Smyrna gun shop owner loses another round in legal fight with New York

By Rhonda Cook

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A Cobb County gun store owner has lost another -- and most likely the final -- round in a five-year-old legal fight that started when New York City sued Adventure Outdoors in Smyrna, seven other gun dealers in Georgia and many more in other states.

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Andy Sharp, 2008 photo, AJC Jay Wallace, owner of the Smyrna gun shop Adventure Outdoors, lost an appeal Wednesday he had filed after New York City sued him. The city sued gun retailers for supplying weapons that turned up in New York crime scenes. The city's lawsuit had targeted retailers in states like Georgia that have the least restrictive gun laws.

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Adventure Outdoors was the only business of the 27 stores Mayor Michael Bloomberg sued to get to a courtroom in the case New York City brought against businesses in states with less restrictive gun laws. The lawsuit said those businesses, because of the laws in their respective states, were supplying criminals in his town. The cases against three of the shops sued were dismissed, while the other owners either settled or defaulted.

In 2008, as a jury was being chosen for a trial against the only remaining defendant in the case, Adventure Outdoors, owner Jay Wallace also defaulted. Wallace said he expected a trial in a New York courtroom would be unfair and his legal team would be more successful with an appeal.

That appeal was lost Wednesday, and Wallace’s Smyrna business now must comply with monitoring. The federal appeals court in New York said, however, that the terms of the monitoring laid out when the trial was aborted three years ago were too broad and would have to be revised. In all the other cases, New York paid for a court-appointed monitor to oversee gun sale records for three years.

Wallace could not be reached for comment Wednesday night, so it was not known if he would try to take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Before bringing the suit in 2006, Bloomberg sent investigators to shops in several states -- including Georgia, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina -- to make “straw” gun purchases in which one person would appear to be buying a firearm for someone who was legally prohibited from having one.

Bloomberg said his office initiated the investigation because “rogue” gun dealers were responsible for firearms that had been recovered at crime scenes on New York streets.

Georgia has long been considered a “source state” for guns traded in other states because of less restrictive laws and access to interstates, especially I-95, which has been known as “the iron pipeline” because it is a route used to ship guns from the Southeast to northeastern states.

For the past two years, the anti-gun group the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence -- using data maintained by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- has ranked Georgia the No. 1 source state for firearms recovered at crime scenes in other areas of the country.