Chicago Tribune September 13, 2004
Gunmaker sets sights on end of ban
By David Heinzmann, Tribune staff reporter.
If all goes as expected, workers at the ArmaLite Inc. factory here on Tuesday morning will start churning out their military-style rifles with ammunition magazines that hold 30 bullets instead of the maximum 10 rounds permitted under the Assault Weapons Ban.
The manufacture of high-capacity magazines is one of the more controversial features that have been illegal under the ban for the last decade. The bigger magazines give criminals more firepower to use in gang warfare or against police officers, critics say.
With the expiration of the ban Monday, ArmaLite owner Mark Westrom said Friday there is no question he'll stop using the smaller magazines.
"That's what the market requires," said Westrom, who has been singled out for criticism by the gun-control lobby in recent months because he started taking paid orders early for guns that have been illegal under the ban. He said he would begin assembling the unrestricted guns on Tuesday and shipping them later in the week.
President Bill Clinton signed the legislation in 1994 with the hope of removing firearms designed for warfare from America's streets. Despite the urging of many big-city police chiefs, there has been little political will to keep it in place this year.
Enacted with a sunset clause that would require renewal after 10 years, the law appeared doomed last week when Republican leaders in Congress took a pass on action to keep it alive.
President Bush said he would support keeping the ban in place if Congress sent him legislation to renew it, but the White House has not taken any initiative publicly on the issue.
Parts ready for assembly
On the workbenches of the compact ArmaLite factory in this western Illinois town about 150 miles southwest of Chicago, piles of black aluminum and plastic pre-ban gun features--such as collapsible stocks and flash suppressors--sit in open cardboard boxes waiting to be assembled Tuesday morning for the consumer market. ArmaLite has many law-enforcement and government customers who already legally order the full-featured military weapons, some of them fully automatic.
With the ban lifted, gunmakers will easily begin adding features to their guns that had been prohibited. But it will not greatly change the availability of assault weapons, industry officials say.
The ban had a grandfather clause. So-called assault weapons that were manufactured before the ban was passed in 1994 have remained legal to sell and trade. Because the grandfathered models have been available, the demand for new guns with the banned features, which ArmaLite sells for between $900 and $2,000 each, has not been overwhelming, Westrom said.
The pre-order plan has brought about 10 gun orders a week for the last few months, he said.
"That was an effort to answer the customers who called in and wanted to get to the front of the line," he said. "It was a way to serve the customer without risk to the company."
But advocates for keeping the ban in place say ArmaLite's early offer is a signal that new weapons designed for military and tactical use will be much more easily, and cheaply, acquired by private citizens, including criminals.
"We expect the demand to be fairly substantial," said John Lacey, policy and research director for Americans for Gun Safety. "This goes to show what's coming down the pike after next week."
Lacey and other proponents of the ban say the law helped limit criminals' access to guns that were designed for warfare.
Under the ban, 19 specific models have been prohibited, and several gun features have been limited. Guns could not have two or more of the following features: a collapsing stock, pistol grip, flash suppressor, bayonet mount or a grenade launcher. Because the pistol grip is most essential to the design of such rifles, it has been the other features that have disappeared from the assembly lines over the last decade.
The flash suppressor "hides the location of where the shooter is" from a human target, Lacey said. "In hunting there is no reason for that."
Little practical appeal
Westrom and other industry officials acknowledge that the controversial "assault weapon" features don't have much practical appeal to hunters or competitive marksmen. But they say they are of great value to collectors of military-style weapons. The ArmaLite M-15 and AR-10 models are based on the fully-automatic M-16 carried by American soldiers for decades.
The guns that will be available are aimed at "a guy who wants to buy a firearm because it reminds him of the one he carried in 'Nam," said Gary Mehalik, spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a lobbying group for the gun industry.
Gun-industry officials say the ban has been a farce because, in their view, the weapons prohibited did not pose a threat to public safety, and large supplies of the weapons already manufactured remained in the marketplace anyway because of the grandfather clause. For instance, "pre-ban" 30-round magazines have remained widely available during the ban, Mehalik said.
Mehalik also said there were many misunderstandings about what kinds of weapons the ban would prohibit.
"This passed in reaction to the public panic and the misconception that machine guns were going to be available," he said.
Fully automatic weapons are illegal and their status has not been affected by the ban. But semiautomatic weapons that could illegally be converted to into fully automatic guns have never left the market, and Westrom said there's not much that can be done to stop an expert with the right tools from converting them. The ArmaLite owner said that after he bought the company he took immediate steps to change the engineering of his guns to make such modifications more difficult. But nothing is foolproof.
"Can a guy take a milling machine and open a gun up [to modify it]? Of course he can," Westrom said.
When the ban was passed a decade ago, its immediate effect was actually the reverse of what was desired. Before the ban took effect in 1994, the gun industry, which had been producing about 90,000 guns a year that fit the assault-weapon criteria, flooded the market with 230,000 of them, according to a National Institute of Justice study.
Westrom remembers it well.
"There was a buying panic and a huge number of people trying to get guns," said Westrom. "That's what we called the good old days."
GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC (color): Military-style features on guns legal again
A law banning the manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons expires today. The law defined an assault weapon as any semiautomatic rifle with a detachable magazine and bearing at least two other military-style features from a list of five.
During the ban, makers of assault rifles sold the same pistol grip guns without the other four features. Pre-ban weapons were legal to own and sell.
1. Retractable or folding stock: Shortens rifle length
2. Flash suppressor: Limits the flash to conceal the shooter
3. Grenade launcher: Rifle grenades that can attach to the flash suppressor remain illegal.
4. Pistol grip
5. Bayonet lug: For attaching a large knife
High capacity detachable magazines: The law limited magazines to 10 rounds.
Bayonet
Rifle grenade
Note: Based on a Colt AR-15 style rifle
Sources: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; GlobalSecurity.org; U.S. Department of State
Associated Press/Chicago Tribune
© Copyright 2004, Chicago Tribune Company
