Machine Guns : Firepower of Civilians Escalating

It should have been a routine call: Two patrol officers walk into an upscale hotel to investigate a report that a man used a stolen credit card to pay his bill.

But when the San Jose policemen knocked on the suspect’s door last October, the man answered with a vicious burst of 19 bullets from an Uzi submachine gun.

One of the outgunned officers was hit in the stomach and arm, nearly dying as he crawled down the hallway to safety. The other policeman reflexively shot the gunman once in the chest while diving for cover.

Weapons of Choice

The use of a powerful, military weapon by a small-time crook may surprise people. But police say military assault rifles and other firearms--convertible to machine guns and available at gun shops everywhere--have become the “weapons of choice” for a growing number of criminals and crazies.

Law-abiding citizens, too, are buying military weapons. Police attribute this to a “military mystique” glorified in movies and on television; advertisers in gun publications cite the weapons’ “sexy” looks; gun enthusiasts credit what they believe are the firearms’ accuracy, historical value and crime-stopping potential.

Among criminals, drug traffickers in particular are fond of military-style weapons, police say. But other outlaws--from ordinary street criminals to jewel thieves to lunatics on a rampage--also have adopted automatic weapons.

Police Observation

“We’ve seen them on the streets with greater frequency than in years gone by,” said Cmdr. William Booth, spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department.

The number of military-style weapons in circulation is difficult to estimate. Gun manufacturers withhold production sums as a competitive business practice, and there are no government estimates because registration is not required.

Perhaps the most popular of these weapons is the compact, easy-to-conceal and very deadly Uzi submachine gun.

“We’re definitely starting to see them more and more,” said Robert Cox of the San Francisco office of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. “Just in the last month, we’ve seen two Uzis (in this office). This is something brand new--seeing our own dope crooks with these types of things--and it’s scary.”

In August alone, Los Angeles has had to cope with one set of Uzi-wielding bandits who robbed and shot four people in Hollywood--killing one--and another that plundered a jewelry store in the posh Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Also in August, in Oakland, N.J., two cheap Tec-9 submachine guns were used to settle a grudge between rival drug gangs at a crowded picnic grounds. One man, a bystander, was killed. On Aug. 29, two gunmen armed with automatic weapons--one of them probably a copy of the military M-16--burst into a San Jose house and killed two men and wounded a 16-year-old boy, apparently the result of a feud.

Last year, Denver talk-show host Alan Berg was cut down by 30 bullets fired, allegedly by a white supremacist, in under two seconds from a MAC-10, another compact submachine gun. Neo-Nazis also have been accused of using military weapons to kill a Missouri state trooper and rob armored cars in California and Washington.

Even some youth gangs have acquired them, police report, although the cost--$600 for some basic models, or $400 for imitations--puts them out of the reach of most gangs.

“They seem to be the weapon of choice for drug dealers--for good reason,” said James Brightwell, special agent in charge of the San Francisco office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “They are awesome in looks and awesome in what they can do.”

Drug Searches

‘When we conduct drug searches,” said Sgt. Dave Krause of the Oakland, Calif., Police Department, “we expect to run into them--and we usually do.”

The guns also have been used in a number of startling crimes of passion and insanity. James Huberty, for example, relied primarily on an Uzi to slaughter 21 people in San Ysidro in July, 1984.

That same month, one person was killed and four wounded by machine-gun fire in Hollywood, apparently the result of a family feud. In February, 1984, a deranged man killed two people on a crowded Los Angeles schoolyard; his primary weapon was a civilian version of the M-16 rifle used by U.S. armed forces.

A year later, four teen-age boys were arrested for blasting 11 rounds from a MAC-10 submachine gun--complete with silencer--through the front of a Newport Beach home after being ejected from a party there. Last April, a mentally ill gunman used civilian copies of the M-16 and M-14 assault rifles to blast two Highway Patrol cruisers on a busy Oakland street.

In June, a Calabasas teen-ager was accused of using an Uzi--which he bought a few days earlier with his mother’s credit card--to pump nine bullets into a classmate suspected of exposing the gunman’s homosexuality.

“We’ve seen a big increase in the assault-type semiautomatic rifles that are based on the Uzi and the Armalite (M-16) and the MAC-10,” said Sgt. Bob Scurria of the Oakland Police Department.

“Those kinds of weapons have close to tripled over the last three years. Of course, there’s been a flood of these things on the (civilian) market in the last three years.”

Illegal in California

Fully automatic weapons--which can fire a continuous stream of bullets with a single pull of the trigger--are illegal in California and at least 13 other states, except for police and licensed dealers who sell only to police.

(In states where such guns are allowed, their owners must register with the federal government and buy a $200 tax stamp.)

However, there are few legal restrictions on the sale of these same weapons in their virtually identical semiautomatic configurations, which fire a single bullet and automatically reload each time the trigger is pulled.

Semiautomatic rifles are relatively easy to convert to fully automatic fire, police and sportsmen agree, although it is illegal to do so without the proper state and federal permits.

One pro-gun lobbyist conceded that “in many cases” all that is needed for a conversion is “a screwdriver and a limited knowledge of firearms.” In most cases, however, custom parts are required--and are readily for sale at some gun shows or through advertisements in Shotgun News and other gun periodicals.

