Crackdown on Assault Weapons Has Missed Mark

They streak through the air at twice the speed of sound, a stream of menacing metal. Tearing through timber fences, stucco walls and steel-girded car doors, they tumble through body tissue and ricochet off bones like searing-hot pinballs, carving the kidneys, the heart, the lungs.

And when their destruction is complete, families must learn to go on without a child’s grin. Or a brother’s wit. Or a mother’s love.

So fearsome is the size, speed and sheer number of slugs let loose from assault weapons that lawmakers cracked down on them.

Or so most people thought.

In fact, the popular laws--adopted in 1989 by California and five years later by the federal government--are in tatters. Today, thousands of assault weapons are changing hands because of gaping holes in the laws--the result of industry guile, spotty oversight and political neglect.

Born in controversy and compromise, the state and federal statutes did not actually ban assault rifles and pistols, despite the fanfare surrounding passage of the measures. Instead, the state restricted specific models and, along with the federal government, allowed countless others to legally remain in circulation.

The fallout:

* Gun manufacturers have flooded the country with so-called copycats--legal assault weapons that are cosmetically different from restricted firearms but that function with lethal similarity.

* Previously undisclosed documents reveal that legislators, in a political compromise, exempted some assault weapons because they were considered too popular among gun owners to ban, even though they often had been traced to criminal activity.

* Federal lawmakers allowed the gun industry to continue selling assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips that were manufactured before the law’s implementation. Given that opening, major gun makers doubled and even tripled production in the year before the restrictions took effect so they would have a stockpile of weapons and clips to sell, according to newly obtained production figures. That pool of weapons is deeper than gun opponents and lawmakers had anticipated. Under both the federal and state statutes, anyone who owned weapons manufactured before the restrictions took effect were allowed to keep them.

* Assault weapon laws are so filled with vagaries and political undercurrents that police say they are often stymied in trying to crack down on the illegal gun trade. Among other things, they say, it often is impossible to distinguish between weapons that are lawful and those that are not. Moreover, some lawmakers and gun opponents accuse the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms of being soft on the arms industry.

Virtually anyone can walk into a gun store or show, log onto the Internet or open up the classified section of Shotgun News and select one of dozens of copycat assault weapons or pick from among thousands of guns manufactured before the laws took effect.

They also can cross the border.

Listen to this conversation at a Nevada gun show in which a dealer offers a Poly Tec AK47 to a potential buyer from California, where the rifle is restricted.

“You could fit this under a coat,” the dealer suggests to the customer, who actually is a reporter. “You could sling it over your shoulder and walk out of here and no one would know.”

“Even though I’m from California?”

“This is a private party transaction. There’s no wait.”

“I could walk out of here with this today?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you do with a gun like this, hunt deer?”

“The only kind of hunting this is good for is the two-legged variety.”

“Two legged? You mean . . . “

“Humans.”

“I gather you’re joking?”

“Yeah, I’m joking. I’m a big jokester.”

Anguished victims are hard-pressed to find the humor.

From under his pillow, Samly Nakhonesy removes a framed portrait of his family. He points to his wife, his daughter, his son: “Dead. Dead. Dead.”

They were gunned down with an assault rifle in April 1995--six years after the state restrictions--by one of his daughter’s old boyfriends. Nakhonesy’s wife of 27 years and their 20-year-old daughter died in the driveway. His 12-year-old boy was fatally wounded by a round that pierced the wall of his bedroom while he was doing homework. Nakhonesy now lives alone in a converted garage in Northern California. Alongside him in bed, where his wife once slept, a rifle rests for protection.

“Why,” he asks repeatedly, “did this have to happen to my family?”

Cheerleader Sonya Woods, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their Compton home when she felt a vicious punch to her stomach. A bullet fired from an assault rifle and intended for a neighborhood gangbanger had passed through a stucco wall, two bags of groceries and a metal bucket before lodging in her abdomen, where it remains two years later.

“Nearly every day,” the teenager says, “I go through the whole thing again.”

The pain never ebbs for Eligio Reyes either. He recently lost his wife, Laura, and 3-year-old daughter, Celeste. A single bullet fired a block from his Lynwood home crashed through a fence and struck mother and child, both in the head.

“I don’t know what this world is coming to,” says Reyes. “When Celeste would go to sleep and she’d say, ‘I’m scared,’ I would say, ‘Don’t worry. Papa will take care of you.’ That night, I failed.”

