Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 9, 1994 TAG: 9401090039
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But behind the well-stocked counters of The American Survivalist was a secret.
While Harris was arming Fredericksburg's finest, according to testimony in federal court last summer, he also was selling guns illegally to people under 21, out-of-staters, and felons. Harris was forced to surrender his gun license only after a customer's guilty conscience resulted in a felony conviction for one such sale.
It is anyone's guess how many of the state's 7,900 licensed gun dealers are equally unscrupulous.
Police and others who monitor dealers say the vast majority are law-abiding. Some prominent dealers refuse to stock the high-powered guns favored by street criminals or to sell to anyone who seems vaguely suspicious.
But such efforts are voluntary, and the belief that the wide array of Virginia licensees are an upstanding lot is based largely on faith.
As gun violence soars, law-enforcement officials, court records and even some dealers suggest a frightening truth: the system of monitoring who sells guns is so riddled with loopholes and weighted against law enforcement that it is close to being no system at all.
Virginia does not license gun dealers. To get a federal license, no test, training, fingerprinting or even evidence that the applicant plans to open a gun store is required. Until recently, anyone with $10 for the annual fee and a clean felony record could sell guns.
In November, Congress increased the fee to $200 for an initial three-year license and $30 per year thereafter. But even with the increase, it costs less over a 10-year period to deal guns in Virginia than to be a barber, a polygraph examiner, an accountant, a restaurant owner with a beer and wine license, or even a manicurist.
Last week, the Clinton administration proposed a further increase to $600 a year - a recommendation certain to spur hot congressional debate.
One result of the low fees is that there are more firearms licensees than pharmacists in Virginia and more than twice as many dealers as dentists. If each licensee represents a gun, there are 10 times more firearms than 7-Eleven stores in the state.
A host of regulatory practices - many reflecting the power of the gun lobby in Congress - reduce oversight and help keep the number high. For instance:
Ten agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are assigned to check out license applicants and keep tabs on dealers in Virginia. Last year, they completed 271 compliance inspections. At that rate, it would take 29 years to inspect each licensee.
Nationally, 220 compliance agents oversee 284,000 licensees.
Under a law championed by the National Rifle Association, the ATF must act on each license application within 45 days. ATF employees say that allows little more than a cursory examination of many applicants.
In Virginia, 879 people applied for firearms-dealer licenses last year. "The great majority" were interviewed only by telephone, said Ed McKita, who heads ATF compliance operations in the state.
Federal law allows the ATF to make only one unannounced inspection per dealer per year.
An applicant's failure to comply with local or state regulations is not considered grounds for denying or revoking a license.
Licenses almost never are revoked; last year, the ATF reported about a dozen revocations nationwide.
That is partly because of a lengthy appeal process, partly because of rules such as this: If the ATF does not begin revocation proceedings within 12 months after a dealer commits a criminal act, evidence of the act cannot be introduced at the hearing.
Business goes on
Even if a revocation occurs, a business may not be shut down.
Consider, for instance, the case of Allen H. Groah of Fairfield in Rockbridge County. About 18 months ago, the ATF learned that Groah - a longtime dealer of firearms - had lied on his license application. Groah, who had been convicted of forgery in 1976, hid the felony, which would have barred him from getting a license.
After a hearing, Groah - who also has a misdemeanor conviction for failing to get police clearance on a gun sale in Carroll County in 1991 - agreed to turn in his license.
According to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Groah's lawyer informed the ATF on May 13 that Groah would submit his license without an appeal. The next day the ATF issued a license to sell guns to Groah's wife, Helen.
An ATF spokeswoman said Helen Groah assured agents that her husband would not be involved in the business. On that basis, "the ATF didn't have grounds to deny Mrs. Groah a license."
The sign outside her business, which was recently relocated to the Groahs' hillside home, reads "Allen H. Groah Blue Ridge Guns and Ammo."
Guns galore
Constricted as the oversight of dealers is, however, it is greater than the oversight of the dozens of people who sell guns through newspapers and shopper publications. Individuals making "personal" gun sales are exempt from licensing requirements, even though they may be selling more guns annually than many licensed dealers.
