Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (28 page)

Jannuzzo argued in private that to appeal to a broader swath of the American public, the industry needed to distinguish itself from Wayne LaPierre and talk of jackbooted federal storm troopers. “I want to sell a Glock to a suburban mom concerned about keeping her kids safe,” Jannuzzo explained. He had little
in common with camouflaged militia members preparing to resist an imaginary United Nations invasion. Jannuzzo played tennis on weekends and rode horses with his children. He enjoyed expensive single-malt Scotch, imported chardonnay, and black market Cuban cigars. “I don’t need to be associated with guys playing survivalist games in the woods.”

Operating under the aegis of Feldman’s trade group, the American Shooting Sports Council, Jannuzzo looked for subtle ways to lower the volume of the gun controversy. Months before the controversial Rose Garden ceremony, he and Feldman had visited Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, a prominent gun-control proponent. Rendell, a Democrat, had his staff researching a potential lawsuit that Philadelphia and other cities might file against the gun industry, modeled on the litigation state attorneys general had brought against major tobacco companies. In a meeting in Philadelphia’s ornate City Hall, Rendell insisted that firearm manufacturers had to take more responsibility for urban gun violence. He accused Glock and other companies of “flooding the streets” with weapons, fully aware that a substantial portion of them would end up in the wrong hands.

Jannuzzo disagreed with the novel legal theory that Rendell espoused: that the gun companies created a “public nuisance,” akin to the pollution emitted by a mismanaged industrial plant. Nuisance suits were rare and difficult to win. The courtroom weapon had never been aimed at an entire industry in anything approaching this fashion. Moreover, the criminal misuse of guns required the intervention of third parties—muggers, murderers, and rapists—whose illegal conduct broke what lawyers call the “chain of causation” between gun manufacturers and victims. Litigation seemed like a long shot.

Rendell, though an attorney by training, was not concerned
with legal niceties. He warned of dozens of suits filed by cities from coast to coast. A barrage of municipally funded legal actions could lead quickly to heavy legal defense expenses. Pretrial discovery could reveal embarrassing corporate documents. Glock and other gun companies historically had fended off product-defect suits filed by injured individuals. But a coordinated assault by government bodies seeking to recover the aggregate cost of police and hospital services related to gun violence presented a far more daunting threat. In light of the tobacco lawsuits, which were on their way to a multibillion-dollar settlement, Jannuzzo concluded that Rendell and the cities had to be taken seriously.

The Glock lawyer also thought that there were modest regulatory and safety steps, such as the concession on trigger locks, that his employer could offer as a way out of prospective suits. Jannuzzo indicated that he would be willing to discuss helping law enforcement agencies take a closer look at customers seeking to buy multiple handguns. Such buyers sometimes turned out to be illicit gun traffickers. If agreeing to restrictions that did not interfere with sales to honest consumers would forestall pricey lawsuits and bad publicity, Glock was open to talking. Rendell expressed interest, and they agreed to stay in touch.

The conciliatory tone in Philadelphia did not last. Other liberal big-city mayors saw the political appeal of taking the gun industry to court. Once Rendell floated the idea, it could not be contained. Gun-control activists hoping to cripple firearm production whispered to any politician who would listen that the tobacco-litigation strategy could be applied to guns.

Backed by a group of wealthy plaintiffs’ lawyers who had helped push tobacco suits, Mayor Marc Morial of New Orleans jumped to the front of the line. His city filed suit in October 1998 against Glock and every other major handgun maker.
“Today is a day of atonement,” Morial said at a press conference. “This suit is about holding that very successful industry accountable.” Two weeks later, Chicago mayor Richard Daley fired off the second such suit, demanding $433 million from the industry to compensate his city for public safety and medical expenditures over the prior five years.

Rendell was incensed that rivals had stolen his thunder, but there was nothing he could do about it. Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco all prepared to join the legal offensive. Others soon followed.

Jannuzzo, combative and not averse to publicity, responded to the challenge. In 1998 and 1999, he emerged in the national news media as the industry’s most forceful and articulate front man. At the same time, he continued to talk to Rendell and other mayors behind the scenes, probing, negotiating, and gathering intelligence. Jannuzzo once again displayed his knack for the dismissive sound bite. “They don’t have a leg to stand on, as far as the law is concerned,” he told the
New York Times
. “Cigarettes were supposed to be enjoyable, relaxing, and they turned out to be lethal. But guns are designed to be lethal. That’s why people buy them.” He waved off the notion that firearms were defective because they lacked adequate safety mechanisms, a theory that New Orleans and some other cities argued in conjunction with the public nuisance allegation. “What we have,” he said, “is a bunch of frustrated big-city executives who have lost control of the crime problem, and they are looking to blame someone else.”

Playing the family values card, Jannuzzo argued that the best way to prevent juvenile accidents with firearms was to
instruct children how to use guns properly. “My wife is having our fifth child in January,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
. “Three of the other four have been taught firearms safety based on the [NRA’s] Eddie Eagle program.… They would no more pick up a firearm without adult supervision than they would put their hand in a moving chainsaw or step in front of a moving car.”