Clearly, most assault weapon owners are law-abiding gun collectors or target-shooting enthusiasts who handle their firearms with caution and believe that the 2nd Amendment guarantees them the right to bear assault weapons. What’s more, such high-powered weapons represent just a fragment of overall gun ownership in the United States--a fact that gun advocates say belies what they consider to be the overblown nature of the controversy.

“The whole assault thing is 99% hysterical,” says Andrew Molchan, president of a national gun dealers association.

Not entirely.

Although handguns are far more prevalent in society, authorities say that assault weapons are proportionately more likely to be involved in crimes--and to injure more people in a single incident because of the velocity and number of bullets rocketing from the barrel.

According to a study released in February by the Urban Institute, assault weapons constitute a mere 1% of the gun market. But they accounted for 8% of all requests made to the federal authorities for traces of guns found at crime scenes during a seven-year span. The report, prepared at Congress’ request, found evidence that assault weapons are “disproportionately involved in murders with multiple victims, multiple wounds per victim and police officers as victims.”

Although no government agency tracks individual assault weapon attacks, reports of such incidents routinely appear in newspapers across the country. In California during the last few years, assault weapon attacks have caused death or injury at a rate of once every three weeks. One of the most recent: A family of six was strafed three weeks ago by gang members while trying to retrieve their disabled car in South Los Angeles. Four were wounded, including two children, one of whom, a 9-year-old boy, died after being struck in the head and back.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who championed the federal assault weapon law, calls this situation intolerable. She says that when lawmakers passed the measure with some substantial compromises, they underestimated the industry’s ingenuity.

“They’ll get around any piece of legislation to ply their wares,” she says of the makers of semiautomatic assault weapons, which can hold large-capacity ammunition clips and have folding stocks making them easily concealable and flash suppressors to hide barrel flame.

“Here we have the perfect weapon for someone who wants to go against the police, for the grievance killer, for the drug traffickers and for the drive-by shooters. That’s what these weapons are designed for,” says the California Democrat. “To me, their indiscriminate sale makes no sense at all in a civilized society.”

Across State Line, Guns to Go

If you’ve got the inclination and cash, an assault weapon can be had with stunning ease, even in California, one of a handful of states with laws similar to the federal statute, which governs the rest of the nation. Prices range from $150 for a no-frills model to thousands for a well-crafted number with laser sight and night scope.

Plenty of dealers are quick to offer encouragement and advice on how to smuggle guns from states with loose laws into those with tighter restrictions.

At the gun show in Nevada, where the federal rules apply, two reporters, appearing to be customers, are repeatedly solicited to make unlawful purchases.

At one booth, a man says he has a 32-round AP 9 assault pistol for sale--a copycat of the California-banned TEC-9.

“If you’re from California, you need to buy this and get the hell out of here. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. It’s a quick and easy transaction.”

Yet another dealer offers a Colt AR-15 rifle, also restricted in California.

“You can just walk away with it now,” he says. “You may never know when you might need it to protect your block. . . . It can pierce body armor and knock down a cop if you have to.”

And then there’s the merchant who says $500 buys a notorious AK47 rifle, no matter that it’s restricted in the neighboring state.

“Just don’t display it when you drive it back to California,” he says, offering this final tip: “If they ask you about anything, just look them in the eye and lie about it. But no one will ask.”

At the manufacturing level, top gun executives also don’t hide their disdain for the law. Some seem to take pride in their use of loopholes.

During a recent tour of Olympic Arms Inc. in Washington state, company controller Bruce Bell volunteers that his company sells an AR-15 copycat called a “PCR.” The initials, he says with a grin, stand for “Politically Correct Rifle.”

He then picks up another AR-15-type rifle called the “MFR.” “Officially,” he says, “it stands for Multi Function Rifle.” Unofficially, he says, the initials are intended as a profane dig at the government: “Mother F-----g Rifle.” Says Bell: “If this gun was an AR-15--and it is an AR-15--you couldn’t own it in California.”

Many in the industry scoff at the notion that assault weapons have a greater capacity for harm because of their firing characteristics and ammunition capacity.

Dick Dyke is president of Bushmaster Firearms, a Windham, Maine, firm that makes several copycat versions of the restricted Colt AR-15. He also owns 10 other companies that manufacture, among other things, poker chips and perfume. To him, assault weapons are just another “commodity.”

Asked about the tragic incidents involving assault weapons, Dyke says: “I guess I don’t see that happening enough to feel that it’s a legitimate social issue.”

Dyke and other purveyors of assault weapons say they should not be called to task when their guns are used in crimes. Such tragedies are the reflection of a violent society, they say, not of something intrinsically bad about any class of firearm.

