Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Just a fraction of Pennsylvania’s thousands of gun dealers — most of them in the greater Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas — represent the biggest source of firearms linked to crimes in the state, according to one of the nation’s most influential groups combating gun violence.
In a report released this year, the nonprofit group Brady pointed fingers, identifying stores it claims belong to the tiny subset of dealers contributing to the intractable problem of gun violence in the commonwealth, especially in its two largest cities.
Most gun dealers are responsible, law-abiding business owners, Brady said. “Only a small minority supply the criminal market with guns; about 5% of firearm dealers are responsible for about 90% of recovered crime guns,” according to Brady.
“By focusing on the small number of gun dealers now known to be contributing to the problem, Pennsylvanians and their leaders will be able to put political, legal and economic pressure on the irresponsible actors of the gun industry and bring about needed reforms to ensure that firearms are transferred responsibly and safely,” Brady said.
But some businesses named in the report, “Uncovering the Truth About Pennsylvania Crime Guns,” pushed back vigorously against Brady’s findings, questioning the group’s statistics, methodology and conclusions.
One of them is George Romanoff, co-owner of Ace Sporting Goods in South Strabane.
“Have we sold guns that were used in crimes? I’m sure we have. But those numbers are so minimal it’s absolutely crazy,” Romanoff said. “There probably are a few bad apples who are selling guns not by the law, and they should have their licenses pulled and be prosecuted. But it looks like these guys are trying to pin it on legitimate dealers.”
Also urging caution in interpreting the raw data: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ top agent in Pittsburgh.
Louis Weiers, the resident agent in charge of the ATF’s Pittsburgh field office, has not read the report. But he warned that determining whether a gun dealer is doing something wrong can be a complex problem, one that requires sifting through more information and data than a few blunt statistics, such as how many crime guns are traced to a business.
Context, he said, is critical.
“Statistics can be misleading,” Weiers said. “Merely to run numbers and say there’s 100 dealers in Allegheny County, and these two are leading (in a particular category), you have to ask, ‘Why?’ ”
Mentioned in some of the report’s unflattering findings are gun shops spread throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania, in places like Pittsburgh, Connellsville, McKeesport, Ross, Butler and Penn Hills.
Two of the biggest purveyors that eventually ended up connected to crimes were Anthony Arms in West Mifflin and Braverman Arms in Wilkinsburg.
According to the report, investigators seeking the origin of guns recovered by police in Pittsburgh traced more than 1,400 firearms each to Anthony Arms and Braverman.
Both dealers are now closed. For years, Braverman had a notorious reputation: The store sold guns to Richard Poplawski, who shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in 2009, and Ronald Taylor, who shot five people in 2000.
Track + Trace
To reach its conclusions, Brady mined a treasure trove of firearms data compiled by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office.
The information, known as trace data, enables investigators to use the make, model, caliber and serial numbers of guns recovered by law enforcement to pinpoint their origins. Invariably, these traces lead to gun dealers. The question then becomes when — and how — did a gun get diverted into the illegal marketplace.
Federal legal restrictions on trace data bar the ATF from disseminating that information.
So Brady turned to a cache of raw data shared by Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies that was made public by Shapiro: 186,000 trace records from 1977 to 2020.
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Shapiro launched the database in 2019 as one prong of his efforts to root out illegal firearms and curb gun violence.
“Our new Pennsylvania Track + Trace Initiative is designed to do just that by investigating how prohibited purchasers obtain firearms and strategically shutting down those pipelines,” Shapiro said at the time.
While the shared data did not identify the federally licensed gun dealers by name, it provided contact phone numbers.
Brady used the phone numbers to trace thousands of guns to individual dealers across the state. These weapons ended up being stolen, used in crimes or confiscated from someone charged with a crime.
The report focused on gun dealers in Pennsylvania — 4,318 in all (many no longer in business), accounting for nearly 92,000 traces.
About half of those traced guns were first sold by just 1% of the dealers, or just several dozen, according to Brady.
Leading the pack were firearms dealers in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, leading Brady to refer to a “home-grown crime gun problem.”
Almost 4 in 10 dealers had only one traced gun linked to them, Brady said.
