Man Fighting for Seized Guns

A neighborhood boy was pestering Louis Anderson again, and the 90-year-old man was fed up.

So when his doorbell rang on a January afternoon, Anderson answered it holding his unloaded Winchester rifle.

Ventura police officers promptly seized that gun and another rifle in the house. Now the World War II veteran is trying to reclaim the weapons.

But it won’t be easy.

State law prevents a person from reclaiming a firearm if a judge deems him likely to be a danger to himself or others. After Anderson brandished the gun, he spent time at the county’s mental health facility and at Vista Del Mar Hospital, where he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Anderson’s legal battle to get his hunting rifle back illustrates the conflicting concerns of law enforcement agencies and gun advocates.

Prosecutors say the bottom line is public safety.

“Everybody has a right to bear arms, unless we take it away,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathleen O’Brien, who handles mental health cases. “There are certain people who should not have guns.”

In addition to keeping firearms from people who have mental health problems, laws place restrictions on gun ownership for felons, misdemeanor violators and those convicted of domestic assaults.

Gun rights advocates say the laws regarding seizures are another attack on the 2nd Amendment.

“The government just wants to take your guns,” said Monique Shana Hill, a Ventura criminal defense attorney and National Rifle Assn. member. “I can’t tell you how many firearms I’ve gotten returned, for people have a lawful right to have guns.”

Even if criminal charges are not filed, gun owners still have to get clearance from the Department of Justice before they can reclaim weapons seized by the police. That often is a bureaucratic hassle and a source of tremendous frustration among gun owners, Hill said.

Gun Owners Believe Rights Are Violated

Senior Sheriff’s Deputy Renee Ferguson, who used to oversee the property room, said she has fielded dozens of calls from owners of seized weapons. “When it comes to guns, they’re very passionate,” she said. “They see it as a violation when we take their guns.”

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department currently has 1,065 firearms--including shotguns, rifles, revolvers and semiautomatic pistols--stored in a narrow vault in its property room. Some are being held as evidence in criminal cases; others will be destroyed or returned.

Since January 2000, west county sheriff’s deputies have received more than 400 firearms. During that time, 23 guns were returned to their owners and 268 were destroyed.

Twice a year, a crew from the Sheriff’s Department hauls guns from around the county to a salvage yard to destroy them.

On a recent day at the yard, 122 guns were fed one by one into a rusty steel machine that one cadet described as a “giant hydraulic pair of scissors.” Wearing goggles, the sheriff’s employees watched as a salvage yard employee crushed the rifles and handguns and tossed the scraps into a dumpster.

“There is a sense of accomplishment,” said Senior Sheriff’s Deputy Katie Baker. “These weapons won’t be out on the street again.”

The fragments of the nearly $100,000 worth of guns destroyed during the recent session will end up in a landfill, according to the recycling yard manager.

Despite the seizure laws and the destruction of weapons, law enforcement officials do not always succeed in protecting the public or gun owners.

In 1995, teacher Daniel Allen Tuffree shot and killed a Simi Valley police officer who was responding to reports that Tuffree had mixed alcohol and Valium and could be in danger. The killer used a handgun that police had seized and returned years earlier.

Superior Court Judge David W. Long, who rules on weapons petitions, said his worst nightmare would be to return a gun and then discover that it was used in a violent crime.

Daughter Calls Weapons Heirlooms

“Guns kill people. That’s what they’re designed to do,” Long said. “So we weigh the evidence and make some very tough calls.”

If owners do request a hearing, prosecutors must prove that they are a danger to themselves or others.

O’Brien said she wins about 90% of the cases in which the owner was detained for apparent mental problems, often because the owner has not followed through with treatment.

Anderson’s attorney, John Orr, said he knows the court will not return weapons to an elderly man with Alzheimer’s, but hopes that Anderson’s adult daughter can claim them. There will be a hearing on Anderson’s rifles at the end of the month.

“We have no intention of putting a gun in his hands,” Orr said. “The intention is to preserve it for the family. It’s a piece of the family lore.”

In court papers, Nancy Antilla wrote that her father’s rifles have special meaning for her. Anderson has owned the guns for nearly 40 years and used them to hunt deer and grouse while he was working in Alaska.

“The whole thing is crazy,” said Anderson, who now lives in an assisted-living home in New Mexico. “They’ll take guns away from me. But they won’t take the guns away from the gangsters.”

But O’Brien filed court documents saying that returning the weapons “would be likely to result in endangering” Anderson.

“Regardless of it being a family heirloom,” she said, “it still could kill somebody.”