Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 10, 1994 TAG: 9401100040
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FAIRFIELD LENGTH: Long
Need a gun, and you won't have to travel so far.
No farther, in fact, than the back door of Dale Rowsey, whose at-home sideline business is aptly named Back Door Guns & Ammo. Or the homes and shops of Posey Clyde Gardner, a state trooper who supplements his income selling firearms, or Bobby Smith, an elementary school teacher and avid hunter who stocks guns in his parents' garage-and-novelty store, or Burnett Hostetter, a tool and die maker who is planning a retirement income from gun sales.
You could also try Blue Ridge Guns & Ammo and J&H Shooters; both maintain a brisk trade in guns despite their businesses' past entanglements with the law.
Welcome to Fairfield, a smattering of antique stores and a microcosmic sample of who is licensed to sell guns in Virginia. Among the several hundred people in Fairfield and neighboring Raphine are 11 licensed dealers.
As gun violence plagues the nation, communities such as Fairfield are moving front and center in a national debate over the easy availability of guns. About 7,900 Virginians and 284,000 Americans are licensed to sell guns. In a controversy that pits tradition and individual liberty against dismay at the growing carnage, some policy-makers are asking: Is that too many?
To get a gun license, no fingerprinting, training or even proof that the individual intends to open a business is required. Until recently, $30 and a clean felony record were credentials enough for a three-year license to sell guns. With passage of the Brady bill last fall, the fee was raised to $200 for the first three years and $90 every three years thereafter.
Federal officials say that is far below the cost of monitoring licensees, however. And they acknowledge that the oversight agency - the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms - is too understaffed to make more than cursory investigations of applicants.
The ATF has 10 agents in Virginia to conduct routine inspections of licensees and monitor applications in addition to dealing with tobacco and liquor vendors. Last year, they inspected 271 gun licensees - less than 4 percent of the total - and reviewed 879 applicants. Given the staffing shortage, the "great majority" of the applicants were interviewed only by telephone, said Ed McKita, who heads ATF compliance operations in Virginia.
To the question of who is selling guns, the ATF offers this snapshot:
The typical federally licensed firearms dealer is a 45-year-old male who is sole owner of his business. Fifty-six percent of dealers live within 25 miles of a large city. Seventy-four percent sell out of their homes. Only 13 percent of licensees buy or sell more than 50 guns in a year.
The ATF estimates that only 30 percent of licensees are truly "engaged in the business" of selling guns. The rest are attracted by the ability to buy guns wholesale for themselves and their friends, or they plan to start a business, they say. Many of those selling from their homes are violating state and local laws, from zoning to sales-tax requirements, the ATF says.
Peruse a list of Virginia's 7,900 gun dealers, and you will find - as in Fairfield - a cross-section of the community and a host of reasons for holding a license. Their ranks include business people, politicians, doctors, dentists, plumbers, military personnel and college students. Most are law-abiding citizens; a few have had brushes with the law.
There are 105 licensees in Roanoke and Roanoke County, 33 in Blacksburg, 40 in Christiansburg, 27 in Rocky Mount and 30 in Bedford.
According to the ATF, licensees include Thomas Munford of Blacksburg, the husband of Joan Munford, who recently retired from the House of Delegates; Hubert Alexander Ruff Jr., an assistant commonwealth's attorney in Franklin County; and Donald O. Lincoln Jr., an agent with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.
According to zoning officials, residents of Roanoke and Botetourt counties are prohibited from selling guns from their homes - even though the ATF lists seven licensed dealers in Fincastle and five in Troutville.
Sales are allowed in Bedford, Bedford County, Montgomery County, Franklin County and Roanoke if certain guidelines are met. In Roanoke, for instance, only mail-order business is allowed.
Even when at-home sales are prohibited, a creative individual can find an outlet.
For instance, Duane Casada's Norfolk business address appears on an ATF printout as "Suite 446, 7533 Sewells Point Rd." In fact, that's the address of a self-storage locker where Casada - who sells an estimated 500 to 600 guns annually, mostly at gun shows - delivers guns to local clients. Unable to sell from his home because of a Norfolk ordinance, Casada rents the locker as a low-overhead outlet.
Part-time dealers may feel less compelled to call the state police for background checks on buyers, or may unwittingly run afoul of the law by failing to keep up on changes, critics say.
