A Rifle’s Journey, From Import to O.C. Assault

It was January 1988, little more than a year before it became a crime to import and to sell certain assault weapons in California, when Bob Kahn put in his order.

The gun dealer told his supplier that he needed 4,400 AK47S semiautomatic rifles. Like other gun dealers across the United States, Kahn was anxious to get the weapons as quickly as he could. Around the bend were state and federal laws designed to restrict the military-style weapons that were among dealers’ hottest sellers.

The call was the beginning of a journey common among assault weapons in those years, when more of the powerful guns flowed into the U.S. than before or since. According to federal authorities, 4,399 of the guns Kahn received have not been used to commit a crime.

But on Dec. 18, the other one would be used to kill four people and wound two others, including a police officer.

That afternoon, an unhappy former Caltrans worker named Arturo Reyes Torres drove into the Orange maintenance yard where he had worked, then into the street, pumping out 144 bullets along the way from the assault rifle in just over two minutes, each traveling at more than twice the speed of sound. Torres died soon afterward, shot by police in a gunfight at a nearby intersection.

The gun, serial number 0318, barrel length 17 1/2 inches, is no different from tens of thousands of assault weapons treasured by gun aficionados throughout the country. When 0318 made its way into Torres’ hands, it was as easy to buy an assault weapon as a car.

From its manufacture in China through its voyage to the U.S. and into the home of a man who loved firearms, 0318 has a story that mirrors that of most assault weapons sold in the U.S. in the years before gun restrictions. When Torres snapped, 0318 was one of 17 guns in a safe in his Huntington Beach den.

“The guy bought the damn thing in 1988, and let me tell you, a heck of a lot of people were buying AKs back in 1988,” said Kahn, whose B&B; Sales stores in North Hollywood and Westminster sold out of the rifles a few weeks after they went on sale. “It’s supply and demand. People wanted them, I sold them.”

Lying less than a foot from Torres’ outstretched arm when police came upon it, submerged in 4 inches of rain and blood, 0318 is now in a back room at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, encased in a plastic evidence bag.

At just over 8 pounds, dull black, with a wooden stock and a pistol grip so it can be held comfortably on the hip, 0318 is pedestrian as assault weapons go. Unlike some of its flashier cousins, it has no bayonet lug, no silencer attachment, no grenade launcher.

But 0318, packing slugs 7.62 millimeters in diameter in cartridges 39 millimeters long, fires its bullets at 2,300 feet per second, more than twice as fast as the 9-millimeter and .45-caliber handguns carried by police who confronted Torres.

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One of a series of knockoffs of the Automat Kalashnikova designed in the Soviet Union in 1947, 0318 can fire 100 rounds without requiring reloading. Unlike the original, automatic version of the Kalashnikova, a machine gun that sprays bullets at the pull of the trigger, 0318 is a semiautomatic weapon. That means it fires one bullet at a time. But because it reloads a new cartridge every time it is fired, without needing to be recocked, 0318 can be fired much faster than a standard gun.

On Dec. 21, Torres loaded 0318 with five magazines, each holding 30 bullets, police said. Wielding the gun alternately at his shoulder and hip, he fired in a wide arc, police said. Several bullets lodged in neighboring buildings.

“This type of gun can cause a lot of devastation very quickly,” said Orange Police spokesman Art Romo.

Demand for AK47-style weapons had been heavy for years in the U.S. before Torres bought his. But it was never stronger than in the year Torres was shopping.

About 4,000 AK47-style weapons were imported annually between 1980 and 1985, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. But from 1986 to 1988, when momentum was building to ban assault weapons, imports of the guns jumped to nearly 40,000 annually, according to the ATF. Between January 1988 and March 1989, when a federal ban on the import of some of the semiautomatic weapons went into effect, 48,000 more AK47-style weapons were imported to the U.S.

“These sort of image weapons didn’t hit till the 1980s. Nasty-looking, big clip military-style image weapons came into their own as an icon in those years,” said Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley professor of law who studies the politics of gun issues.

In January 1989, Patrick Purdy, a drifter with an AK47-style rifle, killed five children in Stockton. The slayings increased concern over the availability of assault weapons and pushed legislators to pass laws restricting them.

Within four months, three California cities made it illegal to buy assault weapons, the Treasury Department suspended their import and California became the first state to ban their sale.

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A 1994 federal law banned the manufacture and import of 19 semiautomatic weapons, including AK47 knockoffs.

But people like Torres, who bought weapons before the restrictions went into effect, were allowed to keep their guns.

That led to “a real feeding frenzy,” in the years before the ban went into effect, said Ed Peterson, a criminalist with the Santa Clara County crime lab and an assault weapons expert.

“People said, ‘Let’s get them while we can,’ figuring that when the door closed, the prices would skyrocket. . . . People were lined up to buy them at any price. People who never would even think before about buying one of these guns panicked, figuring they’d better get one while they still could,” Peterson said.

