From: lvc@cbnews.cb.att.com (Larry Cipriani)
Subject: The Story of a Gun by Erik Larson, part 5 of 8 or so
Organization: Ideology Busters, Inc.
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 21:46:58 GMT
Keywords: atlantic magazine, anti-gun propaganda


SELLING GUNS LEGALLY
   I met Mike Dick - his full name is J. Michael Dick - on a hot morning in
June at Guns Unlimited in Carrollton, on the north side of Route 17.  The
store is one of seven in a tiny mini-mall fronted with a white-gravel parking
lot that blazed in the morning sun.
   Mike and his father, James S. Dick, hold two of the nation's 245,000
federal firearms-dealer licenses - two of the 7,000 licenses issued to re-
sidents of Virginia, where gun controls are virtually nonexistent.  Dick was
late, but two of his clerks arrived and invited me inside to wait.  The shop,
no larger than a suburban living room, was a fortress.  The Dicks had em-
bedded steel "tank traps" in the sidewalk out front, to prevent a recurrence
of what has become a fairly routine kind of burglary at the gun stores of
America: crashing through the front display window with a truck.  The Dicks
installed the tank traps a few years ago, after a thief backed a dump truck
into the store.  Now an alarm system guards the place at night.  The front
door has been reinforced with steel.  Steel herringbone grates cover the
inside surfaces of the two large plate-glass windows.  A big Pepsi machine
stands against the grate just inside the door as a barrier to anyone hoping
to cut through the glass to reach the door locks.  The day I was there, the
two clerks wore large-bore handguns strapped to their hips, one a revolver,
the other a semi-automatic pistol.  One clerk, dressed in black and wearing
tinted glasses, told me that he and his partner were careful to stand at
different points in the shop so that no one could get the drop on them si-
multaneously.  He untached a brief news clipping from the bulletin board
behind him and proudly handed it to me.  The item reported how just that
week a Portsmouth gun-shop owner had shot and killed a would-be robber.  No
charges were filed.
   Mike Dick arrived, wearing jeans and a T-shirt.  He is a young man whose
prior career was in the hospitality (hotel and restaurant) industry.  He
joined Guns Unlimited to help his father salvage the business, which in
the three years since the shooting had suffered badly - not from public
condemnation but from the recession and the sudden decampment of so many
military men from the Hampton Roads area during the Gulf War.  The domestic
gun industry as a whole has likewise experienced declining sales over the
past few years, and last March one of the country's highest-profile arms
makers, Colt's Manufacturing, filed for protection from creditors under
Chapter 11.  At the time of the shooting, however, the industry was enjoying
a robust surge in sales, and Guns Unlimited was thriving.  As of 1990 James
Dick owned three Guns Unlimited stores.  By the time I met his son, however,
Guns Unlimited had also been placed in Chapter 11; the Carrollton store was
the only one operating.
   At its peak the company advertised aggressively on television and with
huge billboards featuring a giant handgun and proclaiming, "NO PERMITS,"
a reference to the fact that in Isle of Wight County, as in most of the
rest of Virginia, you don't need a permit to buy a handgun.  Regulations
are much stiffer in individual cities in the Hampton Roads area, however:
Portsmouth, for example, requires that buyers first get a city police permit.
Guns Unlimited used the placement of its three stores to defeat these laws.
In a deposition the aforementioned Christopher Hartwig, a clerk at the
company until May of 1991, said that if a customer at the Portsmouth store
needed a gun right away, a clerk would drive the gun to the Carrollton
store and meet the buyer there.  "Most people don't want to wait," he ex-
plained.  "It would be like waiting two weeks to buy a nice car.  You would
want it today if you got the money.  So they'd send the gun, you know, to
the other store and then all the paperwork, everything, would be done right
there."
   This bit of retail sleight of hand was legal.
   "Guns Unlimited is very well respected," Mike Dick assured me over coffee
in the convenience store at the end of the mini-mall.  He told me he'd been
invited to join the state police firearms advisory board, and had assisted
the ATF in numerous investigations, often calling the regional office after -
or even during - suspicious transactions.  "In fact," he told me, "I would
venture to say if you talked to the local office of ATF, you would find
that no one in this region assists them, whenever possible, as much as we
do."