The gun-control group — named after Ronald Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady, who was partially paralyzed in 1981 after being shot during an assassination attempt on the former president — hailed the information as “the most important gun trace dataset to be publicly available in decades.”
Brady noted that the data is limited. Many law enforcement agencies don’t share their gun tracing data with each other or the attorney general’s office. And the database doesn’t account for guns changing hands after being sold by the dealer.
But the group claims that by focusing on the supply side of gun violence — the manufacturers and dealers — it can create pressure on dealers to clean up shoddy practices and lax behavior.
‘Totally unfair’
Trace data is a flashpoint issue among pro-gun groups such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association, which warns of misuse.
“It is not appropriate to derive statistical conclusions from the database about firearms used in crime because the database is not a ‘random sample’ of guns used in crime,” according to the trade group.
“Gun control groups try to use these data to argue a trace is a signal that a law-abiding firearm retailer did something wrong if a firearm they legally sold after a background check ended up being traced for any reason. That is simply not the case.”
A handful of the state’s 3,000-plus federally licensed firearms dealers interviewed by the Tribune-Review agree. They believe that the way Brady interprets the data is flawed and draws unfair — and unwarranted — conclusions.
Ace Sporting Goods’ Romanoff said he doesn’t sell guns to gang-bangers and criminals, keeps meticulous records of his sales and is inspected by the ATF. He doesn’t agree with Brady’s interpretation of the data.
“What they infer is we’re selling guns to criminals, and that’s totally unfair and actually not true,” Romanoff said. “All this is just a bunch of baloney, as far as I’m concerned, to make somebody look bad.”
The report fingered his store as being the source of 416 of the 21,661 crime guns recovered in Pittsburgh in the database — one of only 11 dealers that Brady said were linked to more than 200 traces of Pittsburgh crime guns.
Romanoff disputed the findings.
“I think all those statistics are falsified, personally,” he said.
He said it’s not right to blame him if a gun that he sells legally is one day stolen and ends up in the hands of a criminal.
Romanoff also noted — correctly — that a firearm could be counted as a crime gun if it was confiscated from someone’s car pulled over by police for something unrelated, making the conclusions drawn from the data somewhat murky.
Indeed, the attorney general made clear that guns recovered during DUIs were entered into the database.
Lee Markl, president of Markl Supply Co. Inc. in Ross, deals almost exclusively with a law enforcement clientele. He has supplied thousands of guns over the years to the Pennsylvania State Police. And he said he’s done a high volume of business over decades.
Despite catering to police officers, Markl Supply appeared in the Brady report as being the source of 216 crime guns from Pittsburgh.
But that has to be taken in the context of volume of sales and longevity of business, Markl cautioned.
“They’re pointing at us just based on a number, which is not relevant unless it’s understood what it’s a part of and over what period of time the firearms have been distributed,” Markl said.
Markl does not believe he has any responsibility for guns that leave his store as part of a legitimate sale but end up being used in a crime. He rejected the notion of pinning blame on legitimate gun dealers.
“They’re pulling data out of context,” he said of Brady.
Time to crime
Bruce Piendl is one of the owners of Allegheny Arms & Gun Works in Bethel Park. Brady listed his store as one of 31 top dealers who sold guns in 2020 that ended up being used in crimes less than three years later.
Sometimes, Brady said, a short “time to crime” raises red flags.
“A high number of traces paired with a short average ‘time-to-crime’ rate — the period of time between a firearm’s first retail sale and law enforcement’s recovery of the firearm in connection with a crime — is a strong indicator that a gun dealer is supplying firearms to illegal gun traffickers,” the report said.
“According to the ATF, recovery of a gun that was first sold less than three years prior ‘signals direct diversion, by illegal firearms trafficking — for instance through straw purchases or off the books sales by corrupt (dealers).”
Brady does not accuse any of the dealers listed of being involved in corrupt activity.
“We are on the front lines. Every day, I turn people away,” Piendl said.
“When you do volume, you’re gonna have problems. Not everybody lives a clean life. I follow the paperwork process. I talk to the people. … It’s not a quick transaction where you walk in and go, ‘I want this gun.’ It’s a process. It’s not, ‘Hey, here you go. Fill out the paperwork.’ It doesn’t work that way.”
