The Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) September 13, 2004
Gunmakers prepped for demand
Assault weapons ban to expire; requests rise
By Shannon McCaffrey, Knight Ridder newspapers
As the clock counts down on the decade-old ban on selling and buying assault weapons, phones have begun ringing off the hook at ArmaLite. Customers want to know when the newly outfitted AR-15 rifle will be ready.
"People are excited. They've been waiting for this for a long time, and we've been preparing," said Jodi DePorter, a spokeswoman for the Geneseo, Ill.-based gunmaker.
Unless Republican congressional leaders have a sudden change of heart, the assault weapons ban - a centerpiece of the 1994 Crime Bill - will expire at midnight tonight.
The federal law applied to 19 semiautomatic weapons, which fire one round and automatically load each time the trigger is pulled. Automatic weapons, which remain illegal, are designed for military use and shoot without stopping.
ArmaLite plans to ship newly outfitted assault rifles just hours later to customers who were so eager to get the .308 and .223 caliber semiautomatic rifles that they've pre-ordered them.
Gun manufacturers are gearing up for a wave of business once the ban sunsets. They're offering promotional coupons online for extras such as free flash suppressers and boxes of high-capacity 15-round magazines.
Joseph Vince, the former chief of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Crime Gun Analysis Branch, predicted that the end of the ban "will cause a frenzied buying spurt."
"People will buy them in high quantities just because they will fear that this ban may go into effect yet again," Vince said.
A Consumer Federation of America report says prices for the assault weapons would drop as the supply surges. While there have been knockoffs of popular banned semiautomatic weapons such as AK-47s, Uzis and TEC-9s, some gun buyers want the real thing.
The consumer group predicted a wave of "gun buyer nostalgia" for new models of the originals. And high-capacity magazines will begin rolling off the production lines again, dramatically increasing the firepower on the streets, the report found.
Law enforcement - which credits the ban with helping drive down the crime rate to record-low levels in the past decade - says they'll once again be outgunned by criminals.
Several dozen police chiefs from around the country converged on Washington recently to lobby members of Congress to reauthorize the ban. They also sought a meeting with President Bush, who's said he would sign a bill if it landed on his desk, but were rebuffed, said Joe Polisar, the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
Police and other supporters of the ban accused Bush of not doing anything to temper Republican opposition to the ban in the House of Representatives.
"We cannot afford a repeat of the carnage on our streets in the '70s and '80s," Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton said. "We need sanity in our gun laws."
To purchase an assault weapon, customers must undergo a criminal background check. If they pass, they can walk out with a gun. Seven states - California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York - have their own assault-weapon bans that will remain in place.
The biggest opponent of the ban's renewal is the powerful National Rifle Association, which maintains that the ban was nothing more than a cosmetic fix and that there's no evidence proving it worked.
Dueling studies on the ban's effectiveness have given both sides evidence to cherry pick and make their case.
Supporters of the ban - such as the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence - cite ATF "crime gun" data, which show that the number of outlawed weapons as a percentage of all guns the ATF has traced to crimes has fallen - from 4.82 percent before the ban to 1.61 percent after it was imposed.
The NRA counters with a study by the Urban Institute, which found that assault weapons and high-capacity magazines "were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders."
GRAPHIC: B.W. graphic is drawing of a semiautomatic assault weapon with some other military-style features (SOURCE: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; GlobalSecurity.org; U.S. Department of State)(Dan DeLorenzo)(AP)
© Copyright 2004, Capital City Press
