The American firearms industry today might be said to resemble a gunslinger in the gory final minutes of an old Western: surrounded by enemies, running low on ammunition, nearing the end of an unchallenged reign.

This month, the House stunned the gun lobby by voting to ban 19 assault weapons and limit the capacity of all gun magazines to 10 rounds. If it survives a House-Senate conference committee, the magazine limit would require mainstream handgun makers to cut the firepower of many of their most popular pistols.

That gun control breakthrough came six months after Congress passed the Brady law, which requires a five-day waiting period and criminal record check for handgun purchases. The law was hailed by anti-gun forces as their biggest success in 25 years and was reviled by National Rifle Association militants as a step toward Nazi-style dictatorship.

In Maryland, too, gun control forces appear to have gained the upper hand. In March, after five years of debate, the General Assembly banned the sale of 18 kinds of assault pistols.

But the results of these gun control victories are not as simple as they appear. The Brady law detonated an unprecedented nationwide boom in handgun sales. Far from fading since November, when the Brady law passed, the run on guns seems to have gotten another boost from the latest House vote.

Meanwhile, the gun control strategy of concentrating on the most menacing weapons largely ignores the ordinary handguns most used in crime. The same Maryland officials who fought to ban assault weapons have offered political and economic backing for Maryland-based Beretta U.S.A. -- though Beretta handguns are used in crime far more often than even the most popular assault pistols.

The brisk sales at Maryland gun stores and the 10,000-a-month handgun production at Beretta's Prince George's County plant do not suggest an industry in distress. If the gunslinger is doomed, he's mounting one heck of a last stand.

"We may be facing a situation in which the Brady bill will cost more lives than it saves," says Lawrence W. Sherman, a University of Maryland criminologist just appointed director of gun-crime policy in Indianapolis, where he will be the first "gun czar" of an American city.

By requiring that every gun buyer's criminal record be checked, the Brady law already has prevented thousands of felons from buying guns in stores, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) says.

But Dr. Sherman says the flood of new guns into circulation as a result of the heavy sales inevitably will mean more gun homicides, suicides and accidental deaths. This surge in sales, touched off by economic recovery and fear of crime as well as apprehension about future gun bans, appears to be substantial.

"People are buying handguns and ammunition like crazy," says David M. Guthrie, a security analyst who tracks gun manufacturers at Morgan Keegan & Co. in Memphis. "I've never seen this strength of demand in my 30 years watching this industry. There's almost a buying panic now."

At Clyde's Sports Shop in Arbutus, vice president Bill Blamberg says he can't remember sales this heavy since 1968, in the wake of the Baltimore riot and major federal gun legislation.

"Usually, we can get guns from distributors in two or three days," Mr. Blamberg says. "Now it's 30 to 60 days. Manufacturers cannot keep up."

'Better get one now'

Mr. Blamberg cheerfully gives credit for the run on guns at the shop he operates with his brother, Clyde, to the success of the gun controllers.

"The criminal has guns. The law-abiding citizen wants them, and he's not going to be outgunned. People say, 'Better get one now, before they make it illegal,' " he says.

"We have customers who say it never occurred to them to buy a firearm until they were told they might be prohibited from buying one," says Jay Harrell, general manager of Nicoll's Gun & Hunting Supplies in Parkville. In keeping with Mr. Harrell's belief in the right to bear arms, the shop is taking a new name: Second Amendment Services.

Mr. Harrell has had calls from fellow gun retailers in New Mexico, Wyoming and Washington state who are desperate for guns to stock. Now, the impending federal ban has spurred sales of assault weapons, he says, doubling the price of a Colt AR15 rifle to $1,400 in six months. Pistol owners are stocking up on high-capacity magazines in anticipation of the 10-round limit.

'Shoot to kill'

Cheryl Brolin, spokeswoman for Handgun Control, which lobbied for the Brady bill, says any boost in sales has resulted from an industry campaign of misinformation, a claim that "the gun grabbers are coming" to ban all handgun sales.

She also suggests that pro-gun forces are exaggerating the sales. "They want you to think you're the only unarmed citizen left in America," she says.

