With little fanfare, the federal government has substantially increased the number of licenses it has taken away from gun dealers over the past five years, according to newly obtained statistics.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives pulled federal firearms licenses from 22 gun dealers across the country in 2001. That number increased almost six-fold last year when ATF revoked 131 licenses, statistics show.
Despite the increase, license revocations remain exceedingly rare and the number pales in comparison with the roughly 105,000 people and businesses nationwide permitted to sell firearms and ammunition.
Advocates for stronger gun control seized on the figures obtained by The Sun from ATF, saying that an increase in license revocations is more than appropriate after years of poor regulation.
"It's out of control. There is no responsibility. There is no accountability. There is a problem in the neighborhoods in this country with the drastic proliferation of guns," said Joseph J. Vince Jr., former chief of ATF's firearms division, who now runs a private consulting company specializing in helping local law enforcement agencies track firearms. "The laws are so lax that there is almost no enforcement."
But the news alarmed gun rights advocates who are worried about new emphasis on "technical" paperwork errors that could shut down legitimate gun shops.
"There is a Damocles' sword that's hanging over dealers' heads," said Stephen Schneider, president of the Maryland License Firearms Dealers Association and owner of Atlantic Guns in Rockville. "We're a legitimate business, and yet they feel like they may not be in business the next year for record-keeping violations."
The debate still simmers in Washington, where the House of Representatives passed a bill last fall to revamp enforcement rules for gun dealers, establishing fines and suspensions based on the severity of violations, while still allowing licenses to be revoked under the most serious circumstances.
But the bill, which did not clear the Senate, would also allow for an extensive appeals process and, if a shop owner requests it, would prevent ATF from revoking a license while a case is being reviewed.
The issue took center stage in Maryland last year when ATF officials pulled the license of Sanford M. Abrams, an outspoken former firearms dealer in Baltimore County and former board member of the National Rifle Association.
The license revocation in the nearly decade-old Abrams case was based on more than 900 violations of record-keeping regulations designed to help police track guns used in crimes. Afterward, Abrams said he planned to sell his remaining 700-gun inventory on consignment to an independent shop next door in a building owned by his family.
Today, two other gun dealers in Maryland are fighting to keep their licenses in similar cases.
Starting in August, Bel Air Gun and Pawn in Fallston and the Gilbert Indoor Range in Rockville filed petitions in federal court in Baltimore asking a judge to restore their licenses to sell guns. The government has yet to respond in detail to the gun shops' petitions, and no hearing date has been set.
In the Bel Air case, ATF agents revoked the license of owner Charles D. Scheuerman on June 19.
They pointed to a series of record-keeping errors, including a lack of paperwork on 14 guns brought in for repairs and 57 guns bought for resale, according to court papers. The gun shop on Belair Road failed to keep proper records on 124 firearms, according to excerpts of an ATF report cited in court papers.
Court papers detail similar allegations against Gilbert's owner, American Arms International, accusing the gun shop of selling or disposing of 427 firearms without properly recording how. Its license was revoked in July.
By law, the ATF said last week, it could not provide copies of the license revocation reports on the two gun shops. Richard E. Gardiner, the shops' lawyer and a former staff attorney at the NRA, declined to provide copies.
But in court papers filed by Gardiner, the shops say that the violations were not willful and therefore the shops could not be held liable. Gardiner wrote that any problems were "technical record-keeping errors which were not intentional or deliberate."
The federal courts have generally been unreceptive to such arguments.
In the Abrams case in February, for example, U.S. District Judge William M. Nickerson in Baltimore ruled that while Abrams "may challenge the numerousness or seriousness of its violations of federal firearms law, [he] makes no credible argument that there were no violations."
"The undisputed fact is that because of [Valley Gun's] lapses, scores of firearms are unaccounted for, and therefore, untraceable," the judge ruled.
Gardiner, who is also Abrams' attorney, has asked the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., to review Nickerson's decision.
The attorney said ATF's new vigilance come from an unnecessary increase in manpower.
"You have 10 times as many people to use," Gardiner said.
Inspectors used to spend days to review a gun shop's books, but now spend weeks, if not months, poring over its operations, he said. "You have to keep them busy or someone is going to wonder why you need them all."
Gardiner added: "I think it's a huge waste of government resources, because all they're finding is paperwork problems."
ATF officials said the agency increased the number of firearms inspectors in 2003 by about 50 percent. After an intense focus on explosives dealers after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the agency has been spending more time examining gun dealer operations, according to Michael Fronczak, the area supervisor for industry operations for ATF in Maryland.
Although the number of inspectors has grown as the number of licensed gun dealers has fallen by almost two-thirds since 2000, federal agents still rarely inspect gun dealers. And even if the agency wanted to inspect them often, the law restricts them to no more than once a year, officials said.
"I mean, we inspect liquor stores more. And we're talking about guns," said Vince, the former ATF official. "In any other business, it would be different. Would we let pharmacies go without knowing exactly how much OxyContin they have in inventory?"
A report by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General found that ATF inspectors inspected 4,581 gun dealers, or 4.5 percent, in fiscal year 2002.
The report noted that it would take ATF 22 years at that rate to inspect all dealers. Within that group of dealers, inspectors found 134,832 violations of federal gun laws, but ATF revoked only 30 dealer licenses nationwide.
In Maryland, the ATF revoked eight of its 1,778 approved licenses since 2001, five in the past two years. The state has 10 federal inspectors to monitor 2,015 gun dealers.
Fronczak said the vast majority of gun dealers are legitimate.
"There are major dealers that we don't have a problem with," he said. "It's hard to understand why the [license holders] are not keeping or maintaining their records well."
Added Jeffrey Cohen, an ATF lawyer: "What we try to do is bring them into voluntary compliance. We're not in the business of putting people out of business."
Daniel R. Vice, staff attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, argued that the attention paid by ATF agents to paperwork violations is a legitimate pursuit for law enforcement.
"Without proper record-keeping, it easily could mask illegal sales or massive negligence," Vice said. "If a gun dealer is missing records, that is a serious violation."
He added, "It's good that ATF is enforcing the law, but we know it's a small number still compared to the number we know are supplying the criminal market."
Citing earlier data, Vice said about 1 percent of the nation's gun shops provide the majority of firearms used in crimes.
matthew.dolan@baltsun.com