The two stories, excerpted below, portray two very different kinds of gun dealers. One dealer works hard to prevent its guns from ending up in the wrong hands, while the other practically rolls out the red carpet for street traffickers.
As we always remind folks, most gun dealers are upstanding and law-abiding. It's only a minority of corrupt or grossly negligent gun dealers that supply a majority of guns that turn up in crime.
Let's turn up the heat on gun dealers like Kahr Arms, and give a medal to the responsible gun dealers out there. (Send us more stories about gun dealers doing the right thing, and we'll post them.)
Nancy
No inventory, but Joe Gun re-opens
Posted by Dean Bohn | The Saginaw News February 21, 2008 07:53AM
SANFORD -- The Joe Gun firearms store two miles east of Sanford is open for business, although most of the owner's inventory of 200 firearms is locked in the evidence room of the Midland County Sheriff's Department and may remain there for years. Prosecutors will need the weapons as they try to convict seven suspects police arrested in raids in Saginaw and Midland counties this week. Law enforcement officials say the individuals forced open the door to Joe Gun, 152 E. Saginaw, and made off with the cache -- about 130 rifles worth $80,000, 70 handguns valued at $12,000 and "lots" of ammunition.
Store owner Dale R. Furst, 61, and his staff were sweeping up glass from shattered display cases Wednesday, installing new glass and adding measures to guard against break-ins, he said. ..."We're going to beef up our doors," Furst said. "They came in through the fire entrance in the back, and they had to work and work and work on that...." "But when we're done beefing it up this time, they'll have to pull the whole wall down to get in."
Midland County Sheriff Jerry Nielsen said he regrets holding a businessman's stock, but the judicial process dictates he retain the evidence until after the trials and all appeals. "It's possible that he might not get (the firearms) back for years," Nielsen said....
"Even though we don't have them, we're excited they're not in the wrong hands." http://www.mlive.com/business/index.ssf/2008/02/no_inventory_but_joe_gun_reope.html
Money, Guns, and God
by Christopher S. Stewart October 2007 Issue
Inside the apocalyptic—and profitable—gun empire of Justin Moon, the C.E.O. who may someday lead the Unification Church.
On a blustery night in December 1999, Danny Guzman left his house in Worcester, Massachusetts, and headed downtown to Tropigala, his cousin’s nightclub. Tropigala occupied a bunkerlike, one-story brick building on Main South, a street that was home to shuttered storefronts, rooming houses, and a creeping underworld of drug dealing and prostitution, punctuated by the occasional shooting. Despite the upcoming holiday, Tropigala was packed with its usual, mostly Hispanic, crowd, and Guzman, a handsome 26-year-old with a muscular build and deep-olive complexion, settled in with a drink.
Just before 2 a.m., as the club shut down and crowds spilled onto the street, a man named Edwin Novas—a 20-year-old heroin dealer from the Bronx who sported a boyish mustache—started causing a disturbance. Details about what happened are murky, but Guzman was somehow drawn into the scuffle. Novas allegedly drew a 9-millimeter pistol from his waistband and fired, and Guzman was hit. Novas fled, followed by two friends. And at 2:12 a.m. on December 24 at Saint Vincent Hospital, Guzman was pronounced dead.
Four days later, in an empty, weed-choked lot around the corner from Tropigala, a four-year-old child found a loaded 9 millimeter with no serial number. Ballistics linked it to the shooting, and prosecutors, armed with eyewitness reports, accused Novas of murder. Immediately after the killing, his trail went cold, which is how it remains today. Years later, America’s Most Wanted featured the Tropigala murder, describing Novas as the Christmas Eve Killer, but the exposure didn’t help solve the case.
With no one in custody for the murder, investigators turned their attention to the murder weapon, and people in Worcester began whispering about the gun’s local manufacturer, Kahr Arms. We now know that the gun used to kill Danny Guzman was one of dozens that had been either lost or stolen and then sold into the underworld by rogue Kahr Arms employees, at least one of whom was a drug addict. Guzman’s family has since sued Kahr, accusing the company of negligence in connection with his death. A trial is pending. The $2 billion-a-year gun industry is watching the case with trepidation, fearing that a successful suit could prompt other victims’ families to bring similar cases against other gunmakers.
But Kahr Arms is more than just the manufacturer of some of the smallest and most lethal weapons on earth (including the tommy gun, made famous by Al Capone). It is run and mostly owned by a son of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the billionaire and self-proclaimed messiah who founded the Unification Church and controls a sprawl of businesses presumably intended to sustain and defend his followers when the world as we know it ends. The gun business, along with food companies, real estate, and other holdings, will serve to protect the fortress and keep sinners at bay, according to former members, as well as supply necessary provisions after the arrival of the new world order....
For a while, no one paid much attention to what went on behind the building’s brick facade. The trouble began when the company hired Mark Cronin to be a gunsmith in March 1999. Cronin was a 28-year-old high-school dropout who lived in the basement of his mother’s house. He had a well-documented crack habit and a history of violence. Not long after he landed a job on the factory floor, he noticed that Kahr had no metal detectors and no visible security cameras. That’s when he started stealing guns and selling them for cocaine.