No reliable national handgun sales figures are compiled. But in Maryland, where everyone who buys a handgun from a dealer must complete an application, the boom is not just hype.

Handgun-purchase applications to the Maryland State Police climbed steadily last fall as debate on the Brady bill heated up, set a monthly record of 4,403 applications in December and have remained high. In the first three months of this year, the number of applications was 33 percent higher than in the same period of 1993, when a record was set, and nearly twice the 1991 level.

"It's phenomenal, but it's also nerve-racking," says Sanford M. Abrams, a partner in Valley Gun Shop in Parkville and head of the Maryland Licensed Firearms Dealers Association. "People who are not gun-literate are buying guns. It's akin to selling a rash of cars to people who've never driven before."

Some novice gun owners do invest in a basic firearms course. A recent Saturday morning class at Firearms Training Inc., a modest storefront operation on Harford Road in Hamilton, offered a sampling of new gun buyers, frightened and militant.

"Someone comes in -- I shoot to kill," says Denise, 28, a vocational rehabilitation counselor from Owings Mills who keeps her Taurus .38-caliber revolver in a drawer in her bedside table. She and her seven classmates asked to be identified by first names only, fearing that their last names in the newspaper might attract burglars.

Cheryl, 34, of Millersville first fired a gun at 10 when her grandmother took her deer hunting. "It was loud and hurt my shoulder and scared me to death," she says. "I swore I'd never pick up a gun again."

She broke her oath this year, persuaded by crime horror stories ** and the necessity to carry cash for her business. Now she's learning to shoot a $400 Smith & Wesson Ladysmith revolver.

Bernie, 45, of Pikesville, who has a bushy mustache and a small manufacturing business, bought his first handgun just as the Brady bill passed and his second, a .380-caliber, semiautomatic Beretta 84F, just before Maryland banned assault pistols.

Did gun control prompt him to do it?

"Absolutely," he says. "I don't know if you listen to [radio talk show host] G. Gordon Liddy. He's convinced that this is the first step to ban handguns."

'Like a BMW'

For Clyde's Sports Shop, the current situation offers the best of both worlds: The store doesn't sell the guns Maryland has banned, but fear of bans is boosting sales of everything else.

"We never did sell assault pistols," Mr. Blamberg says. What's selling are the ordinary handguns, especially "9mm semiautomatics -- Ruger, Taurus, Glock and Beretta," he says.

Indeed, Beretta U.S.A. is one of the beneficiaries of the handgun sales boom of the past months. The U.S. subsidiary of the longtime Italian gun maker Pietro Beretta, Beretta U.S.A. epitomizes the paradoxes of the gun industry and the gun control battle.

Gov. William Donald Schaefer, for instance, has fought tirelessly to ban assault weapons. But he has worked just as hard to support Beretta's Maryland operations: a plant in Accokeek, in Prince George's County, where 400 workers turn out more than 10,000 semiautomatic pistols a month, and a smaller factory in Pocomoke City, on the Eastern Shore, where 50 workers make pistol parts.

With the enthusiastic backing of the governor and of another gun control backer, Prince George's County Executive Parris N. Glendening, a candidate to succeed Mr. Schaefer, Beretta has received state economic development loans totaling more than $3 million.

The politicians welcome Beretta's jobs and payroll. They can point to the company's role as supplier of high-quality handguns to the U.S. military and to many police departments, including the Maryland State Police, as evidence of its good repute.

Beretta's elegant U.S. catalog pictures well-heeled hunters, soldiers storming a beach and uniformed police officers on an outdoor range, a marketing strategy plotted by Rosse & Associates, a Maryland public relations firm. In an office graced with a spectacular view of Hunt Valley, Claude D. Rosse begins an interview by showing off a handsome, engraved, $5,000 Beretta shotgun.

"Beretta doesn't make a cheap gun," Mr. Rosse says. "Beretta's product tends to be priced like a BMW compared to a Chevy."

It is a world light years away from drug-infested Baltimore street corners. But Beretta sells most of its production to civilians, where the big profits are, because military and police sales are at substantial discounts. Inevitably, many Berettas bought by civilians end up in the hands of criminals.

