Gun Makers Saw No Role in Curbing Improper Sales

FEDERAL PROTECTION FOR THE GUN INDUSTRY Congressional Republicans surrounded President George W. Bush as he signed a law shielding firearms manufacturers from liability in 2005. Testimony from lawsuits filed before the bill passed provides a look at the gun makers’ thinking.

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The executive testified that he would keep doing business with a gun dealer who had been indicted on a charge of violating firearms laws because “This is still America” and “You’re still innocent until proven guilty.”

Bearing Arms

Articles in this series examine the gun industry’s influence and the wide availability of firearms in America.

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“Leaders in the industry have consistently resisted taking constructive voluntary action to prevent firearms from ending up in the illegal gun market.” ROBERT RICKER Former executive director of the American Shooting Sports Council

The president of r was not interested in knowing how often the police traced guns back to the company’s distributors, saying it “wouldn’t show us anything.”

And a top executive for said his company made no attempt to learn if dealers who sell its products were involved in gun trafficking on the black market. “I don’t even know what a gun trafficker is,” he said.

The world’s firearms manufacturers have been largely silent in the debate over gun violence. But their voices emerge from thousands of pages of depositions in a series of liability lawsuits a decade ago, before Congress passed a law shielding them from such suits in 2005, and the only time many of them were forced to answer such questions.

Much of the testimony was marked confidential, and transcripts were packed away in archives at law firms and courthouses around the country. But a review of the documents, which were obtained by The New York Times, shows the industry’s leaders arguing, often with detachment and defiance, that their companies bear little responsibility, beyond what the law requires, for monitoring the distributors and dealers who sell their guns to the public.

The executives claimed not to know if their guns had ever been used in a crime. They eschewed voluntary measures to lessen the risk of them falling into the wrong hands. And they denied that common danger signs — like a single person buying many guns at once or numerous “crime guns” that are traced to the same dealer — necessarily meant anything at all.

Charles Brown’s company, is the sole distributor of an inexpensive brand of gun that frequently turned up in criminal investigations. He said he never examined the trace requests that MKS received from federal agents to learn which of his dealers sold the most crime guns. This lack of interest was echoed by Charles Guevremont, the president of the gun manufacturer Browning, who testified that his company would have no reason to review the practices of a dealer who was the subject of numerous trace requests.

“That’s not for us to enforce the law,” Mr. Guevremont said.

A discordant note was sounded by one executive — Ugo Gussalli Beretta, a scion of the family of Italian firearms makers. His testimony indicated that he did not understand how easy it was to buy multiple guns in the United States, compared with his home country. Questioned by a lawyer for the, he said he believed — incorrectly — that . had a policy requiring its dealers to first determine if there was “a legitimate need” for someone to buy so many guns.

Asked why he thought that, Mr. Beretta replied, “Common sense.” Because the testimony came in the context of high-stakes litigation, it is difficult to tell how much of it reflected a studied attempt to avoid liability or a fundamentally laissez-faire attitude toward the firearms trade.

Even so, many of those who testified are still with the same companies, and the issues they were asked about have not gone away. In the wake of the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and other recent high-profile shootings, the gun industry’s response — that existing laws should be better enforced rather than new restrictions imposed — largely mirrors its stance from a decade ago.

Because of lobbying by gun-rights groups, there are more restrictions on the government’s use of trace data than when the lawsuits began. And the industry continues to oppose limits on multiple gun sales to a single buyer, a major theme of the lawsuits; it is in court fighting a new requirement that dealers report such rifle sales under certain circumstances.

Regarding Mr. Beretta’s testimony in 2002 about multiple sales, the general counsel of Beretta U.S.A., Jeffrey Reh, said last week that it was possible he had not understood the questions being asked because of the language barrier.

“That being said,” Mr. Reh said, “I can advise you that Beretta U.S.A.’s position is and has always been that the purchase by an individual of multiple firearms is not, in and of itself, evidence of improper or suspicious behavior.”