Military's Scrap Metal Reborn As Civilian Guns

CHICAGO - Jack Friese makes a variation of the M-14, the assault rifle developed by the military and used in Vietnam.

Friese doesn't build these guns from scratch; he pieces them together using parts gathered from the unlikeliest of places. One of those places is a U.S. military scrap yard.

Friese's Baltimore-based Armscorp USA is one of more than a dozen gun makers who use U.S. military parts to rebuild the battlefield firearms they sell to the public.

These rapid-fire weapons, some of which can shoot four or more rounds a second, are more powerful than those used today in combat. Many, like Friese's M-14s, fire bullets that can pierce lightly armored cars.

Gun-industry experts estimate the number of rebuilt military guns to be in the tens of thousands. This is a fraction of the more than 3 million guns produced each year in the United States, a country that now has nearly as many guns as people.

But the sale of rebuilt military weapons demonstrates the inability of the nation's numerous gun laws to keep some of the most deadly military firearms off the streets. And it shows how gun manufacturers have created a perfectly legal and profitable enterprise with an unlikely partner - the U.S. government.

Thousands of weapons that end up in private hands originate in the stockpiles of the U.S. military. By order of the military, many are supposed to be ground into unusable scrap but nonetheless find their way to gun shows, gun shops - and into the hands of criminals.

Last year, more than 13,000 Americans were slain with firearms, 67 percent of the total number of homicides. It is estimated that an additional 18,000 took their own lives with guns.

Statistics like these fuel the contentious debate on gun control, pitting the formidable gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, against increasingly influential gun-control advocates.

Both sides have had victories, and there is certainly no shortage of laws.

There are more than 22,000 firearm laws and ordinances nationwide, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the federal agency charged with regulating firearms. In the past six years alone, Congress has passed laws restricting some assault weapons, toughening punishment for gun crimes and requiring background checks for handgun buyers.

Yet there is also no shortage of guns and the violence often associated with them.

An investigation of the gun industry, particularly of the second-hand market that includes assault weapons once owned by the military, found the nation's war on gun crime halfhearted, sporadic and inefficient. Gun laws are riddled with loopholes. Law-enforcement agencies are stripped of essential crime-fighting tools. And Congress has repeatedly shied away from tougher gun laws.

-- Congress never has passed a law to take a single weapon - including military assault rifles - out of circulation. At most, laws have halted production of some and barred importation of others.

-- More than 95 percent of the nation's estimated 240 million guns are in private hands. In most states, the resale of these guns, with the exception of machine guns, is unregulated by federal or local laws. They can be sold, traded or given away without waiting periods, background checks or paperwork.

-- One of the briskest markets for second-hand weapons - gun shows - remains virtually free of federal and state regulation, despite a 1993 General Accounting Office investigation that found stolen military weapons being routinely sold at them.

-- And in a troubling new trend for law enforcement, 24-hour, seven-day-a-week gun shows are popping up on the Internet. Buyers can legally order nearly any type of firearm - including military weapons - from sellers in their state, often without filling out federal paperwork or submitting to a background check.

But the role of the U.S. government as arms supplier, selling hundreds of thousands of high-powered guns to the public, clearly illustrates the difficulties in curtailing the flow of weapons to U.S. streets.

Some guns have been resold by foreign governments that were given the weapons decades ago. Others were reconstructed from spare parts. And in some cases, they were sold directly to U.S. civilians through a little-known government marksmanship program. Together, these sources contribute significantly to the nation's plentiful supply of firepower.

Two valuable loopholes

The global gun business of Friese's Armscorp offers a rare insight into the little-known world of military surplus sales.

It shows how two seemingly minor amendments and loopholes in federal laws allowed millions of U.S.-made military firearms and gun parts to be brought back into this country and resold for handsome profits.

The 1968 Gun Control Act blocked the importation of foreign military weapons that had "no sporting value." The 1976 Arms Export Control Act tightened the law by prohibiting importation of American military guns given or sold to foreign allies.

Both laws dealt with complete weapons but said nothing about weapons parts, and so the parts were imported by the ton.

In addition, amendments to the '68 and '76 laws, lobbied for by the NRA, allowed millions of complete military weapons into the United States as collectors' items.

The importation of weapons given or sold by the United States to its allies is now being held up by the Clinton administration, which says it is re-evaluating the criteria for imports. This moratorium is scheduled to expire in March.

