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Jannuzzo, after all, had been working with New Orleans, to help the city swap around 10,000 guns in its possession -- most of which had belonged to criminals -- in exchange for 1,700 new Glock .40-caliber pistols for its officers. The deal was worth $613,000.

Thus the city of New Orleans was dumping onto the street the same allegedly "unsafe" product that it was now suing Glock and several other companies -- including some New Orleans pawn shops -- for distributing.

Since last October, more than 20 U.S. cities and counties, copying the states that sued the tobacco industry and won, have filed lawsuits against gun dealers and manufacturers for various forms of negligence and irresponsibility. The NAACP joined the action on Monday.

One small glitch in the argument, however: Some of these cities and counties have been more than willing to engage in quiet deals with these same manufacturers to trade in their old police weapons -- and sometimes even confiscated criminal weapons -- for new guns for their officers.

In essence, these cities served as gun distributors themselves. In order to save a buck, they're dumping thousands of firearms, despite the fact that many of them are publicly trying to get guns off the street. New Orleans isn't the only city with the contradictory gun policy: Boston, Detroit and Alameda County, Calif., which includes the high-crime city of Oakland, have also sold confiscated guns while suing the industry. By contrast, the federal government, as well as cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, destroy criminals' guns.

"It's unfortunate because some of them are beautiful guns," says a spokesman for the LAPD, which eventually melts down all of its confiscated weapons. "But if a gun's been used to kill someone, they don't want it out there where it could kill someone else."

In the New Orleans swap -- which is believed to be the largest police trade-in of criminally used weapons -- Kiesler Police Supply and Ammunition in Jeffersonville, Ind., worked as the broker between New Orleans and Glock. The city traded 7,300 weapons seized in crimes as well as 700 Berettas that at one point belonged to New Orleans cops.

Included among the 7,300 criminals' guns that the city of New Orleans was willing to see dumped back out on the street: 230 semiautomatic assault weapons -- including TEC-9s, AK-47s, Cobray M11s, an Uzi and a Fabrique National, a self-loading military rifle. The manufacture and importation -- though not the sale -- of all of these weapons were banned by Congress in 1994.

Dennis Henigan, legal director of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, which is co-counsel for many of these lawsuits, says that the gun industry's outrage over this perceived hypocrisy is "part of an overall strategy to change the subject." [Full disclosure: I worked at the Center for six months in 1997.]

"Ever since we filed the case on Oct. 30 of last year," Henigan says, "the gun industry wants to talk about gun swap programs, they want to talk about how greedy trial lawyers are. What they don't want to talk about is how dangerous their products are. You'll notice: They're not defending their products."

But Henigan didn't defend the merits of the gun swaps themselves. Assuming that these products are unsafe and the companies should be held liable, which is what Henigan is arguing though lawsuits, cities that engage in gun swap programs would seem to have some liability as well.

So many cities have engaged in the practice that the International Association of Chiefs of Police was moved to pass a resolution last October condemning police gun swaps. "The re-circulation of these firearms back into the general population increases the availability of firearms which could be used again to kill or injure additional police officers and citizens," the IACP resolution read. It urged "all law enforcement agencies to adopt a mandatory destruction policy," like the federal government has.

But despite the IACP resolution, and federal law enforcement's example, police departments -- often short on cash for new weapons -- continue to cut financial corners by dancing with the very devil their friends at city hall are suing.

Next page | Boston's veil of deniability