Nationally, according to ATF figures, of 55,208 guns involved in crimes that were traced during 1993, 1,627 were Berettas -- one in every 34. Last year, Beretta for the first time ranked among the top 10 manufacturers of guns used in crime nationally.

In Maryland, Berettas were 54 out of 1,256 crime guns, or one in 23 sold by Maryland dealers and traced between Sept. 1, 1992, and Sept. 1, 1993. By comparison, 16 of the 1,256, or one in 79 crime guns, were Intratec TEC-9s, the most widely used assault pistol.

It doesn't jam'

Berettas turn up regularly in the unceasing toll of drug-corner shootings and occasionally in more notorious crimes.

In 1991, when the leader of the "shotgun bandits" was arrested after taking hostages at a Towson credit union, he was armed with a Beretta. In 1992, when a 14-year-old Roland Park Middle School student shot a school police officer, he used a Beretta. Last year, when an 18-year-old robber shot a Baltimore police sergeant working a second job as a security guard at a Wendy's restaurant, he used a Beretta.

A 17-year-old Park Heights youth who wishes to be identified only as Reggie, jailed on shooting charges at the Baltimore City Detention Center, says the Beretta is his favorite brand of handgun. "They say it doesn't jam so much," says the youth, who says he bought a 9mm Beretta on the street for $370 in drug-dealing revenues.

Reggie says he keeps up with handgun lore by reading Guns & Ammo magazine. But, like most Beretta owners, law-abiding and otherwise, he was introduced to the gun at the movies, where Berettas co-starred in such serial adventure movies as "Die Hard" and "Lethal Weapon."

"Very realistic," he says of "Lethal Weapon." "You see the movie, and then you see the guns on the street, and you know it's realistic."

JTC The first "Lethal Weapon," which drew huge audiences in 1987, contained several scenes elaborately contrasting the traditional police weapon, a six-shot revolver, with the 16-shot Beretta. In a sequence that looks almost like a Beretta ad, an older officer played by Danny Glover uses his revolver to shoot a hole in the center of the target, a silhouette of a man's head. His younger, hipper partner, played by Mel Gibson, then uses his Beretta to "draw" a complete face with bullet holes: two eyes, a nose and a wide grin.

Beretta U.S.A. officials declined to speak to a reporter or to answer written questions submitted by The Sun.

Mr. Rosse says Beretta should not be held responsible for what is done with its products.

"I don't see how any manufacturer can be held liable for the illegal use of its product," he says. "Is it the automobile manufacturer's fault that some kid was drinking and lost control of the car and killed a couple of kids? No."

In the rocky history of gun control, many acclaimed victories have had mixed results or have fallen far short of what was promised. Maryland's gun-crime rate has risen steadily since 1988, despite the state's ban that year on the cheap handguns known as Saturday night specials, which was heralded as an important crime-fighting measure. In 1989, the federal ban on the importation of many assault rifles prompted a run on the weapons by putting them in the news, increasing sales of those that were not banned.

Some gun control advocates are quite aware of such ironies, even if they play them down for tactical reasons.

"The problem of people buying guns when gun control laws are discussed is one we've faced since we started," says Vincent DeMarco, executive director of Marylanders Against Handgun Abuse (MAHA). "Sure it's unfortunate. . . . What's happened is a national reaction to the gun lobby's lies about what the Brady bill did."

He said MAHA proposed a comprehensive package of gun legislation in this year's General Assembly session, of which the assault weapons ban was only an element. The original MAHA proposal also would have required a license for any handgun purchase, registration of the private sale of handguns, a maximum of two handgun purchases a year per buyer and other measures.

One of MAHA's proposals -- a limit of 10 rounds per magazine -- now may be pre-empted by the pending federal legislation. If given final approval by Congress, it would mark the first time the federal government had required a design change in mainstream handguns -- including the Beretta, whose most popular model has a 15-round magazine.

Such a measure, a shift of focus from "bad" Saturday night specials and assault guns to "good" handguns, would send a chill through the industry. But, for the moment, gun control continues to mean gun sales.

"You hear it every day," says Mr. Blamberg at Clyde's Sports Shop. "People look at the counter where we have our handguns and say, 'I'd better get one before they do away with them altogether.' "