For the past 23 years, Jack Friese has used his international contacts, developed from years as a weapons importer and gun maker, to negotiate deals for millions of U.S. and foreign-made military-firearm parts.

Friese said that as recently as July 1996, he imported several million M-14 parts from South Korea.

The M-14s had been given by the United States to the South Koreans in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ten 40-foot containers were needed to carry the Friese shipment.

Until several months ago, when a new Clinton-administration policy required State Department permission to import military parts of U.S. origin, Friese and other gun makers brought in these parts in bulk.

The only gun part that couldn't be imported was the receiver - the metal part of the gun that houses the firing mechanism and bears the serial number and manufacturer's name.

So Friese and some manufacturers built their own receivers. Other manufacturers simply bought them on the open market.

From scrap to street

Although military parts from overseas account for most of Friese's inventory - 85 percent by the gun maker's estimate - he has an even more surprising source of parts.

He buys them directly from the military.

Military policy bars the sale of firearms or weapon parts to the public, with the exception of the Civilian Marksmanship Program, a government initiative to teach marksmanship and gun safety to civilians. The program has sold more than a half-million firearms to the public.

All military-surplus firearms that are not sold through the marksmanship program or given to other government agencies must be destroyed or rendered inoperable. The remains are sold as scrap through a Department of Defense network of military surplus outlets.

But the military does such a poor job of cutting up and crushing weapons that gun makers like Friese typically find enough materials in the scrap to make complete guns.

The relationship between gun makers and the military is a symbiotic one. The gun makers often pay as much as six times the regular price for scrap and in turn get usable weapon parts, a review of surplus sales records show.

Military officials say the law doesn't let them block gun dealers from bidding on scrap. But they say they do such a thorough job of crushing weapons that no guns can be assembled from the pieces.

"The demilled parts should be unusable; most of them are melted down," said Bruce Stout, chief of the Army small-arms-products center in Rock Island, Ill.

But Friese says he gets regular notices from the military announcing sales and inviting him to inspect the scrap and offer a bid.

On May 31, 1995, Friese, through an intermediary, was the highest bidder on 100,000 pounds of scrap sold by the military at its depot in Crane, Ind., Defense Department records show. The invitation to bid stated that the scrap consisted of "demilitarized small arms parts" and other steel of similar quality.

By the time Friese and his workers sorted through the 3-foot-high, 20-foot-long pile of supposedly inoperable guns, he had more than 250,000 usable parts.

Friese's company, Armscorp USA, paid the government $31,800, records show. Friese says he will sell the least-expensive salvaged part for $1. He sells some parts for as much as $125.

Armscorp, Friese says, has more than 500 million weapons parts, including the parts recovered from military scrap. He says he has enough complete kits to build a million M-14s.

His reconstructed rifles can fetch anywhere between $1,250 and $3,000.

Friese is pretty low on the food chain of gun manufacturers. Competition from bigger manufacturers has kept his total production to slightly less than 15,000 semiautomatic M-14s in the past 10 years. The military version of the M-14 is capable of fully automatic fire.

One such competitor is the Geneseo, Ill.-based Springfield Armory, which has manufactured more than 115,000 M-1A rifles, a version of the M-14, in the past 10 years.

Although the M-1A is sold to the public and was never used by the military, a Springfield brochure states, "The Springfield basic M-1A is the essence of a military rifle. No frills, no fancy stuff, just solid battle-proven features."

The similarity is no accident. Springfield uses a number of genuine M-14 parts in the rifle, company officials say.

And like Armscorp, Springfield gets some parts directly from the military.

Springfield has been the highest bidder in 11 military scrap sales since 1994, Defense Department records show. It paid a total of $43,486 for the scrap, which included intact rifle stocks and cut-up firearms.

On Aug. 26, 1994, Springfield bought 47,100 pounds of mixed scrap - including rifle parts - for 36 cents a pound. That is 30 cents a pound more than the military typically gets for steel scrap, an analysis of bid results shows.

The company also paid about 21 cents each for rifle stocks that normally sell on the open market for at least $15.

"It is generally recognized that the more genuine military parts you have in a gun, the higher its value," said William Dailey, attorney for the gun maker.

Dailey scoffs at the military's attempts to destroy the weapons.

"If you cut a Chevrolet in half, you may not be able to drive the car, but that doesn't mean you can't use the engine and other parts," he said.