In California, where since 1990 registration of assault weapons has been required, 37,869 people have registered 62,395 of the guns, according to the state attorney general’s office.

In January 1988, Kahn’s business in assault weapons was booming. Eager to cash in, the gun dealer said in an interview, he called Randolph J. Brill, a Woodland Hills wholesaler who has imported, manufactured and sold weapons for more than 30 years.

In the sort of request being made by dozens of gun dealers to their suppliers in those days, Kahn asked Brill for the 4,400 AK47S rifles. The guns came four months later.

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B&B; Gun Sales is one of 244 gun dealerships in Orange County. It is a one-story, fortress-like building of gray brick in Westminster, squeezed between railroad tracks and Hazard Avenue. Windowless, it has one door. A 6-foot-high gate surrounds its parking lot, which is flooded with light at all hours.

At the Westminster store, where brightly lit cases display hundreds of neatly arranged guns, knives, handcuffs, telescopes and binoculars, Torres was just another customer.

According to ATF records, Torres bought 0318 on April 30, 1988, 19 days after the gun was shipped to Kahn.

The transaction record does not state what Torres paid for the gun. Firearms experts said that prices for the rifles, normally from $250 to $700, rose to as much as $1,500 in 1988.

The AK47S model and its knockoffs are highly prized by gun collectors. Some take the weapons hunting or fire them at target ranges. Others like the guns for their looks and their history, keeping them in display cases and safes.

Many in the firearms industry scoff at the notion that assault weapons are more lethal than other guns. Hundreds of rifles hold bullets the same size and weight as assault weapons, and fire them at the same speed. Many hunting rifles fire more lethal bullets.

Gun control advocates say assault weapons should be banned because they have no legitimate sporting purpose.

Investigators say 0318 was manufactured in China, probably by Poly Technologies, the largest producer of AK47s in the world.

Poly Technologies, owned by China’s army, is one of the country’s two main weapons makers. In a 1993 interview, Poly Technologies’ executive director estimated the company had sold about $200 million worth of guns in the U.S. during the previous decade.

In 1987 a Poly Technologies advertisement in Soldier of Fortune magazine called the gun “an instant classic” and “the essence of practicality.”

Investigators believe Brill ordered 0318 through Beijing-based China Jiang An Import and Export Corp. The gun may have come in on a smuggled shipment, investigators said, a common ruse Chinese companies used in the late 1980s to avoid paying U.S. taxes and customs fees, but they have not determined that with certainty.

Documents filed with federal authorities indicate the gun was imported legally. But although it is stamped with the serial number 0318, the gun is missing markings required by U.S. law on guns brought into the country. Once the gun arrived in the U.S., it changed hands legally, investigators believe. Authorities say they don’t think Torres or Kahn knew they may have been buying a smuggled weapon.

While the gun was being assembled, Arturo Torres’ interest in weapons was growing, friends and neighbors said.

Inside his four-bedroom, two-story house in Huntington Beach, Torres’ cache of guns grew to include two AK47-style rifles, three 12-gauge shotguns, five handguns, six rifles and a revolver, police said. All the guns were legally owned and kept locked in a five-foot-tall metal safe in his den.

It is unclear when Torres became enamored with automatic weapons. But as an Army private from 1974 to 1976, he was trained in using the comparable American-made M-16 rifle, army records show. Torres, who never rose above private, worked as a switchboard operator in the Army.

In later years, friends said, Torres hunted avidly and loved to show off his guns.

“I was aware he had a collection of some type over there, just because he’d see me out by my car and say, ‘Hey, you should come over and check it out sometime, I’ve got some really cool stuff,’ ” said Jeffrey Giovinetti, a California Highway Patrol officer and a neighbor of Torres’.

Police have returned most of the guns to Torres’ widow. But 0318’s journey may have come to an end.

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Times staff writer Michael G. Wagner contributed to this story.

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Weapon of Choice

Even before Arturo Torres killed four former co-workers and wounded two other people, including a police officer, in an Orange Caltrans yard, the AK47 rifle and its derivative family had been the weapon of choice in some high-profile shootings across the U.S. during the last decade:

December 1987: San Diego sheriff’s SWAT team member is killed and two others are wounded in 12-hour siege at an Escondido apartment complex

January 1989: Drifter Patrick Purdy kills five children and wounds 29 others in a Stockton, Calif., schoolyard

September 1989: A mentally disturbed printing plant employee kills seven co-workers, wounds 13

January 1993: A Pakistani upset with U.S. policy toward Muslim countries kills two CIA employees and wounds three others outside the agency’s gates

April 1995: Oakland Unified School District officer Timothy Howe is slain as he approaches a car after a traffic stop

April 1995: A New Jersey woman kills two officers seeking to arrest her on a gun charge

February 1997: Two gunmen in North Hollywood wound six police officers and three civilians while trying to flee after a bank robbery

Source: Times reports