For instance, when Mark Frame last winter sold an AK-47 rifle to a 20-year-old friend who hours later used the gun to kill himself and his former girlfriend in Virginia Beach, Frame says he was unaware that state law had changed to require police background checks on purchasers of all guns, not just handguns.
(In one of the many inconsistencies that characterize U.S. gun laws, an AK-47 can be bought at 18; handguns cannot be sold legally until the buyer is 21.)
Because James Klassen had no police record, and his voluntary hospitalization for depression would not have shown up in police files, the check - even if it had been conducted - would not have halted the sale. But it is the kind of detail that has haunted both Frame, who sold guns from his Virginia Beach home, and the Klassen family.
Both Sharon Trenkle, Klassen's mother, and Frame believe that Klassen would have found a gun eventually. They acknowledge, however, that the price almost certainly would have been higher at a larger dealership and that dealing with a friend may have eased any anxiety.
The experience has driven Frame, who once sold about 300 guns a year, out of the business. Now discharged from the Navy and living with his family in Ohio, Frame said he has not sold a gun since Klassen's death. "It's a big thorn in my side . . . the closeness of someone being killed with a gun that I supplied."
In Fairfield, it is a fear of guns' being misused that persuades licensees such as Rowsey of Back Door Guns & Ammo to sell only to friends. Similarly, Smith said he avoids the interstate traffic, even though the location of his parents' store - Valley Emporium - next to Interstate 81 makes it a prime location for gun sales.
While he keeps a few handguns for sale in his safe, Smith displays only rifles and related gun paraphernalia. "It picks up the wrong type of business on the interstate" if he promotes handgun sales, Smith said.
It is Fairfield's largest gun operations that have had the most trouble with the law, bolstering the argument that size may be unrelated to scruples.
J&H Shooters, in the countryside between Fairfield and Raphine, is home base for Joseph Carlton Puckett, who twice has been convicted of failing to comply with the police background check required before a gun can be sold in Virginia.
Puckett, who was behind the counter at J&H Shooters with his brother, Hubert, declined recently to be interviewed. But court records show that he was given a $500 fine and a 30-day suspended sentence in Carroll County in October 1992 after selling a Tec-9 semiautomatic weapon to an undercover state trooper at the annual Hillsville gun show. Puckett sold the weapon even though the sale had been turned down by the state police.
Two weeks later, Puckett completed a similar sale during a gun show at the Salem Civic Center, resulting in a $1,000 fine and a 12-month suspended jail sentence. At the sentencing, Circuit Judge G.O. Clemens lamented that he expected Puckett had broken the law "hundreds of times."
Despite those sales, J&H Shooters continues to operate. Misdemeanors are not grounds for revoking a gun license, and only last winter did the state legislature make failing to comply with the police background check a felony.
A few miles down the road, Allen H. Groah has a similar conviction and $500 fine for improper sale of a firearm during the Hillsville gun show in 1991. The annual extravaganza there is the state's largest such event. It was a felony forgery conviction, not the gun violation, however, that prompted Groah to give up his gun license last spring.
Groah, a longtime dealer, failed to disclose on his ATF license application a 1976 forgery conviction that would make him ineligible to sell guns. After state police discovered the omission in 1992, Groah went to court in Rockbridge County, and a judge restored his gun rights.
Even so, the ATF - which rarely revokes licenses once they are issued - held a hearing, and revocation was recommended. Groah first indicated that he would appeal, according to ATF records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, but he dropped the planned appeal last May. A day later, Groah's wife was granted a license to sell guns.
The sign outside the couple's hillside home reads "Allen H. Groah Blue Ridge Guns and Ammo," but Helen Groah said in an interview that her husband is not involved in gun sales. "He helps with selling accessories," she said. But as for guns, "I do that."
Helen Groah argues that licensees should be more carefully monitored. "My opinion is that if they're going to have [a federal firearms license], they should have a shop with an inventory," she said. "Somebody with a shop is not going to sell to just anyone."
But Smith, just home from a hunting trip on which he bagged a wild turkey, said proposals to raise the dealers' license fee might put small operators such as himself out of business.
"You can pass more laws to keep the honest people from getting guns, and that's all. The ones that are causing the problems aren't buying now at my place," said Smith, noting that his customers are mostly nearby hunters and farmers. "There are so many guns out there that if they never made another one, it wouldn't affect the criminals."
by CNB