(2007-6-1) Sandy Abrams, a highly-visible member of the state firearm community and long-time firearms dealer, was arrested on 19 April on a number of gun charges following a police investigation. He has posted bond and is scheduled to be in court in Baltimore County early in June. Possible fallout from his case could affect us all.
The story starts well over a year ago. Abrams owns and operates Valley Gun Shop in Parkville, and over the years his business has drawn attention from the ATF because of what the agency says are excessive administrative and inventory errors. The business was repeatedly warned to clean up its act, but according to ATF, the problems continued, and ultimately this led to Abrams' firearms dealers license being revoked.
Abrams has previously characterized the violations as inadvertent errors in paperwork, by which nobody was ever harmed, and suggests that he was targeted because of his ties with the NRA. (Certainly his service as an NRA board member factored into the Brady organization's decision to name Valley Gun its poster child for why more laws are needed.) Abrams aggressively appealed the license revocation, but in October 2006 lost his appeal in U.S. Circuit court, where one of the judges wrote: “… at some point, when such errors continue or even increase in the face of repeated warnings given by enforcement officials, accompanied by explanations of the severity of the failures, one may infer as a matter of law that the licensee simply does not care about the legal requirements.”
As alleged by police, it was last summer, while his license was revoked, that Abrams sold a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle to a customer named Keith Showalter. This apparently came to light after a February 18 shootout between Showalter and Baltimore County Police, an encounter in which Showalter was killed. The weapon Showalter used was traced by police to Abrams. This led to his arrest in April, when he was charged with, among other things, unlawful transfer of a regulated firearm and possession of a machine gun for aggressive purpose.
Analysis: Gun grabbers haven't missed the fact that during the recent legislative session, Abrams was testifying against the assault weapon ban as a spokesman for our community at the very time police were investigating how one of his firearms – a semi-auto AR-15 that gun-grabbers want to tag as an ‘assault weapon' – had ended up in the hands of a person disabled for gun ownership, and as such fired at police. We're going to hear about that.
Of more specific concern, the case may raise a question of what constitutes an exception for AR-15 rifles being a ‘regulated firearm' in Maryland. State law exempts the Colt “HBAR” (heavy barrel); sources generally familiar with Abrams' case suggest one of the ways someone might defend part of the charges is to beg a question of what actually qualifies as the HBAR exception. Many dealers and customers follow a common sense interpretation of that exclusion, which could be wiped out if a ruling results in case law which favors a gun-grabbing definition.