Group Says Lungren Policy Led to Skirting of Gun Ban

Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren’s assault weapons policy has failed to stop registration of some illegal military-style weapons that were apparently smuggled into California after the state’s precedent-setting law banned them, court papers filed Wednesday by a gun control organization allege.

The Center to Prevent Handgun Violence said records it obtained in a court suit against Navegar Inc., a Florida gun maker, show that Lungren’s office registered at least a dozen TEC-9 assault pistols, although they were not shipped from Miami until after the ban took effect.

Wednesday’s disclosure sparked immediate action by Lungren’s office. A senior assistant attorney general said he would intervene independently and try to subpoena Navegar’s shipping records.

Rob Stutzman, Lungren’s press spokesman, said the attorney general was not available Wednesday night for comment.

“This is the first time a possible lead suggesting a registration violation of the assault weapons act has been brought to our attention, and we will aggressively pursue it so we can arrive at our own independent judgment,” Stutzman said.

He said that if the attorney general’s office registered any illegal guns, it was not done intentionally.

John Gordiner, senior assistant attorney general, said in a letter to the center Wednesday that he will file papers in court asking that the shipping records be unsealed.

“It has always been the posture of this office that we will aggressively investigate potential evidence of possible violations of the Assault Weapons Control Act or the commission of acts of perjury in connection with assault weapons registration,” he said.

“On several occasions, you have been invited to provide such evidence. . . . This is the first time your organization or any other entity has provided us with such evidence.”

If the records bear out the center’s conclusions, they would dramatically illustrate the weakness of Lungren’s enforcement of the state’s assault weapon registration law.

They also would confirm findings in a Times series on assault weapons one year ago that demonstrated how Lungren’s assault weapon registration policy made the smuggling of some guns easier. In response to that series, Handgun Control, an affiliate of the center, raised the same issue in a successful suit demanding that Lungren enforce a legislatively imposed deadline for registering assault weapons that people bought before they were declared illegal June 1, 1989.

Since then, Lungren has repeatedly demanded proof that his policy opened the door to gun smuggling.

“He wanted proof, here it is,” said Dennis Henigan, the center’s Washington-based lawyer.

Lawyers said those dozen weapons represent “the tip of the iceberg” because they were found by matching the shipping records for just one gun model from a single manufacturer with less than one-fourth of the registered weapons in California.

There are 75 different assault weapon models made by dozens of gun makers that have been banned in the state. Close to 65,000 assault weapons have been registered since 1989, but Lungren does not require owners to prove that they bought them before the date they were declared illegal.

Henigan said Lungren could subpoena shipping records from other gun manufacturers and match them with California’s registration records to determine how many other illegal assault weapons are in the state.

Besides banning the sale or possession of 75 specific guns, California’s Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act required that people who owned the affected firearms before the ban register them by March 30, 1992. Lungren, however, has continued to accept them for registration.

Critics have complained that the policy, in effect, gives people the chance to buy illegal weapons out of state, bring them into California and get the top law enforcement officer of the state to give them a stamp of approval.

The center’s findings grew out of the July 1, 1993, shooting in San Francisco when Gian Luigi Ferri, armed with two TEC-DC-9s, clones of one of the banned weapons, killed eight people and wounded six others in a matter of minutes before killing himself.

The center filed suit several years ago seeking damages against Navegar on behalf of the victims. During the suit, it obtained the shipping records for the TEC-9 from Navegar, but was required by the judge to keep them confidential.

Those records provided the center with an unexpected bonus earlier this year when it filed an unrelated suit against Lungren demanding that he cease registering assault weapons after the 1992 deadline. In that suit, it obtained registration records of 16,000 weapons that were registered after the deadline. That accounted for about one-fourth of all the registered assault guns.

By matching the serial numbers of the TEC-9 guns that Navegar shipped from Miami with the serial numbers of the 16,000 registered guns in California, the center found 400 TEC-9s that were registered after the deadline. Out of that 400, 12 were shipped after June 1, 1989, the date they became illegal in California.

Henigan says Navegar did not do anything illegal. The data simply means that the guns wound up in California after they became illegal. Henigan speculates that if he had state records for all 65,000 registered guns, many more illegal TEC-9s would turn up.

Henigan said he cannot turn the shipping records over to the attorney general’s office until the judge unseals them.

A special report on the holes in America’s assault weapons laws is on The Times’ Web site. Go to: https://www.latimes.com/outgunned

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Facts on the TEC-9

* Made by Navegar Inc., formerly Intratec Firearms, of Miami.

* After it was banned by California and several other states, Navegar replaced it with a clone and renamed it the TEC-DC-9.

* Police frequently refer to it as the “weapon of choice” among criminals.

* It can use high-capacity ammunition clips holding more than 30 rounds that can be fired as fast as the trigger is pulled.

* Gian Luigi Ferri on July 1, 1993, stormed into a law office in San Francisco, and in a matter of minutes killed eight people and wounded six others with TEC-9 clone.