In any case, many police officials contend that the fine legal distinction between fully and semiautomatic versions of military weapons is negligible in the field.

In either configuration, for example, they can accommodate large magazines that allow them to fire 30 rounds or more without reloading. In addition, many military weapons use high-powered, full-jacketed ammunition designed to pierce bulletproof vests.

“These weapons are awesome in their power,” said Chief Joseph McNamara of the San Jose Police Department. “In their non-automatic state, they can fire 30 rounds in five seconds. In their fully automatic state, they can fire it in two seconds.”

For a police officer with six rounds in his or her revolver, the firepower of military-style weapons is more threatening than almost any other kind of gun, police said.

“If you are talking about the difference between the 9 mm. Uzi and a .308 hunting rifle, they both will kill you equally well,” said Oakland’s Scurria. “The only difference is that you have four rounds in the hunting rifle and 40 in the Uzi.”

Despite the absence of precise figures, hundreds of thousands of automatic weapons are in circulation.

Small Arms of the World, an authoritative weapons manual, reported in its most recent edition that more than 300,000 copies of the civilian M-16 semiautomatic assault rifle (called the AR-15) have been sold since that model went on the market in the early 1960s.

No Sales Figures

Action Arms Ltd., the exclusive importer of the Uzi, declined to share precise sales figures, except to say that “tens of thousands” have been sold in the United States since 1979.

However, law-enforcement officials believe that the number of weapons seized in criminal investigations indicates that the number of military firearms now in circulation is significant--and growing.

In several raids stemming from a single case in June, federal agents seized 91 MAC-10 submachine guns in California and Nevada alone. Another 198 were seized elsewhere, along with 196 illegal silencers and 246 silencer kits.

“California is one of the states where they are not legal, and there are a hell of a lot of them here,” said one federal agent who asked not to be identified because of his undercover work.

The current generation of rapid-fire, large magazine, military-style rifles have been available to civilians for more than 20 years, but law enforcement agents said they only recently started posing a significant crime problem.

Television programs and movies were most often cited by police officials as fostering the guns’ “military mystique,” as one federal agent described it.

“People see it on TV or in the movies and then want one for themselves,” said the agent, Walter Wysocki, the assistant special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office in San Francisco.

“How many TV shows have you seen with these kinds of weapons? How many movies--”Rambo,” etc.--that make it seem exciting?” asked the bureau agent who did not want to be identified. “Hollywood assists in the sales of these weapons by glorifying them.”

Indeed, several law-enforcement agents said some people buy military-style weapons as a kind of status symbol. In addition, a realistic cap-gun version of the Uzi reportedly is a brisk seller, despite occasional confiscations by jittery police officers.

A Certain Mystique

“Nationally, it is a large problem,” said the federal agent. “You have bankers, you have lawyers, you have bank robbers, you have police officers. There is some mystique about owning an automatic weapon. There’s something about being able to go B-R-R-R-R-R-P! and waste a lot of ammunition. It’s difficult to understand why.”

Assemblyman Art Agnos (D-San Francisco) found the same phenomenon when he campaigned earlier this year for a new state law that would have severely limited ownership of military weapons. Faced with almost certain defeat on the Assembly floor, Agnos withdrew his bill in June, but may reintroduce it next session, he said.

In Washington, two New Jersey Democrats, Peter Rodino and William Hughes, have introduced a bill in Congress to ban further sales of machine guns. The bill also would make it easier for people--including some convicted felons and former mental patients--to buy other types of guns and ammunition.

Agnos believes that some curbs are essential. “On ‘Miami Vice’ every Friday, you see 15 people mowed down with these things,” he said. “In the 1970s, we had movies with car crashes; in the 1980s, we see movies with machine guns.

“This sort of romantic glamorizing doesn’t really show the effect one of these things has when it is fired into a crowd of people. (They) are designed for one thing: to kill as many people as fast as is mechanically possible.”

Several sporting organizations and a number of individual gun owners do not agree. Fully automatic machine guns already are against the law, they say, and any further restrictions only will affect law-abiding citizens and infringe further on the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Target Shooting

Larger assault rifles have legitimate value for target shooting, they said, since they were designed to be accurate at up to 400 meters; smaller guns are useful for “plinkers,” or casual shooters, and for home defense. Both types of weapons, they contend, have legitimate interest to collectors, and some can be used for hunting.

“Why should these people have to pay because some other people disobey the law?” asked Robert Grego, Southern California Field Representative for the National Rifle Assn.

He said that relatively few crimes are committed with such weapons, and said the Agnos bill would have outlawed a number of hunting rifles not intended for military use.

“We’re attacking the problem from the wrong end,” Grego added. “We need to really enforce the laws against people who misuse these weapons rather than (enact new laws prohibiting) the weapons themselves.”

Law enforcement officials remain skeptical.

Any compact machine gun, such as the MAC-10 and Uzi, is “a killing machine and nothing more,” said the federal agent who requested anonymity. “It is not a sporting weapon, and it is not a defensive weapon. It is an offensive weapon, that’s all.”

Grego disagreed, pointing to Uzi target-shooting competitions held recently in Nevada. “I’m not saying they are always the preferred weapons (for sport shooting),” he said, “but they do have legitimate uses.”