AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (23 page)

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Authors: Larry Kahaner

BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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As the national debate heated up, some of the largest U.S. gun makers tried to home in on what they perceived as the hot-button issue: the large-capacity magazine. If they could get Congress to focus on this particular matter as the root of the problem, then they might escape more severe restrictions. They had been successful in getting the Bush administration to focus on the magazine capacity as the focal point of their import ban, and they wanted to extend this to any national legislation that was bound to follow.
 
Thirteen gun makers, with William Ruger as their point man, led the charge as a group called the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute (SAAMI). The group also included well-known gun makers Winchester and Smith & Wesson. “Semiautomatic firearms as such should not be the object of any legislative prohibition,” SAAMI’s official position noted. “It is actually the large-magazine capacity, rather than the semiautomatic operation, which is the proper focus of this debate.” Ruger again hammered home the technical point that there was no such thing as a semiautomatic assault rifle, and this resonated with gun owners who felt that their weapons were unfairly portrayed. But when Ruger publicly reiterated the group’s stance, that magazines should be held to fifteen rounds, he attracted the anger of these same gun owners who felt betrayed by the high-profile gun maker whom they had considered an ally in their fight against firearm restrictions.
 
Many in the gun community could not understand Ruger’s position of giving in to
any
kind of limitations, offering
any
type of concessions. They did not understand that Ruger and his SAAMI colleagues were hoping to head off more restrictive legislation. Ruger also hoped to save his own Mini-14, a popular semiautomatic, but during the contentious months ahead he was portrayed by pro-gun groups as a Benedict Arnold. He was also compared to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had appeased Adolf Hitler in the hope of avoiding World War II only to see Germany grow more emboldened and belligerent.
 
Congressional lawmakers spent five years trying to pass an assault rifle ban, without success, but they got the boost they needed from another high-profile case involving an AK. This time, the violence struck close to their Capitol Hill offices.
 
On January 22, 1993, Aimal Kansai, a twenty-nine-year-old Pakistani citizen, enraged by U.S. policy toward Muslim nations, traded in his AR-15 (bought a few days earlier) and purchased a Chinese-version AK at a Virginia gun shop. Three days later, he stopped his car on Dolley Madison Boulevard next to a line of cars waiting to turn into the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
 
He later wrote that he wanted to kill CIA director James Woolsey or his predecessor, Robert Gates, but he knew that entry to the secure facility would be impossible. He settled for aiming his AK point-blank at a group of commuters waiting to make a left turn. Firing through their car windows, Kansai shot and killed two CIA employees and injured three others before he sped away.
 
Police found shell casings at the scene and knew they were from an AK. As they canvassed local gun shops, they received a call from Kansai’s roommate, who reported the man missing. He had last seen Kansai on the day of the shootings. Two days later, the roommate called police again, telling them that he thought Kansai might have been involved in the shootings.
 
When police searched the apartment, they found an AK and several other rifles. They also discovered clothes that matched witnesses’ descriptions and what appeared to be car window glass stuck to the clothing. Subsequent ballistics tests showed that the shell casings found at the scene matched Kansai’s AK. The glass matched the shot-out car windows.
 
The Washington, D.C., area was stunned by the randomness of the crime. Even though the victims were CIA employees, and one was in covert operations, many in the region saw them as regular people killed on their way to the office on an ordinary Monday morning. It could have been almost anybody. The CIA “hardened” its entrance (the building itself is about a quarter mile in from the entry point) with round-the-clock manned SUVs and security teams sitting in cars up and down Dolley Madison Boulevard. Rolling patrols started as construction began on a permanent security booth with bulletproof windows.
 