   At the same time, Guns Unlimited sold an especially lethal weapon to
an adolescent - a weapon, moreover, that its own staff said served no
useful purpose.  At one point in the deposition process that preceeded
the civil trial of Guns Unlimited, Randy Singer, the plaintiff's attorney,
asked Hartwig what he thought of the Cobray M-11/9.  "It's good for nothing,"
Hartwig said.
   Hartwig added that one kind of customer did seem drawn to the weapon.
"Your blacks are real impressed with them.  We usually joke around about it
because that's the first thing they want to look at when they come in, or
we get phone calls, 'Do you have an Uzi, do you have an M-11,' because
they see it on TV.  They feel pretty powerful having one of these."
   Nicholas, who is black, was adamant about going to Guns Unlimited.
Traffickers, gang members, and other killers have likewise chosen Guns Un-
limited, a fact that has given the dealership a certain notoriety in Vir-
ginia's Tidewater region - unjustly, perhaps, but also unavoidably, given
the peculiar nature of firearms retailing.
   In two cases in the 1990s gun traffickers recruited straw-man buyers
to acquire large numbers of guns.  In both cases, according to documents in
Norfolk federal court, the traffickers specifically directed their recruits
to Guns Unlimited; in both cases Guns Unlimited did indeed act as an exem-
plary corporate citizen.
   In one case, Amir Ali Faraz, a twenty-two-year-old student, asked a
friend of his, Matthew Jones, about buying "a couple of firearms"; Faraz
couldn't buy the guns on his own, he knew, because his permanent residence
was in Pennsylvania and he had only a Pennsylvania driver's license.  Jones
got him a Virginia license belonging to a man of roughly similiar appearance
who had lost it earlier in the year.  Jones took Faraz to Guns Unlimited,
where Faraz bought six high-caliber handguns - four for himself and one each
for Jones and a friend of Jones's who had accompanied them to the store.  A
week later Faraz sold three of his to Jones for $1,200.  "Matthew told me
he could sell these firearms for a 'big profit' in the Tidewater area to
people who would take them up North and make even a bigger profit from
them," Faraz said in a written statement to the ATF.
   In the gun trade buying more that one handgun at a time automatically
raises a warning flag; in fact, the ATF requires dealers to mail in a
multiple-purchase form any time a customer buys two or more handguns within
a period of five working days.  Nonetheless, in the absence of specific
local regulations, anyone can walk into a gun store and buy a hundred
handguns.  The dealer is under no obligation to telephone the ATF, or even
to inquire why anyone would want so many guns.  All the dealer must do is
mail the form by the close of business on the day of the purchase.  The
buyer, meanwhile, is free to scoop up his hundred handguns and start selling.
   The ATF, will investigate high-volume purchases, provided it learns of
them.  If a purchase takes place on a Saturday night, however, the ATF won't
see the form for several days.  Meanwhile, the guns will begin their rapid
migration through the illicit-arms network.  Guns trafficked from Norfolk,
Virginia, for example, typically wind up in the hands of crooks in Washington,
Philadelphia, and New York, half a day's drive up Interstate 95 - nicknamed
the "Iron Road" for all the illicit weapons that make the trip.  That the
notification procedure takes place by mail in an age when virtually every
ordinary consumer transaction involves some immediate form of computer
verification is but one of the peculiar ironies that characterize arms
commerce in America.
   Mike Dick managed the first sale to Faraz, and was immediately suspicious,
enough so that he telephoned the Norfolk office of the ATF to alert them to
Faraz's purchases.  (He also mailed a multiple-purchase form.)  Over the
next two weeks Faraz returned three times and bought twenty-nine more guns,
selling twenty-five to Jones, according to court documents.  On the last of
these shopping trips Faraz placed an order for thirteen more handguns, all
high-quality Glock pistols.  Dick telephoned the ATF while Faraz was still
in the store, and helped choreograph an undercover operation against Faraz.
Dick allowed the ATF to choose the day on which Guns Unlimited would notify
Faraz that the guns he had ordered were ready for pickup.
   Agents arrested Faraz and, after allowing him to deliver ten guns to
Jones, arrested Jones as well.  Both men were convicted of violating federal
firearms laws.
   "I don't just send the forms in and hope it takes six months for ATF to
get around to them," Dick told me.  "If there is something that's obviously
a problem - and this obviously was - my opinion is the best way to correct
the problem from society's standpoint is to get these people off the street.