“If it was not my weapon, it could be another weapon,” Carlos Garcia, president of Navegar Inc. of Miami, says in court papers. “It could have been a knife. It could have been anything. It could have been a fire. A man snaps, he snaps. There is nothing you can do about it.”

Garcia speaks from experience.

A Navegar firearm was used in one of the nation’s most shocking assault weapon attacks--the 1993 massacre of eight people in a San Francisco law firm. The gunman was armed with two TEC-DC9s--copycat pistols that Navegar began marketing after a virtually identical weapon made by the company was restricted by the state the previous year.

Reality Falls Short of Laws’ Intent

Enacted in 1989, the California Legislature’s restrictions on assault weapons were the nation’s first. Like many public safety laws, this one was rooted in tragedy. Earlier that year, a drifter named Patrick Edward Purdy had returned to his childhood elementary school in Stockton and opened fire, killing five children and wounding 30. Purdy squeezed off more than 100 rounds in one minute before turning the weapon on himself.

Despite overwhelming public support for the Assault Weapons Control Act, it was, in retrospect, probably destined to fall far short of its backers’ hopes.

As conceived, the measure would have restricted the sale and possession of guns based on a description of their characteristics, preventing manufacturers from producing copycats. But amid strong opposition from gun interests, that language was abandoned in favor of listing 54 specific models, later increased to 75.

Arms manufacturers promptly took advantage of the wiggle room, sometimes doing nothing more than stamping a new name on a restricted weapon, thus making it legal.

One of those companies was Calico Light Weapons Systems of Bakersfield. It renamed its outlawed M-900 rifle and M-950 pistol, calling them Liberty 1 and Liberty 2, equipped with 50- and 100-round ammunition clips.

The firm also made sure it was poised to deal with the looming 1994 federal law--and another loophole. That law allowed the sale of ammunition clips with more than 10 bullets if they were manufactured before the legislation went into effect. Calico produced so many high-capacity clips in the months leading to passage of the measure that, as of last April, the company still had 6,000 on hand.

Calico President Mike Miller makes no apologies. “Personally, I don’t think [ammunition] magazine capacity has anything to do with crime. The guy’s going to be a criminal anyway.”

The federal statute has also made it easy for gun makers to comply with the letter of the law, if not the spirit, by making almost imperceptible changes to their weapons.

Unlike California’s measure, the federal legislation does describe an assault weapon’s characteristics but narrowly defines them. High-capacity semiautomatic weapons with a bayonet lug and flash suppressor on the barrel, for example, are restricted. Manufacturers responded by simply removing those accessories, and continued selling.

Former acting Los Angeles Police Chief Bayan Lewis, among many others, is appalled by this end run.

“Just because it doesn’t have a bayonet doesn’t mean [it’s] not just as dangerous,” he says. “There are a whole bunch of rifles that became modified after the law, but they are still like assault rifles.”

In some cases, there was no attempt made by state or federal legislators to restrict certain firearms that are as deadly as any others. The reason: They were deemed too popular.

One was the Ruger Mini 14, manufactured by Connecticut-based Sturm, Ruger & Co., a weapon used by a Montreal gunman who, shouting, “You’re all a bunch of feminists!” killed 14 female students at an engineering school in 1989. It was the worst massacre in Canadian history.

An internal state Department of Justice memorandum acknowledged that the restricted AK47 and Ruger Mini 14 “are the same caliber, magazine capacity, size, etc.” But the memorandum went on to say: “It was agreed that certain weapons probably had too large a constituency to ever be worth the risk of including, including the Mini 14.”

Sometimes called the “poor man’s assault weapon,” the Mini 14 has a loyal following because of its accuracy, reliability and entry-level price of about $350. Farmers and ranchers often use the weapon to shoot such predators as coyotes and foxes.

An exception also was made for a version of the Chinese-produced SKS assault rifle, another cheap, popular gun that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found was the fourth most-traced firearm at crime scenes in 1995. The top three were Saturday night specials.

Earlier this year, Los Angeles police officers killed a man in South-Central Los Angeles who, after a car chase, brandished an SKS--”a scary incident” that officers encounter much too often, says LAPD Lt. Anthony Alba.

In Richmond, Calif., Officer David Haynes was not as lucky as his brethren to the south. He was shot to death with an assault rifle while responding to a domestic dispute. Although the gun had all the earmarks of an assault weapon, it was not specifically named in the law, making it legal. He left behind a wife and two children.

Today, his widow, Kyle, is president of Concerns of Police Survivors, a support group for families of officers slain in the line of duty--one in 10 of whom were felled by assault weapons, according to one 1995 study. “The gun that killed my husband put out 13 rounds in 15 seconds,” she says. “That’s a gun that shouldn’t be on the streets.”

