Owners’ Numbers Are Small but Impact Is Powerful

Lock and load. You are at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Show, and the shooting is about to start.

All along the firing line, unsmiling men work among machine gun bipods and tables piled high with ammo belts and clips. Their targets: a half-dozen barrels filled with diesel fuel 150 yards downrange.

Here, at the world’s most outlandish assault weapon festival, the gun is an icon and the “right to keep and bear arms” is recited like a religious mantra. Haute couture is an AK47 slung over your shoulder or a Beretta strapped to your leg.

“Ready on the right!” a security guard yells. “Ready on the left!”

And then all earsplitting hell breaks loose, as grown men in camouflage luxuriate in the deadly power that bursts forth from a squeeze of the trigger.

Spectators gasp as the bullets rip into the diesel-loaded barrels, sending fire and black mushroom clouds skyward. The heat warms their faces, shock waves pound their chests.

Assault weapon junkies, these folks live on the outskirts of the American gun community. Although their numbers are small, their voices echo as loudly as their firearms in the debate on gun control--overwhelming the vast majority of Americans who believe that rapid-fire rifles and pistols have no justification in civilian hands.

They are factory workers, low-level municipal employees, bankers, small-business owners. They are antique collectors, target shooters, plinkers and Walter Mitty types who like to get all “cammoed up.” Some are real-thing militiamen.

They spend weekends at gun shows and firing ranges. They read Soldier of Fortune, Guns and Ammo, and the American Survival Guide. And, in a 1990s twist, they surf the Internet for gun buys and news of the latest outrage against freedom and the 2nd Amendment, which, in their thinking, are one and the same.

No matter what their walk of life, however, most share a bond--a fascination with big guns that borders on obsession and views that cross into the dogmatic.

Meet a few of them:

John Schiller, a 31-year-old plastics company employee from Jeffersonville, Ind., has come to the machine gun show because, quite simply, he loves to shoot. It melds mind and body, he says, into one sublime moment.

“You get down into what you are seeing, what your body is doing,” he says. “I’m talking about your heartbeat and breathing and about picking the moment when everything is still, when everything is at rest, and at that very moment, you squeeze the trigger.”

He knows that most people don’t understand this special communion of man and gun. So before heading to the firing range, he takes a precaution for their sake and his.

“I close up my garage, take all my targets, my rifles, pistols and ammunition, put them in my car, open the door and then drive away,” he says. “My neighbors would worry if they saw me loading up my car like that. They would say, ‘What is he doing? Is he going to war?’ ”

Not unless, he says, the government were to forcibly try to disarm the citizenry. “We had a civil war over slavery,” he says. “We should have one over guns.”

Jerry Whitmore, who lives in Oregon, calls his MAC 11 assault pistol “a toy.” He says he uses it for target shooting and doesn’t care what anybody thinks about it. A burly firearms engraver, he says both he and his wife carry concealed weapons.

In fact, he says his quaint Pacific Northwest burg is full of people who pack hidden guns. “I only know two women,” he says, “who don’t carry.”

Meanwhile, the Hall family--father, mother, 13-year-old son and baby--are ready for a pleasant Sunday afternoon outing in the Nevada desert near Boulder City. They’ve got the video camera, a cooler and a blanket spread out on the sand for the little one.

They’ve also packed their arsenal, including two combat style semiautomatic rifles.

Hall, a small-business man in Las Vegas who would not disclose his full name, explains the family’s weapon preferences, starting with his wife.

“She stays with a .38 Special,” says Hall, his slightly graying hair pulled tight into a ponytail. His son, he says, uses a .22-caliber rifle.

As for him, “I like the MAK 90 and the SKS [assault rifles]. I never see these weapons as a means for settling an argument. But it’s necessary to have them for defense, and it is a sport. We come out here as a family about twice a week and just blast away.”

And that’s as it should be, says Dick Dyke, president of Bushmaster Firearms, who thinks that the assault weapons he manufactures, and the aficionados who buy them, have gotten a bad rap because of the “polarization between the rural and urban areas.”

