industry had not been able to make “personalized” guns work reliably. Tiny electronic circuitry tended to malfunction when placed in proximity to gunfire. “I don’t know what they can mandate that we can put on guns,” Jannuzzo told ABC. “The greatest fallacy with Mayor Morial’s suit is that [electronic smart-gun technology] simply doesn’t exist.”
In the most memorable public airing of the municipal litigation, Jannuzzo faced off against Morial on NBC’s
Jannuzzo, cast as the corporate heavy, had come prepared. He turned toward Morial and said: “You have to put the suit in an incredible context. The City of New Orleans is the biggest distributor of used guns in the state of Louisiana.”
Morial looked stricken. He recognized where Jannuzzo was headed. In an attempt to save money, New Orleans had quietly done business with Glock in a way that had put thousands of handguns on the street. Ten months before suing firearm manufacturers for gross negligence, New Orleans had agreed to give Glock 7,200 old service pistols and confiscated weapons in exchange for 1,700 new Austrian .40-caliber handguns. This was one of dozens of such trades Glock had made with police departments around the country.
“I only approved that deal on the condition that none of the guns were sold in Louisiana,” Morial said. New Orleans, in other words, had done exactly what it accused the industry of doing: sought financial benefit from dumping guns indiscriminately on the street. On top of that, Morial had tried to foist the weapons on other communities, as if that would absolve him of any connection to subsequent misuse of the older guns.
Jannuzzo succeeded in upending the televised morality play, exposing his foe’s blatant double standard. The details that came to light after the
Morial’s attempt to keep the used guns out of his backyard proved feckless. Two months after the exchange, a New Orleans pawnshop ran a newspaper advertisement for Beretta nine-millimeter pistols that were part of the Glock deal: “Own a piece of New Orleans history,” the ad said. “Guns formerly belonged to members of the police department. All are stamped NOPD and come equipped with two 15-round ‘pre-ban’ clips.”
“The people of the city were under the impression they were doing away with these guns,” said Linda McDonald, head of the New Orleans chapter of the nonprofit Parents of Murdered Children. “There’s no assurance these guns will not come back here, and even if they don’t, they will be used to kill people in other areas.”
Nationally, the BATF had already noticed thousands of former police weapons among crime-scene guns that it traced. In 1998 alone, the federal agency identified at least 1,100 former police guns among the 193,000 traces it conducted. In one case in August 1999, neo-Nazi Buford Furrow used a compact Glock 26 pistol in a shooting rampage at a Los Angeles Jewish community center. He injured five people at the center and then killed a mailman of Filipino descent. The Glock 26 had been exchanged for a new, larger Glock by the police department of Cosmopolis, Washington. The compact pistol changed hands a couple of times and turned up at a retail gun show before Buford acquired it.
By aggressively fostering gun exchanges, Glock, in effect, had set a trap for municipalities, implicating them in the mass redistribution of firearms and muddying the waters over responsibility for the profusion of guns on urban streets. The gun company had not planned its marketing strategy as a legal defense, but that is how it worked out. And it was not just New Orleans and tiny Cosmopolis that were tarnished. Jannuzzo’s
Beyond the cloud of doubt created by municipal gun exchanges, the city and county lawsuits quickly ran into technical legal hurdles. By early 2000, thirty local governments had jumped on the litigation bandwagon. But in some jurisdictions, judges rejected what they saw as an inappropriate effort to shift the gun-control debate from the legislative arena to the judicial. Dismissing a suit filed by the city of Cincinnati, an Ohio judge in October 1999 called the litigation “an improper attempt to have this court substitute its judgment for that of the legislature, something this court is neither inclined nor empowered to do. Only the legislature has the power to engage in the type of regulation which is being sought by the city here.” In Louisiana and other states, lawmakers passed statutes blocking the courts from entertaining municipal suits against the gun industry: in essence, shielding gun makers from this type of legal threat.
As their suits hit obstacles, lawyers for some cities privately communicated to Jannuzzo and other industry executives that they would be willing to drop the litigation, with no damages paid, if gun makers would agree to a list of concessions. These ranged from limiting customers to buying a maximum of one gun per month—a deterrent to illegal trafficking—to spending a small portion of revenue to develop high-tech smart guns.
In tactical terms, the settlement overtures communicated weakness and uncertainty on the part of the municipalities. The NRA sensed this lack of resolve and pressured gun companies not to give ground. The moderation exemplified by the industry’s visit to the Rose Garden in 1997 eroded. Feldman, the advocate of compromise, lost the support of major companies other than Glock. With the NRA’s encouragement, the industry summarily fired him in early 1999 from his job as executive director of the ASSC. Soon thereafter, his conciliatory trade group was abolished. Jannuzzo lacked the muscle to protect his friend; he tried to mitigate the dismissal by quietly hiring Feldman to do consulting work for Glock. Most other gun makers migrated back to the NRA fold, unwilling to risk the ire of the lobbying group, in no small part because of its ability to influence consumer attitudes toward their products.
The Clinton administration tried to salvage the stalling anti-gun litigation by threatening in December 1999 to organize a class-action suit to be brought on behalf of more than three thousand federally subsidized public housing authorities across the country. Andrew Cuomo, Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development, said he would lead this audacious litigation unless gun makers came to the negotiating table. Cuomo tried to force the manufacturers to talk by simultaneously forming a coalition of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies that vowed to buy guns only from companies that signed a code of conduct restricting manufacturing and marketing practices.
Jannuzzo reacted nimbly to the administration’s intimidation. He jabbed and feinted, coordinating courtroom efforts to get the municipal suits dismissed while quietly talking to emissaries from the cities and Washington. Glock and Smith & Wesson, more than other manufacturers, depended on the patronage of government customers buying their handguns. Both Glock and S&W also had foreign owners hesitant to antagonize the White House. Tomkins, the British conglomerate that had acquired Smith & Wesson in 1987, was particularly keen to resolve the liability issues because it wanted to sell the struggling Massachusetts-based company. Jannuzzo suspected that S&W’s American CEO, Ed Shultz, might try to cut a deal with the Clinton administration in exchange for government contracts. Keeping an eye on Shultz, Jannuzzo attended a number of secret settlement talks with administration lawyers in Washington, including sessions held in an unoccupied wing of the United States Mint.
As a legal-affairs reporter at the
The covert negotiations culminated on March 17, 2000, when Smith & Wesson’s Shultz met with Cuomo in a Hartford, Connecticut, hotel room to sign a twenty-five-page agreement. Smith & Wesson would obtain immunity from government suits at all levels, in exchange for agreeing to a long list of restrictions, well beyond what the law mandated. The company committed to designing all of its guns so that small children could not
