IT HAS BECOME THE QUICKEST WAY TO FAME IN AMERICA'S GUN culture. And one morning in May 1992 it happened to Louis Katona III, a Bucyrus, Ohio, real estate salesman and part-time police officer. He got to tell all about it when the National Rifle Association flew him to its annual meeting in Phoenix last spring--how agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the "jackbooted fascists" of N.R.A. lore, had raided his home and seized his machine-gun collection. At the time, he estimated the guns' value at about $300,000 and kept them locked inside a walk-in vault in his basement, expecting them one day to pay for the college educations of his son and his second child, whose birth he expected in seven months. One version of what happened next appeared in a recent full-page N.R.A. advertisement: "When shouting and cursing ATF agents rushed into his home to seize his firearms collection, they grabbed his pregnant wife Kim and shoved her into a wall. Within days she suffered a miscarriage." The Katona episode is one of the most vivid horror stories the N.R.A. has been telling lately in its campaign to pillory the ATF. In a lawsuit now pending in Cleveland federal court, the Katonas are charging the ATF with the death of their unborn child and other offenses. But there's much more, or ultimately less, to this story than the N.R.A. would have people understand.
What prompted the "raid" was Katona's arsenal of machine guns. Under the National Firearms Act of 1934, anyone hoping to buy a machine gun must first fill out a federal authorization and have it signed by the chief law-enforcement officer of the community. Until September 1988 Katona was an auxiliary Bucyrus police officer and took his forms to his boss, Chief Joseph Beran--an immense, bearded man with a shaved head and a passion for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. At one point, Katona claims, the chief presigned a large stack of forms. Beran denies it.
During the summer of 1988, their relationship decayed. The department demanded that Katona turn in an old Bucyrus police chief's badge that his father had bought for him at a gun show. The department claimed it had been stolen long ago from another collector. When Katona refused, he was forced to resign. Meanwhile, Crawford County sheriff Ronny Shawber had persuaded almost all the county's police chiefs to agree to a moratorium on authorizing machine-gun purchases. Beran agreed. In August 1989 he wrote to Katona: "Dear Louis, I'm sorry, but I am not signing these forms any longer." Over the next two years, however, Katona kept buying machine guns and submitting the required forms to ATF, all apparently bearing the chief's signature.
In choosing the targets of its investigations, the ATF relies heavily on tips from local police. In March 1991 the Cleveland office of ATF got a call from Sheriff Shawber, who had come to suspect, erroneously, that out-of-towners were buying machine guns from Louis Katona's father, Louis Katona Jr., a licensed dealer, and then listing false local addresses on their registration forms.