Cronin smuggled the guns out in pieces. Typically, he said in documents filed in Massachusetts Superior Court, it took him about a week to sneak out enough components for a complete gun. He started with the smallest parts, such as the trigger and springs, which were stored in a plastic 10-drawer cabinet at his workbench. He stuffed the pieces into a ziplock bag, slipped the bag into his pants pocket, and walked out with it at the end of the day. The bigger parts, including the frame and the slide, were snuck out of the factory one at a time. “I just took them home,” he testified, “and built them.”
Cronin’s stolen guns were exceptionally valuable. Having bypassed the serial-number-stamp stage at the factory, they were untraceable, perfect for criminals. Although it’s not clear when Cronin began unloading his wares on the streets, he sold the gun that would kill Danny Guzman sometime in November 1999. It was a 9 millimeter, and the buyer was an old friend named Robert Jachimczyk, a former high-school tennis star who’d recently dropped out of community college. Cronin traded the gun for two half-grams of cocaine, valued at about $80 at the time. Jachimczyk turned around and sold the gun to Edwin Novas, the alleged shooter, for $200 worth of cocaine. Feeling that the relationship had potential, Cronin told Jachimczyk that he stole guns “all the time” and that he “can just walk out with them,” according to the court documents.
The next deal didn’t go down as planned. Several weeks later, Cronin traded Jachimczyk another gun for cocaine—a Kahr .40 caliber without a serial number. As Jachimczyk was on his way to sell it to Novas, police pulled him over, found the gun, and arrested him. Police didn’t make the connection until later. But when Jachimczyk heard about the Christmas Eve murder and the stolen 9-millimeter gun linking him to the crime, he told lawyers, “I shit my pants.”
By the time of the shooting, Kahr was already in the spotlight. Not only did police learn about Cronin’s activities; they discovered that another employee had walked out of the factory with a 9 millimeter and an extra pistol slide and that there were dozens more lost guns. Captain Paul Campbell, a detective for the Worcester police, said that going back more than a year, “as many as 50 weapons manufactured at the plant may be missing.” Campbell also condemned Kahr’s “shoddy” bookkeeping and questioned its security measures. The implication seemed to be that Kahr might as well have been handing out guns to anyone.
Cronin eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges of stealing just two guns, leaving the whereabouts of other missing weapons unresolved. During the year that Cronin worked at Kahr, four or five other company-made guns, all without serial numbers, turned up in connection to local crimes. This means that either Cronin lied to investigators or that there were other people with access to Kahr’s facility who were dealing guns.
Two years later, the lawsuit against Justin Moon and Kahr Arms threatened not only to derail the company but also dredge up stuff the Moon family would rather leave alone. Guzman’s mother hired a scrappy Worcester lawyer named Hector Piñeiro, who had an office within eyeshot of the Tropigala. Soon afterward, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence joined the fight. Together, they filed a class-action suit for wrongful death against Kahr, accusing the company of negligence.
At the outset, it seemed like an open-and-shut case: If a gun manufacturer can’t keep track of its wares and has a drug-addict employee stealing and selling its products, shouldn’t that company be held liable? But it’s not that straightforward. While it is illegal for a known drug user to handle guns, no federal law requires gun companies to secure their facilities or track their inventory, except when shipping a completed firearm. “Most gun companies have security set up,” says Daniel Vice, a lawyer for the Brady Campaign. “You can’t really check this, because all but two—Smith & Wesson and Ruger—are private. But I think most believe that it’s not profitable to let guns leave the factory.”
Vice argues that Kahr’s is an exceptional case. It was not simply a question of the company’s bad hiring policies and slipshod security. The argument is that its lax practices created an atmosphere that endangered the Worcester community and resulted in the death of Guzman. The plaintiffs aimed for a settlement in the millions and hoped to make an example out of Kahr. “We have 32 gun homicides every day in this country,” Vice says. “Certainly it is not too much to ask a gunmaker not to hire drug addicts with criminal records to work in its unsecured manufacturing plant.”
Justin went dark. When questions came from the press, he let his attorneys do the talking. Kahr filed to dismiss the case, but the judge refused. For a stretch, things looked bad for Kahr, until Congress, with help from the lobbying power of the N.R.A., intervened. In October 2005, President Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. A coup for the gun industry, the act protected manufacturers and dealers from liability for crimes committed with their products, saving them from what they described as frivolous lawsuits that threatened to bankrupt them. Kahr filed to dismiss again, citing the new law, but Piñeiro and Vice argued that the law didn’t apply. Most prominently, Vice pointed out that the law only applied to guns “shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce” and the murder weapon in this case was manufactured in Worcester and used in Worcester, thus never crossing Massachusetts state lines.
When I ask Chris Cox, the chief lobbyist for the N.R.A., if manufacturers should ever be held accountable for insufficient security measures and poor hiring practices that result in guns being stolen and getting into the hands of criminals, he says, “We’ve been very clear that if a gun manufacturer violates a state or federal law, it should be prosecuted to the fullest extent.”
http://www.portfolio.com/careers/features/2007/09/17/Unification-Church/?TID=rm/goo/Stolen_Guns_And_Murder/Stolen_Guns_And_Murder_CT