Kansai had flown to Pakistan a day after the shooting, and despite the CIA’s and FBI’s best efforts, they could not get their hands on him for another four and a half years. (Eventually he was extradited to Virginia, tried, and executed for murder.) During his absence, however, the assault rifle ban moved ahead in Congress, buoyed by stories on television and in newspapers about how easy it was for Kansai to purchase his AK and emphasizing that these weapons were not for sport as the gun lobby had led many to believe but were designed to kill people. Like the Stockton shooting, the incident pushed many lawmakers who had been on the fence into voting for restrictions. This, along with stories about the use of AKs in Africa and South America, pushed even ardent pro-gun lawmakers into changing their position.
 
On September 13, 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which banned the manufacture, transfer, and possession of certain semiautomatic weapons. Many gun owners were furious at the new law and stepped up their criticism of Ruger, because this time, instead of a limit of fifteen rounds per magazine, the number was now ten. They believed that if the famous gun maker had not pushed for the fifteen-round limit for the import ban Congress would not have lowered it still further.
 
In a break for gun owners, though, Congress grandfathered weapons and magazines manufactured before the ban. Aside from the magazines being limited to ten rounds, semiautomatics could not have folding or telescoping stocks (to prevent secreting under clothes), a pistol grip (to prevent rapid hip firing), a bayonet mount, a flash suppressor (flash suppressors prevent the enemy from locating your position in the dark), or a grenade launcher. The ban also applied similar criteria to semiautomatic pistols and semiautomatic shotguns.
 
The act outlawed exact copycats and lookalike guns, but the wording still provided loopholes similar to those in the import ban. Whether the law actually prevented crimes was an issue that continues to draw debate. A report by the National Institute of Justice in March 1999, covering the years 1994 through 1996, noted that the ban had clear-cut, unintended short-term effects on the gun market. For example, not only did manufacturers step up production while the ban was being debated—giving many thousands of rifles “pre-ban” protection—but prices rose dramatically, more than 50 percent in some cases, during the year before the ban took effect and then fell afterward. This suggests that the weapons became generally more available after the ban, probably from the stockpile of pre-ban weapons and from new copycats that hit the market. Also, there was a measurable short-term drop in criminal use of the banned weapons after the act, according to law enforcement officials who monitored so-called tracing requests of weapons used in crimes.
 
Within a few months of the ban, however, it became clear to almost everyone that the loopholes were so large that they rendered the law’s intentions largely useless. Proponents said it was better than no law, but its full intent certainly was being thwarted. Even gun makers noted that the law did little to get banned rifles out of the hands of criminals. Colt president Ron Whittaker said that the ban was simply about cosmetics: “We had a crime bill that was supposed to focus on crime, and hopefully, criminals. We ended up with an assault weapons ban that has nothing to do with defining assault weapons, but it had a lot to do with what something looks like.” His company’s Sporter rifle did not pass the ban test until it had the flash suppressor removed and the pistol grip altered. It was then sold under the name Match Target. “They passed a cosmetic law, and now they’re [Congress] sitting back saying, ‘Oh, woe is me. . . . People are changing the cosmetics!’ I don’t understand that logic.”
 
Copycats and pre-ban stockpiles filled gun buyers’ needs, and gun makers readily advertised post-ban models alongside their outlawed kin that were no longer for sale. The inference was obvious: these were basically the same weapon. The gun industry called altering a firearm to legal status “sporterization,” which sometimes meant only changing a minor detail such as removing the flash suppressor or taking away the threaded portion of the barrel to prevent a suppressor from being mounted. Manufacturers had learned how to fit within the letter of the law from their experience getting around the import ban. AKs, for example, banned by the Bush import restriction, were resurrected by China’s NORINCO as the MAK-90, which stood for Modified AK-1990—modified to go around the 1989 import ban. Not only was the pistol grip replaced by a thumbhole in the stock, but a nut was welded at the barrel’s end to prevent a flash suppressor from being screwed in. In addition, the bayonet lug was machined down so a bayonet could not be mounted. More MAK-90s were imported from China than any other country, and they remain one of the most popular, because they are inexpensive and plentiful.
 
