Gun Dealer Sues Over Assault-Rifle Ban

An Alabama gun dealer has launched the first legal challenge of the Bush Administration’s sweeping ban on imported assault rifles, arguing that the government illegally seized 1,100 weapons already approved for importation, lawyers in the case said Friday.

The Steyr-Aug semiautomatic rifles, now stored in a Birmingham warehouse, are among at least 4,000 AK-47s, Uzis and other assault weapons halted at the nation’s borders by Customs Service officials in the last 10 days, a customs official disclosed.

The seizures followed a decision by a Treasury Department agency to widen a previously declared moratorium on approval of requests to import new assault guns and to bar entry to weapons for which authorization had already been given.

The weapons are to be held under bond until the government decides whether they are primarily used for sporting purposes, as required by law.

The moratorium was widened after officials of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms learned that they already had issued permits that would have allowed the importation of more than 400,000 assault weapons in the next six months.

The gun dealer, Gun South Inc. of Trussville, Ala., contends that the agency had no right to retroactively revoke two “Form 6” permits, which gave it permission to import about 4,900 weapons.

The firm’s owner, Donald Wood, says ATF officials initially told him that his permits would not be affected by the assault-gun moratorium, announced by the Administration on March 13.

Wood said the government did not inform him that the ban had been broadened until March 22, and did not send written confirmation until a week after that.

By that time, he contends, the shipment of 1,100 Steyr-Aug weapons was in transit, and he had placed an order for 3,500 additional weapons that are now being manufactured for him by the Austrian firm.

A federal judge late Thursday refused Gun South’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have allowed the company to receive its shipment. But the judge ordered the government and the gun dealer to appear in court later this month for hearings on a permanent injunction that could overturn the federal ban altogether.

Lawyers for the company had argued that Gun South was “dead in the water economically” because of the ban. “Our client has received a permit, and he relied upon the permit to place orders for guns for which he is now liable,” attorney James Barton Sr. said Friday.

Government attorneys countered that the public interest in considering controls on semiautomatic weapons outweighed any potential harm the ban might cause to Gun South.

The disclosure by Customs Service chief spokesman Richard Weart of the number of AK-47s and other assault rifles seized in Los Angeles, New York and other U.S. ports was the first official accounting of action taken since the moratorium was broadened two weeks ago.

Weart’s office reported that Customs Service officials had seized 10 shipments under the new policy, but had released three of them because the weapons they contained were not covered by the ban.