For instance, a recent Richmond Trading Post listed eight guns - including an AK-47 assault rifle with 1,200 rounds of ammunition - for sale by one unlicensed individual. Stephen Oakes, a registered private investigator who sold the AK-47 to a stranger he arranged to meet in a South Richmond parking lot, said he "took extra precautions" to make sure the buyer was legitimate.
But Oakes, who cited security concerns in declining to detail those steps, acknowledged that nothing other than a personal decision compelled him to do so.
Not long after the Virginia State Police formed a special firearms investigative unit in the summer of 1992, they decided to test the ease with which felons could arm themselves through such channels. Posing as felons whose gun purchases would be turned down if the seller contacted police for a criminal-background check, the officers were able to buy guns indiscriminately.
More paperwork
Such loopholes for gun collectors and others who don't bother to get dealer licenses, plus the ready access to guns on the street, lead many legitimate dealers to complain that additional regulation is pointless.
"If you take the top 25 dealers in the state, every one operates pretty much by the book," said John Copeland, manager of DeGoff's Firearms in Mechanicsville, which last year had the state's fourth-largest volume of gun sales.
Tightening requirements for dealers - perhaps by requiring a state license - would produce added paperwork while doing little to halt the flow of guns to criminals, Copeland and other prominent dealers argue.
"A licensing law is just going to create more problems" for legitimate people, Copeland said.
William Gibbs Jr., a Christiansburg police sergeant who once had a thriving gun business on the side, agreed. "You can get a gun anywhere: on the street, at the front door of gun show, flea markets," he said. "You don't have to go through a dealer to get a gun."
According to state police records, fewer than 50 Virginia dealers - less than 1 percent - consistently sell more than 50 guns per month, although about 2,000 transfer firearms in any given month.
Even for those who don't go into business, becoming a licensee has substantial benefits:
Licensees can buy their guns wholesale, producing savings of 30 percent or better.
Licensees are exempt from the handgun-a-month limit enacted in Virginia last year, and - unlike ordinary citizens - can buy handguns in interstate commerce.
Licensees are exempt from waiting periods and permits required for a gun purchase in several Virginia localities.
Licensees can swap guns with other dealers without going through a criminal-background check.
The result is a burgeoning list of licensed Virginia dealers that includes doctors, brokers, teachers, business executives, plumbers, politicians, students and an assortment of individuals who have had brushes with the law.
Enforcement gapsi
In Norfolk last year, a detailed look at who is selling guns was undertaken by the Police Department's criminal investigative unit.
Their interest was spurred by the case of Waverly Brown, a convicted felon who in 1991 was apprehended for selling guns in the city's Berkeley section out of the trunk of a car.
Police became aware of Brown when some of those guns started turning up in the pockets of drug dealers and in minor crimes. The guns were traced to an elderly gun dealer - the mother, it turned out, of Waverly Brown.
Unable to buy guns because of three drug-distribution convictions, Brown had set his unsuspecting mother up with a dealer's license and was ordering guns in her name. The ATF check on her application was so cursory that neither the mother nor the government caught on to Brown's scheme.
The case also flags another weakness in the system. Even after Brown was indicted and it was clear that his mother's license had been obtained fraudulently, the ATF took no action to revoke it. Brown's mother eventually turned the license in voluntarily, and she made no additional gun sales, but nothing prevented her from doing so.
Nothing stops a licensee who is involved in a disciplinary proceeding from continuing to sell guns.
Norfolk police have traced more than 50 recovered guns to Brown, "and they're still coming up today," said Charles Claxton, a Police Department investigator assigned to the criminal intelligence unit.
Sales from home
Claxton last year oversaw an operation in which officers visited 103 licensed firearms dealers who had no apparent place of business for gun sales other than their Norfolk homes.
The individuals interviewed cited a variety of reasons for getting a firearms-dealer license.
About one-third got licenses for their personal use. Another third were selling only to friends and relatives. And a final third were selling to the public; one of those had annual sales of about 700 guns.
Among localities surveyed in the Roanoke region, only Roanoke and Botetourt counties prohibit home sale of guns. The city of Roanoke allows mail-order sales; Bedford County, Bedford and Montgomery County allow home sales under certain guidelines.
