Maine gun-sale laws under fire

Associated Press by Gordon Chibroski

John Clough of Hancock, a retired private investigator, was dismayed to find he sold a gun to a convicted felon with a false idenity. The gun was traced after Boston police arrested a man and charged him with unlawful possession of a pistol.

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For the last five months, a 252-foot billboard near Fenway Park has been warning Boston motorists that Maine and its lax gun-control laws help supply local criminals with their weapons.

Even before the billboard went up, Boston officials had been pointing fingers north, saying that Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont must stop what they said had become a pipeline of illegal guns flowing into the city.

But what neither the huge sign beside the Massachusetts Turnpike nor city officials have revealed is exactly how many people buy guns in Maine to illegally resell in Massachusetts or to commit other crimes there.

No one can answer that question with certainty - and federal law makes it difficult to obtain these numbers. The best estimate comes from trace data on illegal guns made public by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts this spring.

These records show that 8 percent of the illegal guns confiscated in the Bay State in 2005 that could be traced were originally purchased in Maine. That makes Maine the second largest source for out-of-state crime guns coming into Massachusetts, just behind New Hampshire. But by far the largest share of illegal guns in Massachusetts, 37 percent, were traced back to gun dealers within the Bay State.

Like many statistics in the gun-control debate, these numbers are open to widely different interpretations. The top federal law-enforcement official in Maine said she believes the data undercuts any claims that guns from Maine are fueling a crime spree in Boston.

"That's a negligible number," said Paula Silsby, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maine. "When you go to the extent of putting up a billboard blaming crime in Boston on another state, I think the rhetoric has gotten a little heated."

The owner of the Boston billboard, however, said he sees no problem with shaming Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Georgia for their looser gun laws. John Rosenthal, who uses the billboard to promote the message of his gun-safety group, Stop Handgun Violence, points out that the majority of crime guns in Massachusetts come from out of state, and these states top the list.

"Maine's only part of the problem, but they are a part of the problem," Rosenthal said. "I'm hoping that Maine, when they realize what is going on, would try to be of help regardless of whether it's 7 percent or 5 percent or 15 percent."

Federal law already calls for purchasers to wait five days and undergo a criminal background check before buying a gun from licensed firearms dealers.

State law in Massachusetts goes further, requiring private purchasers to pass the same background check. Maine and 31 other states, including New Hampshire and Vermont, do not. Rosenthal said his goal is for every state to put in place the same criminal background checks required for all firearm sales in Massachusetts.

In Maine, private sales of guns occur mostly through classified advertisements and at gun shows. Sellers do not file paperwork with the state, as they do in Massachusetts. They are only required to ask potential buyers for proof of Maine residency, which Rosenthal contends makes it easy for criminals to exploit the system and difficult to trace a gun's origins. The real share of illegal guns coming to Massachusetts from Maine and elswhere may be larger than the ATF numbers reflect, he contends, because there is not much of a paper trail to help track firearms coming from states with lenient gun laws.

Whatever the source, many say a surge in illegal guns is having bloody consequences on the streets of Boston. The city's homicide rate hit a 10-year high in 2005 with 75 killings. There were 48 homicides in Boston this year through the end of July, ahead of last year's pace, according to Boston police.

"Urban kids are dying at an incredible rate due to easy access to guns," Rosenthal said.

But as far as the leader of one of the most powerful voices in Maine's gun-control debate is concerned, Massachusetts gun laws haven't prevented criminals from obtaining guns in Massachusetts, and they are certainly no model for Maine.

George Smith is president of the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine, a group with 14,000 members, 500 of whom are from Massachusetts. Smith said he believes criminals will always subvert background checks by stealing weapons or finding other people to buy guns for them. If the laws worked, he said, criminals in Massachusetts wouldn't be finding nearly 40 percent of their guns at home.

"I don't think Massachusetts' very restrictive laws are very successful," he said.

Smith said Massachusetts officials would do better to focus on cracking down on local criminals rather than calling for neighboring states to revise their gun laws. "They're obviously blaming us," he said. "There's no justification for punishing Maine citizens because people in Massachusetts are behaving badly."

But data from other states suggest that Massachusetts criminals do find it more difficult to obtain guns within their state than do their counterparts in most other states.