The Brady report said most dealers sell few or no crime guns, so “zeroing in on the dealers contributing to the crime gun problem allows for efficient and effective enforcement.”
Those dealers, Brady said, should warrant extra attention.
“Importantly,” the report said, “gun manufacturers must be pressured against supplying large crime gun dealers with firearms to transfer to the public.”
One Westmoreland County firearms dealer, Nathan Carey, said he is all for coming down hard on unscrupulous gun-store owners.
Carey, who runs Bullseye Firearms Gun Vault in New Alexandria, said dealers train their employees to spot problem customers and void sales if there is anything fishy. He doesn’t think it makes sense to blame by-the-books businesses for crime guns, especially if a firearm was stolen or changed hands after a sale. Carey also said the Brady analysis should take into account whether the businesses or their customers live in high-crime areas.
“If someone breaks into somebody’s house and steals a gun, that has nothing to do with the dealer. … How is that the dealer’s fault?” Carey asked. “That sounds like a Ford dealership selling a truck, and then yelling at the Ford dealership because that truck got into an accident.”
Weiers, the ATF supervisor, echoed that sentiment.
“We have to be very careful in demonizing interstate commerce,” Weiers said.
A gun store located near an urban center that sells lots of guns could well have more firearms end up at crime scenes than a rural dealer selling largely to sportsmen and hunters, even if both engage in legitimate sales, he said.
He also said that despite the best efforts of gun dealers, sometimes even purchases that appear to pass the smell test can go awry. Sometimes, he said, straw buyers don’t raise any red flags. And other times, someone without a rap sheet who buys a gun might turn to crime.
Brady’s general counsel, Joshua Scharff, dismissed the dealers’ arguments.
“These have been gun industry talking points for as long as there’s been a conversation about trace data,” Scharff said Monday. “I think those arguments are nibbling around the edges of the real issue: Gun dealer behavior matters — and matters most.”
ATF inspections
Another Brady effort, the Gun Store Transparency Project, also has swept up dealers in the region.
For years, the group has been assembling thousands of ATF inspection records obtained through Freedom of Information requests and litigation. The advocacy group makes them public.
There are 66 reports in Pennsylvania, about a dozen of which are in the southwestern part of the state.
In 2016, a surprise federal inspection unearthed nine violations at a Dravosburg gun dealer that had been flagged for scrutiny.
ATF had grown concerned over how many guns used in crimes shortly after purchase were being traced to Guns Priced Right.
The infractions, most dealing with errors on forms, raised questions about how well employees were able to detect the warning signs of straw purchases — buying firearms for someone barred from owning them — and gun trafficking.
With its practices under review, Guns Priced Right “made the immediate decision to cease selling Hi-Point Pistols, one of their most traced firearms,” the report said.
But that didn’t prevent other guns from showing up at crime scenes.
In a case study featured in the report, Brady said that in 2020, Guns Priced Right “likely” sold a gun — a .32-caliber Beretta — used three months later in a double shooting near Philadelphia that killed one of the victims.
While the convicted shooter was a man, Brady said a 22-year-old woman bought the firearm as part of a multi-gun purchase 94 days before investigators recovered it.
“Note that because of the very short time-to-crime, the purchase of multiple guns, and the fact that the purchaser was not the shooter, there is a high likelihood of the gun having been sold to a straw buyer,” Brady said.
David Tyler, the lead investigator of the homicide case for the Delaware County Criminal Investigation Division, confirmed the details in the Brady report. He said the ATF had contacted him in connection with the shooting as part of an investigation of a straw purchaser.
But beyond learning that the gun buyer and the shooter were from Pittsburgh, Tyler said he didn’t know whether they were linked.
“If this purchase was indeed a straw sale,” Brady concluded, “Guns Priced Right should have been prepared to identify any red flags presented by the buyer.”
Jim Lorenzi, manager of Guns Priced Right, said a new group took over the store at the beginning of the year, so he could not speak to what happened under the previous owners.
Jonathan D. Silver is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Jonathan at jsilver@triblive.com.