On ABC’s
World News Tonight
, he answered Morial’s contention that the industry should be held liable for failing to invent a “smart” gun, meaning one that integrated a microchip or a fingerprint reader that would make it impossible for anyone except the rightful owner to pull the trigger. Such gadgetry may sound appealing, and it had been researched. But Jannuzzo noted, correctly, that engineers within and outside the industry had not been able to make “personalized” guns work reliably. Tiny electronic circuitry tended to malfunction when placed in proximity to gunfire. “I don’t know what they can mandate that we can put on guns,” Jannuzzo told ABC. “The greatest fallacy with Mayor Morial’s suit is that [electronic smart-gun technology] simply doesn’t exist.”

In the most memorable public airing of the municipal litigation, Jannuzzo faced off against Morial on NBC’s
Today
show. The confrontation in late January 1999 seemed stacked in favor of the politician from New Orleans. He spoke of innocent young victims of gun violence and a profitable industry’s indifference. New Orleans, he said, was taking the bad guys to court in the name of justice.

Jannuzzo, cast as the corporate heavy, had come prepared. He turned toward Morial and said: “You have to put the suit in an incredible context. The City of New Orleans is the biggest distributor of used guns in the state of Louisiana.”

Morial looked stricken. He recognized where Jannuzzo was
headed. In an attempt to save money, New Orleans had quietly done business with Glock in a way that had put thousands of handguns on the street. Ten months before suing firearm manufacturers for gross negligence, New Orleans had agreed to give Glock 7,200 old service pistols and confiscated weapons in exchange for 1,700 new Austrian .40-caliber handguns. This was one of dozens of such trades Glock had made with police departments around the country.

“I only approved that deal on the condition that none of the guns were sold in Louisiana,” Morial said. New Orleans, in other words, had done exactly what it accused the industry of doing: sought financial benefit from dumping guns indiscriminately on the street. On top of that, Morial had tried to foist the weapons on other communities, as if that would absolve him of any connection to subsequent misuse of the older guns.

Jannuzzo succeeded in upending the televised morality play, exposing his foe’s blatant double standard. The details that came to light after the
Today
episode made New Orleans look even worse. The guns the city traded went to a wholesaler in Indiana to be resold. Included were confiscated TEC-9s and AK-47s prohibited two years earlier by the federal assault weapons ban. Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, a private watchdog group, was livid: “To learn that the city has exported 7,000 guns seized from street criminals to other parts of the country is really mind boggling and the height of hypocrisy.”

Morial’s attempt to keep the used guns out of his backyard proved feckless. Two months after the exchange, a New Orleans pawnshop ran a newspaper advertisement for Beretta nine-millimeter pistols that were part of the Glock deal: “Own a piece of New Orleans history,” the ad said. “Guns formerly
belonged to members of the police department. All are stamped NOPD and come equipped with two 15-round ‘pre-ban’ clips.”

“The people of the city were under the impression they were doing away with these guns,” said Linda McDonald, head of the New Orleans chapter of the nonprofit Parents of Murdered Children. “There’s no assurance these guns will not come back here, and even if they don’t, they will be used to kill people in other areas.”

Nationally, the BATF had already noticed thousands of former police weapons among crime-scene guns that it traced. In 1998 alone, the federal agency identified at least 1,100 former police guns among the 193,000 traces it conducted. In one case in August 1999, neo-Nazi Buford Furrow used a compact Glock 26 pistol in a shooting rampage at a Los Angeles Jewish community center. He injured five people at the center and then killed a mailman of Filipino descent. The Glock 26 had been exchanged for a new, larger Glock by the police department of Cosmopolis, Washington. The compact pistol changed hands a couple of times and turned up at a retail gun show before Buford acquired it.

By aggressively fostering gun exchanges, Glock, in effect, had set a trap for municipalities, implicating them in the mass redistribution of firearms and muddying the waters over responsibility for the profusion of guns on urban streets. The gun company had not planned its marketing strategy as a legal defense, but that is how it worked out. And it was not just New Orleans and tiny Cosmopolis that were tarnished. Jannuzzo’s
Today
ambush led to media investigations and official confessions in Boston, Detroit, Oakland, and other large cities suing the gun industry. As a practical matter, the municipal litigation was deeply compromised before it even got off the ground.

Beyond the cloud of doubt created by municipal gun exchanges, the city and county lawsuits quickly ran into technical legal hurdles. By early 2000, thirty local governments had jumped on the litigation bandwagon. But in some jurisdictions, judges rejected what they saw as an inappropriate effort to shift the gun-control debate from the legislative arena to the judicial. Dismissing a suit filed by the city of Cincinnati, an Ohio judge in October 1999 called the litigation “an improper attempt to have this court substitute its judgment for that of the legislature, something this court is neither inclined nor empowered to do. Only the legislature has the power to engage in the type of regulation which is being sought by the city here.” In Louisiana and other states, lawmakers passed statutes blocking the courts from entertaining municipal suits against the gun industry: in essence, shielding gun makers from this type of legal threat.

As their suits hit obstacles, lawyers for some cities privately communicated to Jannuzzo and other industry executives that they would be willing to drop the litigation, with no damages paid, if gun makers would agree to a list of concessions. These ranged from limiting customers to buying a maximum of one gun per month—a deterrent to illegal trafficking—to spending a small portion of revenue to develop high-tech smart guns.