Using ATF trace data from 2000, when these numbers were still publicly available, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C., tracked the percentage of guns in 50 U.S. cities that were used in crimes and purchased in-state. On average, 68 percent of these guns came from in-state. By contrast, 32 percent of criminals' guns in Boston in 2005 were traced back to a Massachusetts dealer, slightly less than the statewide figure of 37 percent.

"Strong state gun laws tend to deprive criminals of local sources of crime guns, requiring them to exploit out-of-state sources," according to the Brady Center report published last year. "Seen another way, however, the pattern also indicates that the strong gun laws of some states are undercut by the weak gun laws of other states."

Brady Center spokesman Peter Hamm said gun trafficking like that between Maine and Massachusetts occurs in many places around the country where criminals can easily travel from an urban area with tight gun laws to a nearby rural state with fewer restrictions on gun sales.

"It's a day trip," he said. "If you have weak gun laws, you do get on the A-list of gun traffickers as a source state for crime guns."

At least one Maine gun owner who inadvertently sold a gun to a Massachusetts felon said he favors tighter gun laws in Maine.

Four years ago, John Clough, a retired private investigator from Hancock, decided to sell the .45-caliber semiautomatic Glock pistol he had used on the job and took out an ad in the weekly classified bulletin, Uncle Henry's.

Within a week, Clough was sitting at his kitchen table with a man who called himself Michael Smith who wanted to buy the gun. Clough, a former Ellsworth police officer, said he noticed that Smith's truck had Massachusetts plates and told him he could not make the sale.

Smith said he used the truck for work and produced a Maine driver's license with a Springvale address. Clough's wife, Carolyn, drew up the bill of sale, which included two and a half boxes of ammunition and a black shoulder holster along with the pistol. The date was Dec. 8, 2002.

In the 10 or so minutes he was in their home, there was nothing to suggest that Smith, whose real name is Michael Fowler, was a convicted felon with a record of gun trafficking between Maine and Massachusetts, Carolyn Clough said.

Five weeks later, Boston police arrested a man in Roxbury for unlawful possession of a pistol - the same gun Clough had sold, as it later turned out, with an obliterated serial number.

In May, Fowler pleaded guilty on charges related to illegally buying 24 guns, 18 in Maine and six in New Hampshire, over a three-year period. Police have yet to recover more than half these guns.

When police searched Fowler's apartment in Lynn, Mass., in 2004, they found 14 serial-number plates removed from handguns, including one that was originally attached to Clough's gun, according to court documents. They also found more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition and driver's licenses in the name of Michael Smith from Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts. Fowler told police he took orders for handguns and made about $200 in profit per sale.

Clough, who learned of what happened when he was contacted by an ATF agent about five months after the sale, said the experience had shaken his sense of security. He has installed floodlights around his house and now sleeps with two loaded guns under his bed. If he were ever to sell a gun again, he said, he would do it through a licensed dealer who would conduct the required background check.

If complaints from Massachusetts do spur any changes to Maine's gun laws, these changes would have to occur through the Legislature. But this group traditionally shows "a strong respect for the Second Amendment," according to Smith of the Sportsman's Alliance, who said he's not worried about state-mandated background checks coming out of Augusta.

Even under existing gun laws, though, Silsby, the U.S. attorney in Maine, said more can be done to prevent illegal gun trafficking.

Starting this fall, Silsby's office will start a public education campaign to help sellers avoid placing a gun in the wrong hands. The effort will focus on trying to make people consider the potential danger of private gun sales.

"The last thing most Maine gun owners want is to have their gun end up at a crime scene," she said.

The campaign will ask gun sellers to question potential buyers to determine their residency and background, Silsby said. Anyone uncomfortable with that sort of conversation will be encouraged to sell their gun through a licensed dealer, who must do a background check by law. For many people, Silsby said, this is the safest option.

"There is nothing illegal in the state of Maine in selling guns privately," she said. "But if they do so and they sell a gun to a stranger, there is an inherent risk in that."

Rosenthal, the gun-safety advocate, said he would be pleased if his billboard on the Massachusetts Turnpike helps some Maine legislators decide that risk is too great.

"We're hoping people in Maine take some responsibility for an extremely irresponsible public policy," he said. "I'm hoping that billboard begins a dialogue."

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