It’s the gun industry’s biggest boom these days: firearms from the ex-communist bloc and China, sold cheaply. Imports from Russia have just started to pick up in the last six months, but they’re moving fast; Chinese firearms have already flooded the American market. In 1992 the United States imported 97,000 Chinese firearms (mostly copies of Soviet models); in 1993 it imported about 900,000, nearly a tenfold increase. Prices for an SKS rifle have gone as low as $70; a comparable American rifle would cost at least $600. But lately demand has risen so fast that prices for old commie firearms have doubled or even tripled. Suppliers can’t keep up. Michael Kassnar, president of KBI Inc., which imports Russian and Hungarian rifles and handguns, says, “It’s the best business I’ve ever done.”

Criminals don’t use these guns much, partly because many of the imports are rifles, which can’t be concealed easily. Most buyers are collectors or workaday gun users. Still, ATF officials warn that SKS rifles are so cheap and so prevalent that a kid like Wayne Lo, a former student at Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington. Mass., could buy one in an afternoon at a local sporting-goods store, and the ammunition reportedly by mail. Lo is now on trial for allegedly murdering a professor and a fellow student in December 1992. The Chinese sold 55 million rounds of ammo in the United States in 1992, at a retail cost of about 10 cents a round, less than a third of its American equivalents. “This is firstclass firepower at Saturday-night-special prices,” says ATE spokesman Jack Killorin.

Many importers are making a killing, so to speak. Importing 18,750 Russian semiautomatic rifles, for example, could easily turn half-a-million dollars in profit, according to gun dealers. Century International Arms, Inc., probably America’s biggest importer of Chinese rifles, keeps a low profile at its headquarters in tiny St. Albans, Vt. Some locals disparage the company as “fast-buck people,” and gun-industry analysts concur that Century’s business must have doubled since 1992 sales were posted at $24 million. Its 1993 holiday catalog boasts the Russian SKS on the cover: “Call today. toll-free, hassle-free.” The back shows two stags in the snow. with the slogan “Peace on Earth (and profits to all!).”

At last week’s Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade show in Dallas, the gun industry’s annual convention known as SHOT, importers were doing-a snappy business. One Colorado retailer begged importers of the Russian Dragunov sniper rifle, “.Just let me know which distributors you’re going to ship to first.” Importer Berge Boghossian, an Armenian from the former Soviet Union, says he can sell “as many [guns] as I can bring over.” The big attraction at his Big Bear Arms and Sporting Goods booth: Mikhail Kalashnikov himself. designer of the world’s most widely used assault rifle. Kalashnikov. who says he became an honorary member of the National Rifle Association two years ago and wears an NRA necktie, offers a simple explanation for Russian guns’ popularity: “Americans just love firearms.”

The mood at the SHOT show was both euphoric and desperate. The gun business now is unusually robust–largely because threats of gun control have sent customers stampeding to buy firearms before they get yanked from the market. One editor at Guns and Ammo Magazine likened the convention’s atmosphere to “a Roman orgy on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.” Even the wobbly giant Colt’s Manufacturing Co., which is in bankruptcy, has a long backlog of orders for its Sporter rifle. Ordinarily the Sporter might compete with cheap SKS imports, but not in this robust market.

That’s one reason Colt doesn’t object to the wave of cheap imports. Another reason is the peculiar solidarity of gun businessmen. To call for curbs on imports would be “letting the government get its sticky fingers on the gun industry,” as one big rifle manufacturer put it. He’d rather be squeezed by the competition than concede to any government regulation. According to the ATF, in 1991 the United States made more than three times as many rifles as it imported; in 1992 it made about half as many rifles as it imported. Imagine if the Chinese were dumping shoes. instead of guns. Strange to think there’d be a bigger outcry.

PHOTO: Good times at the Dallas SHOT show: AK-47 designer Kalashnikov takes aim

Gun buyers are crazy for inexpensive pistols and rifles imported from China and the ex-Soviet empire. The growing trend:

In 1991 the United States imported 719,521 firearms; in 1993 it imported 3.2 million, a 345 percent increase.

China sold 97,000 firearms to the United States in 1992; in 1993 it sold 900,000, and 54 percent of all rifle imports were Chinese.

SKS rifles retail here for as little as $70; the closest American competitor, the AR-15, sells for at least $600.

SOURCE: BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS