"When You Find Out, You Call Me Back" - An Update on Brian Borgelt

Here's a really interesting article on Brian Borgelt, former owner of Tacoma's Bull's Eye Shooter Supply from which the Bushmaster XM-15 used by Muhammed and Malvo in the D.C. Sniper shootings was stolen. I've ragged on Borgelt a bit myself, and I have to blame some of that on the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" - the tendency to believe the news media even when you know they get it wrong almost every time. But hey, they're pretty much all we have to work with, so what can you do?

It's a long piece, so I'm not going to copy the whole thing, but here's a few highlights:

Brian Borgelt never killed anyone.

He sold guns for more than a decade, but he rarely carries one. He was a soldier who taught marksmanship to thousands of other soldiers, but he’s never fired a gun at another human being.

In summer 2002, a boy and a man robbed him – took a rifle from the store he owned, and killed at least 10 people they didn’t know, just because they could. Because of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the Beltway snipers, Borgelt, 40, is a man without a career – a casualty of America’s endless culture war over firearms.

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In 2003, families of the sniper victims sued Borgelt and Bushmaster Firearms, manufacturer of the weapon used in the killings. In September of this year, Borgelt agreed to a $2 million settlement.

After the settlement hit the news, a few friends in the gun industry called and asked why he’d caved in to the anti-gun lobby. The question set him seething.

“Where have you been?” he replied. “I’ve been the damn Alamo here for two years!”
How many guns from his store remain unaccounted for following multiple audits by federal firearms officials?

Borgelt says he can’t be sure. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have all his records.

The numbers jumped around wildly during the frenzy of media coverage that followed the sniper arrests in October 2002. The rumors said 340 guns were missing, then 262, then 238, then 160 and finally 78 – a number cited by the ATF.

He thinks the real number has dropped, down to two dozen or so. Stray records still pop up, and the ATF continues to trace them. An ATF spokeswoman could not provide an exact figure to The News Tribune, and said it would require consulting databases in Washington, D.C.

Borgelt believes some of the guns will never turn up. There were thefts – some by employees. People he hired to handle sales records made mistakes. He mentions that, and even as he says it, senses the rejoinder.

"I’ve been accused from the beginning of this thing of blaming other people,” he says. “This was my company, my license. I take responsibility – but one man can’t do it all. Was there something wrong with my leadership? Perhaps. I can what-if that to death.”

The day after the lawsuit settlement, he got a call from a reporter in the Czech Republic. The reporter couldn’t understand why, in America, Borgelt and the gun manufacturer would pay for the actions of other people.

"When you find out, you call me back,” Borgelt said.

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“Did I sell guns out of here without paperwork?” he asks, his voice rising. “For personal gain? No. You bring one SOB in here who can prove that. However, did I have employees stealing guns out of here? Yes. Was I getting ripped off by people I trusted and paid in here? You bet I was.”

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More news stories appeared, noting a domestic violence restraining order on Muhammad’s record should have prevented him from buying a gun, and that Malvo was an illegal immigrant. Laws should have stopped a sale. The shop had a history of spotty inspections and missing records. Was the rifle stolen, or sold illegally by a renegade employee?

The question nagged Borgelt. It still nags him two years later – and he knows what skeptics think: Stolen? Come on – how do you walk out of a gun shop carrying a 3-foot displayed accessorized semi-automatic rifle without anyone noticing?

“How does someone walk in and steal ‘The Scream’?” he asks, citing the recent theft of a famous painting from a European museum. “Tell me one thing in this town that can’t be stolen.”

The shop was a busy place – between 1997 and 2002, Bull’s Eye sold roughly 25,000 guns.

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His name and store began to show up in other stories, in a repeated refrain of guilt by association.

One story pointed out that Buford Furrow, a white supremacist from Olympia who killed a postal worker and wounded five people at a Jewish community center in California in 1999, bought a gun from Bull’s Eye. The sale was legal, and Furrow didn’t used the gun to commit his crime, but there it was.

