A gun's story: Bought for protection, ends as crime weapon

As any firearm defender will tell you, a gun is just a cold, metal tool with no innate capacity for good or evil. But if you want to sell a gun, you play up the potential for lifesaving heroics without mentioning anything about a possible future link to mass murder.

That image of a gun as protector is probably why law-abiding Robert Spiedel legally bought a stainless-steel, .38-caliber, snub-nosed revolver from a legitimate California gun dealer in 1985. He apparently gave that handgun to his ex-wife, Roberta, after they divorced in 1989 to protect her from whatever dangers might be lurking around her Barrington Hills home.

But instead of stopping a crime, that gun became a hapless victim of one during the summer of 1992. You see, the Spiedels' high schooler, Scott, had a 16-year-old buddy named Matt Wzientek. And, well, here's how Wzientek explained it to jurors last week.

"I walked in and just took it because they never had the door locked," the gun thief, now 33, testified. "I stole the gun."

Wzientek says he sold the stolen gun to another guy who gave him 15 bucks, and he even threw in the bullets for free. That guy was Jim Degorski, the man prosecutors say teamed up with Juan Luna and that same gun in 1993 to massacre seven people at a Brown's Chicken restaurant in Palatine. Prosecutors say the pair later threw the gun in the Fox River, and divers testified Monday that they looked for that gun but never found it.

So the gun bought for protection was stolen, allegedly used to murder seven people and now is gone.

"The classic law of unintended consequences," says Doug Pennington, assistant director of communications for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "We have empathy for the pain of people who have endured that."

No one blames a legal gun owner who is a victim of a crime for any future crimes committed with that gun.

"You can't help but have some empathy, some sympathy for the person who thought he was doing this with all the right intentions," says Thom Mannard, executive director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence. But others could learn from this story.

"I do think people really need to educate themselves, not only about the risks (of gun ownership) versus the potential benefits, but also about these kinds of scenarios," Mannard says. "A lot of times the possibility of that gun being stolen isn't even considered."

The Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence sports billboards informing potential gun-buyers that their new firearm would be far more likely to be used in a suicide or unintentional shooting than in self-defense, but those billboards don't say anything about burglaries and thefts.

There are 2,731,611 lost, stolen or recovered guns listed in the FBI's National Crime Information Center, but those numbers are compiled by local law enforcement agencies and nobody really knows how many stolen handguns are floating around. One 12-year-old Department of Justice survey found that nearly 10 percent of prison inmates used stolen guns to commit their crimes.

Gun-control studies have estimated anywhere between 170,000 to 500,000 guns are stolen each year.

"I doubt that," says Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association. Yet, the National Rifle Association can't say how many guns are stolen each year either.

That's the problem.

There are no national laws about safely storing guns or letting police know if one is lost or stolen. Illinois has a law prohibiting people from making a firearm accessible to children 13 and younger, but no requirement to report a stolen or lost gun.

"You have to be responsible with your firearm," Pennington says. "The first thing you need to do when you realize your weapon is gone is call the police."

While the NRA balks at any laws putting mandates on legal gun owners, Pearson says he urges all gun buyers to seek training and learn about safety.

"There certainly are a lot of ways to secure your firearm," Pearson says, suggesting a shoebox-sized safe bolted to the floor can make a gun less likely to be taken during a burglary.

"When you are gone, the gun is still there 365, 24-7," Mannard says. Keeping a burglar or neighborhood kid, most of whom are unarmed, from adding a gun to their criminal ways is key, he says. If a gun goes missing anyway, let the authorities know.

"If you report it lost or stolen, and it ends up being used in a crime or mass murder," Mannard says, "you aren't going to be hit with a ton of bricks when the police show up."