State Ending Gun Sales to Vendors

Just beyond the main gate at Old Folsom State Prison sits a squat cinder-block building surrounded by a 10-foot-high fence topped with razor wire.

It is the prison’s armory, its shelves stocked with thousands of rounds of ammunition and an arsenal of firearms, including dozens of assault rifles. And heightened public concern about gun safety has turned these high-capacity weapons into a headache for the nation’s largest prison system.

Until last fall, the Department of Corrections sold or traded in used assault weapons, stored at prison armories around the state, for new firearms. But then Corrections Director Cal Terhune, worrying “about the possibility that the weapons could end up on the street,” told prison wardens to hold on to the weapons.

When it was revealed recently that one prison had traded in 10 weapons in violation of the agency’s new policy, Gov. Gray Davis weighed in, directing the Department of Corrections in writing “to formally terminate this practice.”

Davis wants all prison weapons that can’t be used any longer to be destroyed or possibly returned to the manufacturer for sales credit, said his press secretary, Michael Bustamante. “We need to ensure that the state isn’t exacerbating a potential problem by putting guns back onto the streets,” he said.

With an eye toward creating a statewide policy, Davis has asked other departments to report how they dispose of weapons.

It is not unusual for police agencies, especially in cash-strapped cities, to sell or trade confiscated weapons to firearms dealers (the Los Angeles Police Department does not; it destroys used weapons).

In the mid-1990s, an effort by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) to ban all police departments from selling or auctioning weapons to the public or licensed dealers stalled in the Assembly.

Hayden said that once Davis drafts a statewide policy he plans to include it in legislation in hopes of giving it the full force of law.

Already, state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer’s office has decided to destroy or keep all weapons it confiscates. Nathan Barankin, a Lockyer spokesman, said used service revolvers issued by the state will be destroyed or offered to other police agencies.

“The policy of the attorney general is that state law enforcement agencies ought not to be gun dealers,” Barankin said.

How many guns, including assault weapons, the state has been putting on the open market every year is not clear.

Since 1992, for example, the California Highway Patrol has traded 4,046 guns to a weapons vendor in Vermont in exchange for 652 Smith & Wesson pistols worth about $345,000. An additional 10,500 weapons confiscated because they were illegal were destroyed, according to the CHP.

Bill Carlson, CHP deputy commissioner, defended the deal with the vendor as “a good decision at the time.” But in the future, he said, “we’re going to destroy all of them.” The CHP has machinery to cut up guns and other weapons.

Corrections officials estimate that in the last 10 years they have sold or traded in 1,651 weapons.

State’s Prisons Heavily Armed

California is one of a handful of states in which prison guards carry rifles inside maximum security units. Most states limit firearms to a few guard towers around a prison.

Critics have maintained that guards use their weapons too often. Since 1994, guards breaking up fistfights and melees have killed 12 and seriously injured 32 inmates--a toll unheard of in other states.

In the last year, since a more restrictive lethal force policy has been in effect in California, no inmates have been shot to death.

In armories such as Folsom’s, the Department of Corrections has stored several types of weapons, including AR-15s used primarily by special tactical squads; Mini-14s typically assigned to gun post officers, and 9-millimeter carbines. Use of 9-millimeter rifles was discontinued several years ago, and the department has held on to more than 1,000 of them.

At Folsom, east of Sacramento, 47 are in storage. Terhune said that some may be given to local police departments.

Despite Terhune’s tightening of the used weapon policy last fall, in January the California Correctional Center at Susanville gave 10 Mini-14s, which can be converted into assault weapons, to a San Diego wholesaler in exchange for credit to buy new guns.

State officials are investigating why the prison didn’t follow department policy.