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In 1997, the New Hampshire State Police signed a contract with Smith & Wesson to trade its 9 mms for .45s, a deal worth about $236,000, according to the state police. "It saved the taxpayers an enormous amount of money," says Sgt. Patrick Pouirier. The concern that the guns might fall into the wrong hands "is always there," he adds, "but Smith & Wesson is only going to sell them to a dealer, and the dealer is only going to sell them to a qualified person. And now we've got top-quality firearms so we can protect citizens of New Hampshire. And I guess it's good advertising [for Smith & Wesson] to have a state police agency carrying their weapons."

Like free Nike shoes for NCAA basketball teams.

In the last few months, the Charleston, W.Va., Police Department traded 175 or so Smith & Wesson service pistols for 200 Glocks. "We had to make a decision on what to do, ethically," says Maj. Pat Epperhart: "The other option was to destroy them. But without getting into the ethical arguments, we did it." Bottom line, says Epperhart. "If it had not been for the swap program we would not have been able to afford new weapons."

New Jersey's Bergen County Sheriff's Department and the Alaska State Troopers have also recently engaged in gun swaps. And according to a Glock document, the following law enforcement agencies are not only trading old law enforcement weapons but confiscated criminal weapons as well: Alabama State Troopers; the Mobile, Ala., and Biloxi, Miss., police departments; the Dayton and Lima police departments in Ohio; the Clayton County Sheriff's Department in Georgia; the Gary, Ind., Police Department; Virginia's Mecklenberg County Sheriff's Department; the Oklahoma City Police Department and Washington state's Yakima County Sheriff's Department.

One big difference between the above law enforcement agencies and those of New Orleans, Boston, Detroit and Alameda County: The former are, of course, not suing the gun industry for marketing an unsafe product; the latter group is.

The New Orleans gun swap has caused more problems than just a local embarrassment for Morial. In one instance, as the Times-Picayune reported in February, a 9 mm Beretta used in a January 1997 shootout had accidentally been traded to Glock through Kiesler, which was only able to recover the gun's barrel and slide.

What's more, Goyeneche says that the gun industry has an interesting strategy in the works in the event that any of the swapped firearms turn up at the scene of a crime.

"I've heard that the defendants are going to [name as a] third-party the city of New Orleans, so the city will be named as a defendant," Goyeneche says.

New Orleans suing New Orleans. It's easy to see a certain poetic justice in that.
salon.com | July 13, 1999

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