Another story reported that one of the men involved in the 1998 Trang Dai killings in East Tacoma bought a gun from Bull’s Eye. The sale was legal; the gun hadn’t been used in the killings. But there was that link again: bad guy plus Brian Borgelt.

In March 2003, a New York architectural magazine published a story about Tacoma’s downtown renaissance, and mentioned someone taking a potshot at the city’s Bridge of Glass. The article called the shooter a “sniper,” and suggested he might have been firing from around “the nearby Bull’s Eye gun shop, source of the weapon used in the D.C. sniper killings,” though no evidence supported the assertion.
Borgelt became a national footnote, his name forever tied to a pair of spree killers he never knew – the man who armed the snipers.

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In April 2003, The Brady Center – a national gun-control group that financed the lawsuit against Borgelt and Bushmaster – issued a news release describing him in capital letters as “One of the Worst Gun Dealers in America.”

On cluttered bulletin boards near Borgelt’s second-floor office above Bull’s Eye, he sometimes posts articles on gun rights issues – pointed editorials, stories of self-defense. Scattered among them are political cartoons. One shows a judge with a TV camera for a head, staring down at a hapless defendant.

"You’ve been found guilty by the media,” camera-head says. “How do you plead?”

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Borgelt is a strong Second Amendment supporter – an advocate of gun rights, a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association. Part of him figured that powerful lobby and other gun-rights advocates would rush to his aid – if not with help for his legal fees, at least with a little moral support in the public glare.

"Hell, yes,” he says. “I thought we had a fraternity that would protect each other.”

It didn’t happen. For once, the gun lobby was gun-shy.

Some of its leaders say Borgelt never asked for help, though his lawyer, Frush, bluntly says, “The NRA wouldn’t touch us.”

Others say news reports detailing Borgelt’s sloppy record-keeping scared his natural defenders away: He gave the anti-gun crowd too much ammo.

Guilty as charged. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

(Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms) remembers talking to gun-rights advocates who thought Borgelt was getting a raw deal for being robbed, but feared another black eye for the gun industry. He says he heard similar comments from acquaintances at the ATF, who talked to him off the record.

“It made them look bad,” he says. “It made ATF look bad – ATF was under a lot of pressure, too.”

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Inspectors looking for a grand total of missing weapons combined the results of four inspections over a five-year span, without mentioning that some were later accounted for, and that inspection results hopscotched from bad to good, bad to good.

A 1997 ATF audit praised Borgelt’s record-keeping. A 2000 audit criticized it, prompting a rare “warning conference.” A 2001 audit found no “repeat violations,” and noted improvements in the shop’s record-keeping.

(Borgelt’s attorney, Jim) Frush showed that some violations reflected an order by the ATF to use a new recording system that agency officials later admitted was the wrong method. That, he said, contributed to violations found in the 2002 audit, conducted after the sniper arrests.

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The defense was a partial success. The ATF revoked Borgelt’s license for record-keeping violations. But last month, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that it would not pursue criminal charges on gun violations.

“The inspections identifying the possibility that guns were stolen or missing are very troubling to the government,” U.S. Attorney John McKay said in a news release. “But after careful review of ATF records going back to 1997, we have concluded Borgelt’s conduct did not reach the standard necessary for a successful criminal prosecution.”

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(Borgelt) remembers catching shoplifters in the store he used to own and turning them over to police, only to watch the thieves walk away from prosecution.

It nettles him that he faces symbolic blame for the homicidal actions of two men who robbed him while another man, Earl Lee Dancy, so far goes unpunished.

In court testimony, Dancy, a Tacoma resident, admitted buying one gun for Muhammad illegally and lending him another that was used to kill Keenya Cook, a 21-year-old Tacoma woman, in February 2002 – eight months before the sniper shootings began.

Dancy did a straw-purchase of a Remington 700 .308 caliber rifle - one that would have almost certainly resulted in the deaths of every victim of the attacks. I wrote about that back in January. And he hasn't been convicted or sentenced for this yet?

Anyway, read the whole thing. Especially the conclusion.

My sincerest apologies, Mr. Borgelt. And my best wishes for your future.