June 3, 2000

HANDGUN COMMON ON STREET

By STEVE FRIESS
Staff Writer

A 13-year-old honor student named Nathaniel Brazill Jr.

A teacher, Barry Grunow.

A Raven Arms pistol.

As Americans reel from yet another slaying at a U.S. public school, South Florida is left in disbelief over the bloodshed so close to home, over the improbability of such a smart, engaging teenager going bad.

But one part of this drama is no shock at all: That police say a Raven was used to kill Grunow.

"Anyone in law enforcement, if they heard that the crime gun was a Raven, would not be surprised because they en

counter that kind of firearm routinely on the street," said Dale Armstrong of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. "The reality is, these little .22-, .25-caliber handguns are the most frequently used handguns in the country. And the Raven has been the most popular one of its type."

A recent study by the ATF showed the Raven is especially popular among Miami's juvenile offenders. Between August 1997 and July 1998, it was one of the two gun models most often used or suspected in crimes among youths 17 and younger, the ATF said.

Yet it's a gun that hasn't been minted since 1991, when its factory burned down.

The .25-caliber Raven involved in the Grunow death took an unclear cross-country trek from the Los Angeles-area gun factory where it was made in 1990 to a Palm Beach County evidence room where it resides today in a plastic bag.

Lake Worth police have refused to release a week-old report on the gun's history until State Attorney Barry Krischer decides whether charges are warranted against Elmore McCray, the 75-year-old grandfather-figure to Brazill who owned the gun.

Police sources said Friday it was purchased at the Hypoluxo Pawn Shop in Lantana, but not by McCray.

Police have said the boy grabbed the unloaded gun and ammunition from McCray's drawer days before the shooting, then shot Grunow on May 26 in a fit of rage after being sent home for playing with water balloons.

Police wouldn't explain how the pistol migrated from the manufacturer to the pawnshop or from the buyer to McCray. Armstrong did say that no federal violations occurred in that journey. A man who answered the phone at the pawnshop on Friday declined to comment.

The facts, scant as they are, fit neatly with the Raven profile.

Raven Arms opened for business in the late 1960s, after Congress, galvanized by the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy, banned the import of handguns unsuited for sporting use. Sensing opportunity, George Jennings left the aerospace industry to make domestic versions of the banned guns.

Over the years, a crop of companies, dubbed the Ring of Fire, sprang up around the southeast rim of Los Angeles, all run by Jennings' relatives or friends. The firms specialize in cheap, small handguns that retail for $60 or less -- Saturday Night Specials, so-called because they're often used, experts say, for weekend crime jaunts.

In 1992, according to ATF, the Ring of Fire companies collectively made 685,934 handguns, 34 percent of all the handguns made in the United States that year. In 1994, seven Ring of Fire gun models made the Department of Justice's list of the top 10 guns most frequently traced to crimes.

A Raven, like the chrome model used to shoot Grunow, weighs just a few ounces even when fully loaded. About five inches long, it makes a barely discernable bulge in the front pocket of a pair of jeans.

Some gun dealers refuse to deal in Ravens and their kind, partly because the profit margins on cheap weapons is small, partly because criminals are attracted to the low-priced, easily concealed handguns.

"The kind of clientele that it draws into the store is the kind we don't want to deal with," said Mike Caruso, owner of the Delray Shooting Center in Delray Beach and Palm Beach Shooting Center in Lake Worth. "That's why they pop up so often in pawnshops. We prefer to deal to avid shooters and sportsmen and people who are interested in learning how to properly handle their weapons, not people who want to put a $50 gun in their pocket and go hold up a liquor store."

A number of states have tried to regulate such handguns. Hawaii and Illinois bar the manufacture and sale of guns cast in a zinc alloy that melts or deforms at a temperature lower than 800 degrees, a measure of cheap materials. In Maryland, a panel called the Handgun Roster Board bans any guns that fail to meet a wide range of criteria from quality of materials to ballistic accuracy.

"What we have to remember about guns and murder is that most murders occur because somebody got angry," said George Akerloff, a scholar with the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think-tank. "And if guns weren't available at the time, those murders would not have taken place."

In Florida, the Republican-ruled Legislature avoided gun-control matters altogether during its recently completed session. Several bills related to gun safety were never brought up for committee hearings, a fact that led an infuriated state Sen. Betty Holzendorf, D-Jacksonville, to declare in a floor speech in early May that legislators would be responsible for future gun deaths.

But even Holzendorf, the Senate's most strident proponent of gun laws, isn't interested in attacking particular types of guns like the Raven.

"That's not my concern, the outlawing of guns," Holzendorf said. "If we start trying to take guns from people who legitimately have them, we run into some problems. But I do think we need to put trigger locks on them to make them safe, because this child wouldn't have been able to fire it if it had a trigger lock on it."

Dealers like Caruso are frustrated by the proliferation of the cheap, small handguns, but aren't so keen on government laws banning them or mandating trigger locks.

Still, Caruso worries that publicity surrounding shootings like the one in Lake Worth will hurt his industry.

"That middle school is less than a half-mile away from my [Lake Worth] gun store, where I sell 30 different devices that could secure firearms for less than $15," Caruso said. "But we're going to lose our Second Amendment rights [to bear arms] and I'm going to lose my business because people are too ignorant, too lazy or too cheap to be responsible."

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