By P.J. REILLY, Staff
As a sales associate in the gun department at Kinsey's Outdoors, Ben Bode has seen a lot of firearms.
When he saw the photographs published by Lancaster Newspapers on Tuesday and Wednesday of a gun that police say was discarded by a would-be robber in Manheim, he immediately recognized it.
"That's an AB-10," Bode said.
Police initially identified the weapon as a TEC-9.
"Both were made by a company called Intratec, but that one is an AB-10, not a TEC-9," Bode said.
The most visible difference between the two is the TEC-9 has a cylindrical shroud with multiple holes drilled in it covering the barrel, while the AB-10 has no barrel shroud.
The TEC-9 was made by the now-defunct Intratec prior to the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, according to the Modern Firearms Web site. The gun was one of several banned from being manufactured after the law took effect.
"It's a gun you don't come across that often. It's a gun that you do find in the streets," said Manheim police Chief Barry Weidman, a lead investigator in Tuesday's shooting, which officials are calling a "justifiable homicide." The gun used in the shooting was a small pistol.
The AB-10 was Intratec's replacement for the TEC-9, but it lacked several of the TEC-9's assault-style features, such as the barrel shroud, a threaded barrel that could receive a silencer and the forward handgrip found on some TEC-9s. (The "AB" in the gun's name stands for "after ban.")
The ban, which expired in 2004, forbade selling guns with magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds; the AB-10 was sold with a 10-round magazine. It can, however, accept any of the higher-capacity magazines made for the TEC-9.
It was not illegal to own TEC-9 handguns or high-capacity magazines during the ban period.
Intratec went out of business in 2001, but Bode said Kinsey's still occasionally sells used AB-10 handguns.
"Mostly, they are preferred by guys who like to spend time on the range shooting the assault-style firearms," he said.
Despite their appeal to some shooting enthusiasts, Bode characterized the AB-10 as "unreliable" and "not very accurate."
Manheim Borough police said the gun recovered after Tuesday's attempted robbery was jammed. A round was lodged in the chamber, police said. That malfunction either occurred as it was being fired or as a round was racked from the clip into the chamber, investigators said.
Converting the AB-10 to a fully-automatic weapon is "extremely difficult," Bode said.
"I don't even know how you'd do it," he said. "You'd have to modify the internal parts, and that would take a person with a lot of experience."
E-mail: preilly@lnpnews.com