If I just refuse to sell them weapons, nothing's going to happen.  They're
just going to go to someone less ethical than myself.  And he may send the
multiple-purchase form in; he may not send it in.  Not all dealers are good."
   Society did not make out in this deal quite as well as Guns Unlimited
did.  The store booked at least $15,000 in sales.  Yet twenty-nine of the
forty-eight high-caliber handguns that Faraz bought wound up in Matthew
Jones's hands and presumably in the gun-trafficking network.  (Some of the
guns were kept by Jones, Faraz, and Faraz's friends.)
   In the second trafficking case a local college student, Dean Archer, was
recruited to buy guns by a convicted felon.  He made his first purchase on
December 1, 1990, when he bought four handguns from Guns Unlimited - four
pistols made by Davis Industries, a favorite of traffickers who buy them
cheaply in Virginia and other jurisdictions with lax controls and then sell
them at a steep markup to inner-city buyers.
   No one at Guns Unlimited seemed particularly concerned about the purchase.
No one felt moved to call the ATF.  Indeed, the store sold Archer the guns
on the strength of a rent receipt for a Virginia apartment and his driver's
license - a New York driver's license.
   When the ATF learned of Archer's purchase - three days later - the agency
was instantly suspicious and launched a preliminary investigation.  A few
days after the first purchase Archer reappeared at Guns Unlimited, this
time accompanied by a young woman, Lisa Yvonne Scott.  Scott bought seven
cheap Davis handguns.  Again, the ATF learned of the sale only through a
multiple-purchase form mailed by Guns Unlimited.  Again, the form arrived
three days after the purchase - more than enough time for those guns to make
their way from hand to hand, state to state.  And again, the ATF immediately
assumed that something illicit had occurred.
   The ATF called Guns Unlimited to get more details and learned that Scott
had been accompanied by an unidentified male later identified as Dean Archer.
By this point, however, eleven of the country's favorite crime guns were on
the street.
   A few days later Scott appeared again and bought thirteen Davis pistols.
This time Mike Dick telephoned the ATF.  Nonetheless, Archer and Scott left
the store with their new purchases.  The total of cheap and deadly Davis
pistols bought by the pair had risen to twenty-four.  Four days later Scott
and Archer made yet another buying trip, but at last the ATF was waiting.
The two were arrested and convicted.
   Clearly the store had been helpful to the ATF.  But why would Guns Un-
limited even consider selling a handgun to a buyer presenting an out-of-state
license for identification?
   Dick explained that the clerk accepted the license as identification
only because it had a photograph of Archer and established the link between
his face and his name.  A Norfolk rent receipt and an ID card from a local
college established that he lived in Virginia.  The fact that he was enrolled
in college explained why he would have a New York license and be renting an
apartment in Virginia.
   Federal law grants a licensed gun dealer broad discretion to refuse to
sell to anyone; a brochure mailed to licensees states in bold print, "Know
Your Customer."  Wouldn't prudence have dictated that Guns Unlimited simply
refuse to sell weapons when the nature of the sale provides clear grounds
for suspicion - clear enough, certainly, for the ATF?
   "They tell me I have the discretion to do that," Dick said.  "But in
practical terms, that doesn't give me the right to infringe on anyone's
civil rights."
   I asked him how he felt knowing that Nicholas Elliot and various gun
traffickers had specifically sought out Guns Unlimited as the place to
acquire their guns.
   "Well, actually, good," he said.  "I don't know how to describe it with-
out sounding...bad.  Because I come out of hospitality, customer service is
my number-one concern.  Period.  Beyond all others.  The ethnicity of an
individual, in my restaurants, my hotel rooms, my store, is absolutely un-
important.  I don't care what part of town you live in, what race you're
of, you're going to be treated like a human being."
   "But I'm not talking about race," I said.  "All I-"
   Dick cut me off.  "But that's the point," he said.  "I have a stronger
black clientele than any store in Tidewater and I would bet any store in the
state, and maybe any store in the Southeast, because - and words get around -
I treat people like human beings, and they can't always get that elsewhere."