“In rural areas, you go out as a family and shoot,” says Dyke, who has been a hunter since age 10. “It sounds weird to city folks, but that’s what we like to do.”

Public Disavowal, Private Ties

Assault weapon enthusiasts bristle at the suggestion that anyone who owns an assault weapon is a political extremist or doomsday zealot.

“I don’t believe the end of the world is coming, and I’m not going to get my guns stockpiled,” says carpet installer Doug Tweedy, 33. “That makes guys like me look bad.” He, like most recreational shooters, says he just enjoys the power that flows from the business end of a high-powered rifle.

But make no mistake, in the ranks of assault weapon owners, there are plenty of militia members willing to die for their armaments. Although there are no firm figures on the number of militia members in the United States, estimates range up to 40,000. California has 25 to 30 groups.

“We are everywhere,” says a fully camouflaged militiaman, perhaps wishfully, as he swaggers along a dirt road leading to the firing line at Knob Creek.

He wears a bushy, untrimmed beard, black beret and sergeant stripes on his sleeve. He is carrying a MAK 90 combat-style rifle. A 9-millimeter pistol is strapped to his leg, a huge bowie knife to his hip. His dark, deep-set eyes rove the landscape with suspicion.

He and three other men dressed in military garb say they are members of a militia group called the Christian Soldiers of America.

“When I’m at home,” he says, patting his right leg, “I also wear a .45 right here.”

Gun industry leaders, trying to create a more moderate image, wince at such public displays of militarism, saying they scare the public and thus make life difficult for all gun owners.

“You have camouflaged men blowing up the hillside with machine guns,” says Russ Thurman, editor of Shooting Industry Magazine in San Diego. “Growth of our industry depends on the new person coming into the market, and they are going to say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with that.’ ”

Says National Rifle Assn. spokesman Steve Helsley: “We have zero to do with the militia.”

Except to strongly support members’ right to bear assault weapons--and contribute millions of dollars to help ensure that politicians throughout the country share the NRA’s agenda.

For when it comes to the 2nd Amendment, the gun industry does not discriminate against person or weapon.

Assault rifles represent a kind of line in the sand to the NRA and other gun interests who believe that if a ban on them were ordered, then handguns and hunting rifles would be next. If that happened, they argue, the nation would be left defenseless against armed criminals and oppressive government agents.

That’s why the NRA and gunmakers say they have battled against state and federal assault weapon restrictions, limiting their sweep and, in the process, opening gaps that have resulted in the continued proliferation of such guns.

Thanks to this strategy, assault weapon owners have exerted an influence over the nation’s gun policy that far exceeds their representation in the overall firearms market, which is only about 1%. This despite the fact that mainstream opinion polls show that the vast majority of Americans want such guns eliminated because of their proven rapid-fire potential for wounding innocent people.

Although the NRA and gun purveyors publicly distance themselves from the more extreme elements of the assault weapon community, their magazines, Internet sites and public gatherings suggest the gap is not so wide.

Soldier of Fortune magazine, for example, editorially denounces paramilitary groups. But the magazine runs ads from a number of violence-oriented book distributors, including Paladin Press, the self-proclaimed “most dangerous press in America.”

It sells such how-to books as “The Revenge Encyclopedia” and “Close Quarter Combat,” which teaches how to crush a man’s windpipe or “do a bad guy in with a bayonet.”

At gun shows across the country, the splashiest displays feature midnight-black assault rifles, machine guns and a dizzying array of bullets. At some shows, such as one held recently at Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood, a table is stocked with Nazi paraphernalia, from SS helmets to handkerchiefs from concentration camps.

After buying a MAK 90 assault rifle during a Las Vegas event, two men gaze longingly at a Thompson machine gun with a 75-shot drum. “Wow,” one says. “Look at this one. You could take care of everybody you need to take care of and still have 60 rounds left for the cops.”

Among those enjoying the sights are a father and young son, a matching pair. Both are dressed in fatigues; Dad has a Colt AR-15 assault rifle slung over his shoulder while junior totes an AR-15 squirt gun.

Higher up the industry chain, assault weapon manufacturers also cater to the tastes and philosophies of their hardest-core clientele.