When the 1994 ban took affect, Russian gun makers also saw an opportunity to make money. Vyatskie Polyany Machine Building Plant, or MOLOT (which means “hammer”), produced the VEPR, their “sporterized” version of the AK. The VEPR was actually based on the RPK, the light machine gun version of the AK. The action worked the same as the AK, but the receiver (the main frame of a firearm) was a little thicker and stiffer.
 
Gun magazines, which had opposed the ban in editorials, understood that the act had a bigger bark than bite and reveled in its impotence. In essence, the pro-gunners had won. A story in
Gun World
bore this out: “In spite of assault rifle bans, bans on high capacity magazines, the ranting of the anti-gun media and the rifle’s innate political incorrectness, the Kalashnikov in various forms and guises, has flourished. Today there are probably more models, accessories and parts to choose from than ever before.”
 
Senator Feinstein admitted that while many gun makers were getting around the spirit of the law, its most important part, the limit on magazine size to ten rounds, still was a great step forward, but this turned out not to be the case either. Gun dealers had mountains of high-capacity pre-ban magazines on hand, enough to last ten years—when the law was set to expire. Moreover, some gun dealers became even more creative, especially with the pistol section of the law that limited the number of bullets a pistol could hold. They offered police departments an exchange of new pistols and magazines for their old ones, which they could then legally sell to the public because they were produced before the ban. Since new, large-capacity pistols were allowed for sale to law enforcement agencies, this system added to gun dealers’ stocks for public consumption. Most police agencies shied away from the offer.
 
“If I could have gotten fifty-one votes in the Senate,” Feinstein lamented, “for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren’t here.”
 
But even such an outright ban would not have prevented the most vicious police standoff in Los Angeles history, sparking a nationwide debate about how best to arm law enforcement officers against the growing numbers of assault rifles being used against them. Police around the country were scared. They were under-armed, facing criminals carrying AKs and other high-powered assault rifles.
 
 
 
ON FEBRUARY 28, 1997, less than a week after the Russian Army Museum opened an exhibit celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the AK, two men, armed with M-16s and AKs, and both wearing masks and body armor, entered the North Hollywood branch of the Bank of America. With their nerves steeled by phenobarbital, veteran bank robbers Larry Eugene Phillips Jr. and Emil Matasareanu pushed a hostage into the bank door as Los Angeles Police Department officers came upon the scene by chance. Officer Loren Farell, a nine-year veteran and his partner, Martin Perello, who had been on the job for only eighteen months, were on patrol. Perello, driving slowly, casually eyed the bank, checking the door of the division’s busiest bank as he always did. Farell was making entries in his administrative log when his partner yelled, “Two-eleven!”—robbery in progress.
 
Perello described two men dressed like Ninja Turtles pushing someone through the front door. Both officers then saw the rifles. After the officers requested backup, they took cover just outside the bank and heard automatic fire from inside. “Witnesses report suspects are shooting AK-47s,” officers at the scene radioed the dispatcher so she could warn others who were on their way. “Subjects are firing AK-47s. . . . Stay down!” Then, “Officer down!”
 
They warned helicopters to keep their distance as the robbers exited the bank, spraying the area with hundreds of steel-jacketed bullets. Armed as they were with only 9mm pistols, their bullets bounced off the robbers’ armor. Patrol officers could do nothing but wait for reinforcements. “It was like throwing a rock at a wall,” Officer John Goodman later said. They also knew that their own vests would not protect them against the AK rounds. Several more officers lay injured.
 
As additional officers arrived, they could do little but hide behind their cars for protection. They watched helplessly as their patrol cars’ tires exploded, windows shattered, and steel side panels were riddled with holes. They soon discovered that the only parts of their vehicles that the robbers’ bullets could not penetrate were the massive engine blocks, so they hid behind them. Helicopters, hovering just out of firing range, offered a brutal bird’s-eye view of the surreal, close-in firefight, with the gunmen calmly changing magazines including hundred-round drums.

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