   On March 29,1991, Jean-Claude Pierre Hill, a young Virginia doctor with
a history of mental-health problems, bought two Colt .45 pistols from Mike
Dick at Guns Unlimited.  Dick remembers the case well.  "In that particular
situation there was something wrong about him," he told me.  "I called ATF
while he was in the store; I said, I can't put my finger on it but there's
just something not right here."  Despite his unease, however, he failed to
notice that Hill never signed his Form 4473 - an absolute requirement of
federal firearms law.  Dick would later testify that he "somehow missed"
that omission.
   The ATF ran a background check on Hill through the National Crime
Information Center, but found nothing.  No one at the agency's Norfolk
office knew of Hill or had any reason to worry about him.  Dick sold him
the guns.
   I asked Dick why, given his concerns, he made the sale.  "Couldn't you
have just said, 'You worry me; I'm not going to sell you these weapons'?"
   "You're absolutely right: that's what I could have said.  But do I
trample on somebody's individual rights simply because I feel bad and the
ATF says I have the discretion to do it?"
   A week after Hill bought the guns, he fired into a crowded street in
Philadelphia, killing one man and wounding two.  (He was found guilty of
first-degree murder early last year and sentenced to life imprisonment.)
   "How did you feel when you heard about this?" I asked.  "That this
guy had taken these guns you sold him, even though you had doubts, and
killed somebody - the ultimate deprivation of somebody's rights?  Did it
cause you any sleepless nights?"
   "No.  I did everything I possibly could have, short of compromising
something I feel very strongly about.  And that is, I'm not going to decide
if you are a worthwhile person or not.  He gave me red flags.  I checked
him out.  Had there been anything, had ATF said he was [dishonorably]
discharged, I could have gone to him and said, 'Jean-Claude, I'm not
going to sell you these guns.'  But I'm not going to decide somebody's
character based on my impressions of him - I'm just not gonna do it.  It's
not necessarily tied to any Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms -
it's not tied to my right as a retailer not to do business with somebody.
I just would not want to put myself in the position of deciding someone
else's character arbitrarily based on my own opinion.  Empowering people
to do that is dangerous."
   In most jurisdictions in America, however, there is little else to keep
guns out of the wrong hands.  Form 4473, far from helping, has become a
conduit for the evasion of responsibility.  You'd have to be naive indeed
to answer yes to any of the eight questions about your criminal background
and mental health.  And in most jurisdictions no formal channel exists to
check the truth of your answers.  (In 1989 Virginia changed its guns laws,
establishing an "instant-check" system that requires dealers to run a quick
criminal check on every purchaser.  But the system tells nothing about
whether a buyer has been committed to a mental institution.)  One can argue
that it is unfair to ask America's gun dealers - businessmen, after all -
to go beyond what the law requires of them.  Nevertheless, dealers and
their official lobbyists - the NRA in particular - played a large role in
shaping existing firearms regulations and in making Congress squeamish
about establishing anything even faintly resembling a centralized, auto-
mated registry of all the nation's gun owners.
   Blame aside, Form 4473 is flimsy protection indeed for an enterprise
under assault from all quarters.  Mike Dick must defend against trucks.  He
must be vigilant for traffickers, killers, and other felons seeking to buy
his wares.  He wears a handgun to work 40 percent of the time but concedes
that it provides only limited protection from robbers.
   So why, I asked, did he stay in the business?
   "I come out of the hospitality industry - hospitality is my first love.
I came here out of necessity to help my father.  It has become a challenge
to me, taking a declining business under constant seige by various aspects
of society - it is a monumental challenge.  My goal is to become profitable
enough that at some point we can sell and I can go back to what I do best,
and that is run hotels."
   I asked Raymond Rowley, the ATF special agent who investigated Nicholas
Elliot's acquisition of his gun, how he would describe the ATF's relation-
ship with Guns Unlimited.
   "I would say it's a good relationship," Rowley said.  "We try to deal
with all these firearms dealers as fairly as we can.  They are selling a
legal commodity.  Obviously guns can be used in crimes.  We try to deal
with them fairly."
   Leonard Supenski was a bit less circumspect.  Of James Dick he said,
"That guy is a pariah.  He ought to be turned out of that industry.  But
ATF didn't do anything.  ATF should have nailed him to the cross."

-- 
Larry Cipriani, att!cbvox1!lvc or lvc@cbvox1.att.com