Bruce Bell, comptroller of Olympic Arms, an assault weapon maker in Olympia, Wash., disavows militia types and rolls his eyes at the mention of the Knob Creek shooting festival. But not long ago, he wrote a piece in SWAT magazine linking the congressional authors of the 1994 assault weapons restrictions with supporters of a “New World Order,” a favorite topic among militias and survivalists.

At the NRA’s recent national convention in Seattle, Olympic Arms proudly displayed its Internet site, promoting “California Assault Weapons” day--an occasion for assault weapon owners to blast away in the Angeles National Forest in protest of the state restrictions. The ad promised that gun registrations “would not be checked.”

It also noted that the event would take place April 19--”the date of the British attacking the colonists at Concord (and some more recent stuff . . .).” The more recent stuff: the Oklahoma City bombing and the fiery final siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Also mining customers from the ranks of military wannabes is Navegar Inc. of Miami, an exclusive producer of assault weapons.

“I tried to play to that audience,” Michael Solodovnick, the firm’s former marketing director, said during pretrial testimony in a lawsuit brought against Navegar by survivors of a 1993 San Francisco massacre in which two of the firm’s guns were used. “They believed in certain things. They wanted to play military.”

To find such folk, Solodovnick says, he scouts Soldier of Fortune conventions, where “Joe lunch bucket . . . dresses up in a military outfit and goes there like he’s a soldier. . . . So, you know, he eats, sleeps and breathes it as a secret life, and yet . . . in the outside [world], you know, nobody knows what he really is.”

These kinds of admissions, be they in court testimony or trade magazines, show that, although assault weapon owners may be few in number, they are the “shock troops” of the industry, says Andres Soto, policy director of the Pacific Center for Violence Prevention in California.

“It’s disingenuous for [gun leaders and owners] to try to disassociate themselves from militia types,” Soto says, “when their own organizations are cultivating the extremists.”

In Defense of Guns

Certainly, assault weapon owners are neither blind to, nor disinterested in, the tragedies that have occurred when criminals and the mentally unbalanced have taken aim. But on the grand scale of societal catastrophes, they say, assault weapons barely register.

“You are talking about saving a few lives that were lost because someone got a hold of [an assault rifle] and probably got it illegally,” says one Knob Creek spectator. “More people die from drug overdoses. So let’s eliminate the drug problem.”

By day, Dean D’Alessandro is a buttoned-down bank examiner from Chicago. After hours, he’s an assault weapon fan, who drove 310 miles to join 3,000 others at Kentucky’s Knob Creek shootout.

“They’re not hurting anybody out there,” he says, pointing to the lines of shooters pulverizing everything from old refrigerators to bowling pins. “These are legitimate people. Some of these people are doctors and lawyers. They’re legitimate Americans, good people. They’re not crazies.

“What’s the difference between an assault rifle and a hunting rifle?” he asks, not waiting for an answer. “There is nothing. It’s all image. Can I kill you with a shotgun? I sure can. Can I kill you with a handgun? I sure can. Are you going to outlaw everything?”

One of the most time-honored cliches in popular American culture is the NRA’s “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” This is more than a simplistic slogan. It’s a maxim, a belief system, a preeminent principle.

Greg Coghill of Louisville, Ky., who owns a bar called the Body Shop and has attended nearly every Knob Creek machine gun festival for the past decade, is a true believer.

“One crazy with a gun and you’re going to affect the rights of millions of people?” he asks. “Following that logic, you’d have to ban knives, baseball bats, everything. Any weapon is dangerous. If a person is going to kill you, what’s the difference between a handgun and a machine gun?”

Adds Richard Estevez, a Boeing Co. engineer who owns more than 50 weapons, including several assault weapons: “These are fire extinguishers. Just because I own a fire extinguisher doesn’t mean I’m going to start a fire.”

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Contributing to this report were Times staff photographer Carolyn Cole and researcher Janet Lundblad.

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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, gunmakers 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.

* Sunday: 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.

* Today: 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.

The complete series will be available Wednesday on The Times Web site at https://www.latimes.com/outgunned