Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 10, 1994 TAG: 9401100054
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
That weapon, along with about 1,800 others, was traded in on a new model when the Virginia State Police switched sidearms last year.
The $300-per-gun trade-in credit saved taxpayers more than $500,000, according to an official of Southern Police Equipment Co., which received some of the used firearms. The flip side is that the exchange once again boosted the number of high-powered weapons available to the public at discount prices.
Across Virginia and the nation, such exchanges between police departments and gun dealers or manufacturers are commonplace, underscoring the love-hate relationship between those who enforce the law and the world of guns.
Over the past decade, as Virginia police have upgraded their firepower to compete with a new generation of semiautomatic weapons, thousands of used guns have been traded in and resold on the civilian market. The arrangement has been viewed largely as a sound financial move.
But as gun violence escalates and evidence mounts that some former police weapons are being used in crimes, opposition is forming. Used police guns were linked recently to murders in New York and Michigan.
"It's counterproductive to the goal of reducing violent crime," said Jeff Muchnick, legislative director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Handgun Violence.
The savings associated with used police guns are deceptive, he said. "Everyone understands that times are tough for local and state governments, but gun violence costs $20 billion a year, and these guns are adding to that cost."
Recycled weapons are not the only link between those who enforce the law and those who arm the public.
The list of federally licensed gun dealers in Virginia includes at least five state troopers and a dozen other law-enforcement officials. That counts only individuals in Hampton Roads, the Roanoke Valley and the New River Valley identifiable through newspaper files, however. It is likely that the statewide number of moonlighting officers is substantially higher.
"You're constantly using guns," said state Sen. Kenneth Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, a former police officer, offering a possible explanation for the link. "People who happen to be around firearms a lot tend to appreciate firearms."
Both the officers who privately sell guns and police officials who oversee the trade-in of police weapons acknowledge that the relationship has become more sensitive as the national debate over gun control intensifies.
Randolph Rowland, for instance, is a Roanoke police officer assigned to Addison Aerospace Magnet School, an inner-city middle school that was stunned last year by the shooting of a student by a former student at the adjacent Alternative Education Center.
"I'm trying to keep the kids' minds off guns," said Rowland, explaining why he never mentions his sideline business, J&R Guns and Ammunition, while he is at school. Although Rowland says he is committed deeply enough to the gun trade to hope that it may become a full-time occupation in a few years, "normally, I don't let anybody know - except close friends - that I sell guns," he said.
Similarly, Maj. W.V. Dunning, deputy chief of the Suffolk Police Department, said he has mixed feelings about the department's trade-in to a dealer for resale of about 50 weapons last year.
"It's a matter of dollars," he said. "We're in the business to take guns off the street, not put them on the street. . . . If we had all the money in the world, I assure you we would have destroyed them."
\ `Back to haunt you'
A random statewide survey of 14 police and sheriffs' departments suggests that most - though not all - Virginia departments follow the same two-pronged philosophy when it comes to disposing of confiscated and used weapons.
From Franklin County (where confiscated guns are beaten apart with a hammer) and Portsmouth (where they are cut by torch and dumped in the Elizabeth River) to Roanoke County (where they are sliced apart with a cutting saw), guns seized by police departments in criminal cases are routinely destroyed.
But used police guns are just as routinely traded in for credit and sold at discount prices to the public when the departments move to a newer model. Such trade-ins have occurred in recent years or are anticipated in Roanoke, Roanoke County, Franklin County, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Fairfax County, Chesterfield County and Henrico County.
The only exceptions among the departments surveyed were in Chesapeake, where officers bought all the used weapons when the department last traded used guns, and Richmond, a city with one of the nation's worst homicide rates.
Four years ago, when Richmond upgraded its Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolvers to 9mm Sig Sauers, City Manager Robert Bobb ordered that the used guns be melted. About 850 guns, worth tens of thousands of dollars to a financially strapped city, were destroyed.
"It would have saved us a lot of money, but we've got a gun problem," explained Sgt. Cecil Bryant of the department's property division. "He didn't want the guns to get in the wrong hands."
In the past, the department occasionally would get a call from New York or another Northeastern city saying that a gun once belonging to the Richmond Police Department had been used in a crime. "They have a way of coming back to haunt you," Bryant said.
Many police departments maintain that selling used guns is OK, because the weapons are transferred only to reputable dealers.
"I see no reason to destroy them. We know they're going to go to law-abiding citizens," said Col. Carl Baker, superintendent of the state police, explaining the department's trade-in policy. The public policy focus is not on reducing the number of guns in society, but in making sure that guns do not wind up in the wrong hands, he said.
Most of the 1,800 state police guns traded in last year went to SIGARMS, the New Hampshire-based manufacturer of the replacement guns. Several hundred were transferred back to Richmond's Southern Police Equipment Co. for resale to troopers who wanted to keep their personal guns. A half-dozen or so were not purchased by the officers and are for sale to the public, a company representative said.
Edward Rowe Jr., president of SIGARMS, said the rest of the guns "were sold in normal distribution in the states." He acknowledged that they could make their way back to Virginia gun shops. "We sell to distributors, and we have no idea what vendors they sell to," Rowe said.
Karen Allen, president of Southern Police Equipment Co. and its retail outlet, Southern Gun World, is the major vendor of used police weapons in Virginia. She suggested any move to destroy such guns would be economic idiocy.
"You might as well throw $20,000 in the corner over there and throw a match to it," she said, using a theoretical number of what a small department might save in trade-ins. "Why should my tax dollars be destroyed? This money helps our law-enforcement people purchase what they need."
Allen says those who think eliminating used police guns would reduce crime are fooling themselves. "It wouldn't do anything to crime. The weapons are out there" from other sources for those who intend to break the law, she said.
\ From law to crime
Police spokesmen and individual officers who deal in guns acknowledge that they are haunted by the fear that one of their guns will turn up in a crime.
A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms spokesman said that 166 of the gun traces requested of their bureau last year involved guns once owned by police departments. Most traced guns have been recovered in a crime.
The Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday reported recently that at least three of those trace requests involved murders: the fatal shooting of a cab driver in Queens; a shootout between drug gangs that left one person dead and another wounded in Poughkeepsie; and a gang slaying in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Following that report, New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani indicated that he would move to bar police sales of used weapons in that city. A Maryland legislator called recently for a similar ban in his state.
"It's gotten to be such an emotional issue," said Norfolk police Patrolman Laurence Bobbitt, explaining why he is considering not renewing the federal firearms-dealer's license he has had for 10 years.
He already limits his sales to police officers and individuals he knows well, Bobbitt said. "I'm just so afraid a gun might go to New York and kill five people in a subway. If I sell to a police officer, I can't be any more careful than that."
by CNB