Looking back, authors of the California and federal measures insist that there was little they could do to stitch the loopholes because of the fierce and organized opposition they faced.

“The bottom line is, I’ve learned a lot,” says Feinstein. “The biggest and most arrogant lobby back there [in Washington] is ‘Big Gun.’ They pack a clout, particularly in the House, that I have never seen in my entire life.”

With a membership estimated as high as 3.5 million and a staff of hundreds, the National Rifle Assn. spent about $3 million in contributions to politicians throughout the country during the 1995-96 election cycle.

Still, Feinstein says her weapons law represents progress, if mostly symbolic, because it has prompted assault weapon legislation in several cities and states--and because many on Capitol Hill predicted it would never pass.

Former Assemblyman Mike Roos, co-author of the California law, agrees that inroads have been made. The Assembly is considering legislation to strengthen the law by including a generic description of an assault weapon.

“We did what we wanted to do,” Roos says. “We got our nose under the tent. We saw this as a beginning. That’s what politics is, a beginning point.”

Dennis Bridges doesn’t care about such political realities. They can’t bring back his easygoing kid brother, a father of three young children.

On May 19, 1995, Schun Bridges and two friends were gunned down with an AK47-style rifle during an argument over a woman in the small Northern California community of Pittsburg. The gunman first pumped multiple rounds into Bridges’ friends and then pursued him into a nearby street. There, as a wounded Bridges pleaded for his life, the gunman took aim and fired from 40 yards away.

“The switchboard just lit up. People said it was like a war zone,” recalls Pittsburg Police Sgt. William Zbacnik. “Those . . . slugs were literally taking out chunks of flesh from this guy.”

Authorities refused to let Dennis Bridges see his brother’s body because so much damage had been inflicted. All told, police recovered 30 expended shell casings, two 30-round magazines and several 15-round clips.

“That weapon not only took my brother from me and ruined my life, it ruined everybody’s life,” he says. “My brother had a newborn baby that will never get to see his father. . . . What do you need with an AK47? With a 30-round clip? Why do you need a weapon that’s going to go through a wall?”

Complaints, Criticism of Enforcement

Laws--even flawed ones--need the muscle of government to back them up if they are to serve as a deterrent. But when it comes to targeting assault weapons, enforcement efforts pack a weak punch, according to police around the country.

Local authorities complain that the laws are so confusing, vague and incomplete that officers who try to make them stick are left exasperated. Over and over, they say, police officers seize guns they believe to be illegal assault weapons, only to learn later they are not covered under the statutes and must be given back.

“We confiscate these kinds of weapons all the time,” says Zbacnik. “Our officers check to make sure they’re not the ones on the ban list because there’s literally no difference. We’re always surprised when they’re not on the list.

“To have a certain type of weapon banned and have the exact same types available out there doesn’t make much sense to me,” Zbacnik says. “If you’re going to ban an AK47, then you’re going to ban anything that looks like, smells like an AK47.”

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Wes McBride is one of the nation’s premier gang experts and is well versed in assault weapons. But even he has a hard time keeping track of what’s illegal. He says he was surprised recently when his son called and described a new gun he had purchased. Based on the description, McBride concluded it was restricted.

“I told him, ‘You can’t buy that gun.’ He said, ‘Oh yes I can. I just did.’ It was one of these look-alikes, an SKS.”

Some officers also question the resolve of the agency primarily responsible for weapons violations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

In Southern California, there are about 65 ATF agents to police the entire population of 20 million. And those few agents are handcuffed when it comes to what they can do.

The ATF is permitted, for instance, to conduct only one surprise inspection a year of a licensed firearms dealer--the legacy of a National Rifle Assn.-sponsored law passed by Congress in May 1986.

Called the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, the law was written and passed after the NRA complained that federal agents were harassing law-abiding gun owners. Opposing the measure were the country’s major law enforcement organizations, which predicted that it would “pose an immediate and unwarranted threat” to the community.

“The firearms lobby didn’t want ATF looking at firearms dealers’ records unless they had a reason to,” says Dennis Anderson, the agency’s expert on regulatory matters.

In another concession to the NRA, field agents are not allowed to attend the burgeoning number of gun shows across the country without permission from supervisors, although the events are fertile ground for illegal transactions. “We only go in the course of the investigation of a specific case,” says one ATF official.

Just two weeks ago, two companies--one domestic, one foreign--announced that the ATF had granted them permission to manufacture and import redesigned versions of Uzi and Galil assault rifles--eight years after a ban on their import.