`Straw buyers'
Among the licensees interviewed by Norfolk police was Keith Kenner, a Navy corpsman who several months later ran into trouble with the law. Kenner was sentenced in November to six months' home confinement and a $5,000 fine for selling a firearm to a convicted felon.
Kenner's case underscores both the ease with which "straw purchases" can be made and the strength of the temptation for a small-time dealer to skirt the law when big dollars are at stake. A straw purchase occurs when an individual who is qualified to buy a gun purchases a firearm for someone who is not, usually for a fee.
Following a Hampton Coliseum gun show in September 1992, Kenner - who ran a small gun business out of his home - ordered a $590 12-gauge shotgun for a customer.
When the client arrived to pick up the gun, Kenner ran a background check through the state police as required by law. That check turned up a felony drug conviction, and the police turned down the sale. Faced with losing his investment, Kenner enlisted a friend to act as the purchaser and pass the gun to the original customer.
If not for the original customer's honesty when an ATF agent showed up to interview him a few days later, the sale would likely have gone undetected.
But not only small-time dealers may be tempted to skirt the law. Probably the state's largest straw purchase investigation ever involved the Virginia Police Equipment Co., a once-thriving Chesterfield County dealership located across the street from state police headquarters.
The operation was closed a year ago after workers sold guns to undercover officers posing as organizers of a gun-buying operation. According to federal law-enforcement officials, the store had been the point of origin of about 10 percent of the guns traced back to Virginia from crime scenes in New York.
In one case, a New Yorker named Shane Skillings masterminded a guns-and-drugs operation that transported an estimated 280 guns from Richmond-area gun stores to New York City in 18 months. Most of those guns were sold at Virginia Police Equipment, according to federal officials.
The store owner, Donald Weiss, was a decorated former military officer who committed suicide before he could be sentenced in federal court.
High-volume trafficking such as that in the Weiss and Waverly Brown cases often begins unraveling when guns start turning up in crimes. Since enactment of the one-handgun-a-month purchase limit last summer, however, mass sales are taboo, and tracking illegitimate sales has become trickier.
Both the ATF and the state police have expanded their gun-related enforcement activities substantially in the past 18 months. The ATF has 80 agents investigating the illegal movement of guns in Virginia and Washington, D.C., and the state police have an 18-trooper firearms-investigation unit.
To uncover corruption these days, those investigators rely heavily on informants and cooperation from people who make illegal gun purchases. For instance, anyone who applies to buy a gun and is turned down in the background check is routinely contacted.
The fear, officers say, is that an overabundance of dealers and a shortage of investigators result in easy evasion of the law. "Undoubtedly, people can beat the system, if they choose to," said Major Charles Bennett of the Richmond Police Department.
Often an element of luck figures in successful prosecutions. In the case of Sam Harris and the American Survivalist, for instance, investigators were approached by a felon to whom Harris had sold a gun. According to court records, the man said he told Harris in casual conversation that he would like to buy a gun for protection in his job at a service station but could not do so because of his police record.
"No problem," Harris was quoted as saying after the man reportedly told Harris that he had been convicted of forgery and marital rape.
A few days later, the man returned to the shop with an FBI agent posing as his girlfriend. With the girlfriend signing the papers, the felon bought a .38-caliber revolver.
A month later, the man called Harris and said he needed to buy a 9mm automatic, according to court records. When he told Harris that his girlfriend was out of town, Harris suggested that the man pay for the gun and send his "girlfriend" in later to sign the papers.
Although Harris denied the charge, an employee testified in a related case that straw purchases involving underage buyers and non-Virginians were commonplace.
Harris was sentenced to five months' home detention on a single illegal sale and was forced to give up his firearms license, a light sentence partially reflecting his cooperation with police in another case.
In a newspaper story published before his conviction, Harris described a life of adventure after dropping out of school in the eighth grade. He said he had designed a noise suppressor for his personal machine gun and shares such suppressors with "those who have a use for them."
"I'm a family man," he added, noting that he turned away drunk or aggressive customers and that he refused to stock the last and most graphic installment of a book series on making bombs.
But others familiar with the case argue that greater discretion should be applied when the government is deciding who can sell guns.
"It's harder to get a license to drive a car than to sell guns," one federal prosecutor complained. "That's inexcusable."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB