revealed to me some aspects of the sniper case of which I was not aware.

I learned that the Bushmaster rifle was not the first gun that John Allen Muhammad had acquired from Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply. In November 2001, Earl Dancy, Jr. straw purchased a .308 Remington 700 rifle (a gun often used by police departments for tactical shooting) from Bull’s Eye on Muhammad’s behalf. On August 17, 2002, that rifle was found perched on a bipod in a patch of woods in Tacoma. It had been loaded and pointed toward a nearby apartment complex. Law enforcement traced the gun to Dancy, who lied for Muhammad and claimed that the rifle was stolen from him sometime after he bought it. As the state of Washington has no law requiring gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms (only seven states currently have such laws in place), police had nothing to charge Dancy with and he was released after questioning.

Straw purchasing a gun for another individual (so that they can avoid the required background check) is a federal felony offense. It is a common tactic for straw purchasers to claim a gun was stolen after it is traced back to them from a crime scene. This forces law enforcement to prove that they are lying, which can be extremely difficult if the shooter has yet to be identified and/or apprehended, or if the connection between the shooter and the straw purchaser is tangential.

Brian expressed a great deal of frustration to me that local law enforcement had failed to identify Dancy as a straw purchaser in the fall of 2002 (he was later convicted after the Beltway shootings). He believed Muhammad could have been stopped before the bulk of his shooting spree took place.

I was surprised, therefore, to learn that Brian opposes any requirement for gun owners to report lost or stolen guns. His explanation was that he knows many gun owners who own 30 or more guns and these individuals might not be aware if one or more of their guns were stolen. He was worried that law enforcement might prosecute these individuals if they did not comply with the law.

I told Brian that my personal concept of a “responsible gun owner” is an individual who takes the necessary precautions to prevent unauthorized individuals from gaining access to their firearms (i.e., by storing those firearms safely and securely). It disturbed me to think that a gun owner could be so cavalier about his collection that he could lose guns without even noticing.

I suggested to Brian that even a law that gave gun owners one, three, or a full six months to report lost or stolen guns would be better than nothing (most laws of this type allow gun owners 72 hours to make their reports). It would certainly help deter straw purchasers like Dancy, who would lose their most convenient alibi and face the threat of prosecution.

But Brian wouldn’t budge. Law enforcement should just do a better job of investigating these cases with the tools they have, he said.

It’s Hard to Get Good Help These Days
Regarding the Bushmaster XM-15 rifle that Muhmammad and Malvo used in the Beltway killings, Brian told me he still isn’t sure how it left his store. Bushmaster delivered the rifle to Bull’s Eye on July 2, 2002. Two Bull’s Eye employees later told investigators that they first noticed the rifle missing from a display case in August or early September. The first murders linked conclusively to the rifle occurred in mid-September at liquor stores in Maryland, Georgia and Alabama. Brian did not report the weapon missing—as required by federal law—until two weeks after the snipers’ arrests in November.

Lee Malvo would later tell authorities that he shoplifted the Bushmaster from Bull’s Eye. Brian had a different theory to share with me. He believes one of his employees took the rifle from the store and transferred it to Muhammad and Malvo off the books.

Brian believes he first met Muhammad and Malvo at a gun show in Washington many months before the sniper shootings. They came to his table to inquire about AR-15-type rifles and Brian referred them to an associate of his who was well versed in those firearms. He thought it might be possible that this individual was involved in the illegal transfer of the Bushmaster XM-15.

That was not the only employee that Brian had a problem trusting, however. He told me one horror story after another … One pair of employees he hired became involved romantically and conspired to steal his clients and open a new gun store … Another was embezzling money from Brian by keeping a calculator on top the cash register and ringing up transactions off the books …

To his credit, Brian did require new employees to possess a concealed carry permit in Washington (to demonstrate that they had passed a criminal background check). While not a perfect screening mechanism (such permits are only renewed every five years and it’s unclear how often state authorities check permit holders’ records to see if there is cause for revocation), there is no federal or state requirement in this area, so Brian took this step voluntarily. He also told me he wrote to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the main trade group for the gun industry, requesting assistance in performing more thorough background checks on his employees. They never responded.

Despite these efforts, I found it hard to imagine that this much malfeasance had taken place at Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply without Brian’s knowledge. The showroom is just one large room, with the owner’s office sitting directly adjacent. Was Brian minding his shop at all?

I was also aware that it wasn’t only store recordkeeping that was an issue for Brian during this period. The record shows that Brian failed to file a partnership tax return for Bull’s Eye from 1994 to 2001. But he also failed to file personal income tax returns between 1995 and 2001. He was eventually indicted for tax evasion and pled guilty to a single charge. At that point, he agreed to pay back taxes, penalties and interest for all the counts alleged in the indictment—amounting to $230,884.

President Harry Truman used to keep a famous sign on his desk in the White House that read “The Buck Stops Here.” I’m still trying to figure out where the buck stopped at Bull’s Eye.

“They Stole Your Freedom”
During a conversation about self-defense, Brian threw me a curveball. While asserting his belief that citizens have the right to be armed in public against would-be criminals, he informed me that he had stopped carrying a concealed handgun twelve years ago. His reticence stemmed from an incident when he was jumped in a parking lot by two unarmed young men who mistook a hand gesture that he made. He told me that he spent most of his energy during this brief confrontation defending his own handgun (which he wore in a waist holster and never drew). Thankfully, he was able to subdue the men and prevent them from gaining access to his firearm until a nearby security guard arrived on the scene, but the encounter changed his thinking about concealed carry.

I told Brian I had thought a lot about this topic myself after being mugged in my neighborhood in the District a year ago. I was accosted by two young men (who may or may not have been armed) who took my wallet, cell phone, iPod, and work bag and left me unharmed to walk home to my family. To Brian, the equation was simple—these criminals were “terrorists” who had “stole my freedom.” I granted that I lost my freedom for about a minute, but while I was scared by the incident, I didn’t quite feel terrorized (I was walking in my neighborhood again the very next day and have been ever since).

I also wondered what might have happened had I been carrying a concealed handgun. These guys grabbed me seconds after I first spotted them turning a corner. Would I even have had time to draw a gun? If I was carrying a gun but didn’t draw it, would they have found it on my person and taken it from me, potentially using it against future victims? If I had drawn a gun, could they have overpowered me and taken it from me? What if I had fired a handgun in that type of tense situation? Did these young men deserve to die for stealing my property? And if I had missed my target(s), where would the bullets have gone? I was in a residential area with houses on all sides, mere feet away from where I stood.

I told Brian I had a difficult time imagining any positive outcomes that might have resulted from my being armed during that encounter.

Cause and Effect
That afternoon at the Bull’s Eye indoor shooting range, I underwent safety training and fired four handguns (.357 Ruger revolver, Glock 9mm, Sig Sauer 9mm, Ruger .22 caliber), a shotgun (Mossberg 12-gauge), and an assault rifle (Hi Point 9mm). It was my first time firing anything more powerful than an air gun, and I took to it pretty quickly, grouping most of my shots in fairly tight circles on the targets. I was awed by the power, lethality and accuracy of these firearms—particularly the Hi Point rifle, which had little if any recoil and which I was able to rapid-fire with great accuracy (placing 10 or so shots in the eye socket of the target). It was easy to see how even a teenager without any formal firearms training could become an efficient killer with such a weapon.

Brian was clearly a skilled shooter and proud of his range’s role in training gun owners. He also asserted to me that the range was great for kids, because it taught them patience, discipline and “cause and effect” (i.e., that there are consequences for their actions). On that point, I wasn’t so sure. It’s one thing to blow holes in a paper target; completely another to shoot another person and witness the damage that bullets can do to the human body. I was worried that having fun at the range could have the opposite effect and desensitize kids to the enormous damage that firearms can do.

I was reminded that John Allen Muhammad himself had once practiced at the Bull’s Eye range, honing his marksmanship. He had also reportedly practiced shooting with Lee Malvo—then just a boy in his mid-teens—in a backyard on South Proctor Street in Tacoma.

His Own Worst Enemy
The greatest irony of Brian’s story seems to be that—for all his concerns about street criminals and the damage he has endured in past assaults—it is his own criminal actions and the alleged actions of corrupt individuals that he himself employed that have had the greatest negative impact on his life. On one level, I had a great deal of sympathy for Brian. He clearly was proud of building Bull’s Eye into a profitable business in the late 1990s and devastated at losing the store and his reputation in the wake of the sniper shootings. On another level, it really bothered me that he never expressed any sympathy for the victims and survivors of those attacks, who suffered far worse than he did.

I was also dismayed that he refused to take ultimate responsibility for the guns that were lost or stolen from his store. When I asked him, “If you could go back and do it again, what would you do differently?” he said “nothing” other than that he would have kept a smaller staff once the store began to profit (presumably of those who were most trustworthy). As usual, it was a way to avoid his own culpability regarding the reckless manner in which his business was run.

Just before I left that day, Brian told me he had filed a lawsuit and was seeking to regain his FFL. It was still his dream to be a successful gun dealer. I told him that if he got his license back, I would move to Washington and handle his books. I was joking—I have no bookkeeping experience to speak of—but sadly, I was also certain that if tasked with that job, I would do it right and make sure the store presented no threat to the public. In a better world, well-funded trade organizations like the NSSF and National Rifle Association would step in and work directly with gun dealers to make sure they are running their businesses responsibly (as opposed to turning a blind eye to negligent conduct). But I’m not holding my breath.

Despite my disappointment, I enjoyed my time with Brian. I think he put it best when he said we were able to “come together as human beings rather than political or ideological rivals.” Unlike so many gun rights activists I deal with on a regular basis, Brian was always civil, and eager to engage in polite conversation on a number of topics. Demonizing him would be easy, but he treated me with great hospitality and listened to what I had to say—even when I was critical of him. It left me with hope that we might have more in common than we realize and that—if we’re willing to listen—we might ultimately find some things to agree on that can make us all feel more secure about this world we live in.