Asked why the agency would do so, an ATF official in Los Angeles said the agency does not comment on “proprietary information” of gun importers.

This development followed the ATF’s recent decision to allow foreign weapon manufacturers to continue exporting to the United States large-capacity gun clips, as long as they were made before September 1994, when the federal ban on such clips went into effect. The difficulty, observers say, is that U.S. authorities cannot confirm the production dates--a fact the ATF acknowledges.

“It is impractical for the government to conduct investigations abroad to determine the date of manufacture of these foreign [clips],” the agency conceded while still approving the sales.

On top of all this, many local law enforcement agencies say the ATF sometimes is not responsive to assault weapon cases unless the number of guns is large.

“My experience with them is that individual cases aren’t a priority,” says one state parole agent. “I had a case here a while back where a convicted felon had purchased one of these assault rifles from a dealer.” He says he asked the ATF to investigate the transaction but never heard back. “Nothing,” he says.

Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., has monitored the ATF’s relationship with gun makers for a decade. The agency’s recent decisions, he says, are “not nibbling at the edges of the assault weapons law. They’re taking big bites out of it.”

For its part, the ATF says that, despite chronic personnel shortages, it is deeply committed to enforcing weapons laws. The agency says it conducted 77,000 firearms traces in 1995, the lion’s share at the request of other law enforcement agencies investigating crimes ranging from burglary to murder.

In Southern California and at field offices around the country, ATF agents lead or participate in numerous high-profile weapons seizure cases, including one in Los Angeles in March in which they confiscated an illegal cache of 400 guns, including a machine gun.

John D’Angelo, the ATF’s spokesman in Los Angeles, says the agency enforces the law to the best of its ability but adds: “If we had more agents, there’s definitely enough work to go around.”

Victims’ Families Seek Answers

From Manhattan Beach to Maine, there are many people who wonder each day: How many more must die?

People like Rebecca Valdez of Westminster. As her 19-year-old son Daniel said goodbye and unlatched the screen door to head out for a night with friends, shots rang out from a legal assault rifle. He grabbed his chest, wobbled backward and collapsed. “Mom, give me some help,” he whispered. She could offer none. Moments later, he was gone, the victim of mistaken identity.

People like Mary Gaugh of El Cajon, who lost her 9-year-old daughter, Jessica, on Oct. 30, 1993, when a man with a Colt AR-15 began firing at children from his second-story window. Wounded in the back, Jessica made it to the doorstep of her apartment, where she crumpled into the arms of her older brother, Joshua. To this day, he can still vividly remember the way Jessica’s skin turned cold.

And people like Darrel Southall of Compton.

Last December, his 16-year-old daughter, Angie, and two of her closest friends were getting ready to go roller-skating when they were felled by repeated shots from a high-powered assault weapon fired from a passing car. All three teenagers died, the victims of a mistaken retaliatory shooting by gang members.

“It’s just too easy for these kinds of guns to fall into the wrong hands,” Southall says. “There are gun collectors and there are very responsible gun owners, but it’s the other half that does the damage.

Sitting in his daughter’s bedroom one recent afternoon, Southall has the look of a man gazing hard at memories.

“If you take the most expensive piece of crystal and drop it from the highest building, it shatters on the street, and if you go down to try to put the pieces back together, it will be impossible. That is the way my life is right now.”

He speaks haltingly of the baby girl he once held and promised to protect, and of her final words before her body stilled.

“Daddy,” she said, “there’s blood in my mouth.”

Times photographer Carolyn Cole and researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this story.

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About This Series

Six months ago, after the nation saw two North Hollywood bank robbers terrorize scores of police officers and civilians with a seemingly endless spray of assault rifle bullets, Times staff writers Jeff Brazil and Steve Berry set out to answer this question:

Why, years after federal and state laws were passed to restrict these lethal semiautomatic guns, do they continue to proliferate, felling innocent people from coast to coast?

Through documents obtained under public records laws and interviews with victims, gun makers and law enforcement officials, the reporters found that the country’s assault weapon statutes have been circumvented and undermined--that the law has been outgunned.

* Today: How the arms industry has exploited flaws in the law, with tragic consequences.

* Monday: The questions surrounding California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren’s commitment to enforcing the state’s landmark assault weapon restrictions.

* Tuesday: A look at assault weapon owners, who represent a fraction of the overall arms market but exercise significant clout in the nation’s gun policy debate.

* Wednesday: Australia’s answer to assault weapon violence in the wake of the world’s worst attack by a lone gunman.