A Whistle-Blower Who Has the Gun Industry in His Sights

Talk about a smoking gun.

With blood in the streets, a dozen California cities and counties have sued gun manufacturers and dealers, accusing them of keeping quiet about weapons sold to criminals and juveniles.

Industry officials naturally deny such charges in the 3-year-old case, even as innocent children get cut down in the cross-fire. I think these guys have photos of tobacco company execs on their walls for inspiration.

But now here comes one of their own to rat them out. A whistle-blower with perfect pitch.

Robert Ricker, a former lobbyist who collected a paycheck for more than 20 years from the National Rifle Assn. and other big bazookas in the gun industry, holds nothing back in a 16-page whistle-blowing affidavit filed Monday in San Diego County Superior Court.

Naming names and citing dates going back more than 10 years, Ricker tells of “lawyers’ meetings” and other gun industry powwows to discuss whether to “take action to control” the distribution of guns.

He says the industry has known for years that guns from its factories routinely fall off the truck, so to speak, and end up flooding the black market in California and elsewhere.

You’ve got shady middlemen -- using easily obtained dealer licenses -- peddling guns to gangsters and kids. Then you’ve got operations that use straw men -- guys with no criminal record -- to buy large caches of artillery that are passed on to the bad guys.

But at meetings to discuss the problem, many of which Ricker attended, the cowboys couldn’t find the courage to cut off crooked dealers.

“The prevailing view,” Ricker says, “was that if the industry took action voluntarily, it would be an admission of responsibility for the problem.”

Good work, boys.

We’ve got hot guns on the street by the thousands, bodies scattered across one city after another, and these cowboys can’t bear the thought of losing a single sale. They’re sticking with what Ricker calls their “see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil” policy.

“Guns are the driving force of crime deaths in this city,” Los Angeles Police Department Chief Bill Bratton said in a statement Thursday. “Some of the manufacturers, particularly of the cheaper models, cannot pretend they don’t know who their ultimate market is -- the gangbangers.”

Ricker, by the way, has solid pro-gun rights credentials. But he discovered there was no room for moderate views in his field, and he decided somebody had to do the right thing. So in the California case, he laid out all the dirty little secrets about the industry’s refusal to cut the flow of firearms to the black market.

In a telephone interview from his home near Washington, D.C., Ricker told me the gun industry has done more than simply resist reform -- it has shot down the brave few in its midst who have raised a challenge.

Ricker, former executive director of the American Shooting Sports Council, became a pariah in the eyes of officials from the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and here are a few of his crimes:

He supported legislation to raise the age for handgun possession from 18 to 21. He suggested the industry had a moral responsibility to flag corrupt dealers. And in a move that probably had his colleagues forming a posse, he attended a White House summit called by President Clinton after the shooting at Columbine High in Colorado.

Ricker’s lucky they didn’t strap him to a chair and have Charlton Heston pistol-whip him.

After that White House meeting, Ricker says, they came gunning for him. The NRA and another agency were out to muzzle him and put his agency out of business, he claims in the affidavit.

And they shot bulls-eyes, too.

When his agency was taken over by a more conservative one, Ricker resigned, “And the NRA was firmly in charge of the industry’s legislative and policymaking arm.”

Lawrence Keane is vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the outfit that swallowed up Ricker’s. Keane dismissed Ricker’s claims as “long on opinion and short on facts.”

He also said gun manufacturers “can’t play junior G-men” and investigate corrupt gun dealers, because they’ll step on the toes of federal authorities and blow their cases.

No one is asking them to play junior G-men. When a gun is used in a crime, manufacturers get a call from the feds and the history of the gun is traced from factory to crime scene.

Patterns become clear. It’s easy to spot the bad guys.

You can find them from the street to the boardrooms, quiet in conspiracy, all of them with blood on their hands.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@

latimes.com