Pawnshop To Pay Families For Selling Gun Used To Kill 8 Relatives Of Victims In San Francisco Law Firm Massacre To Receive $150,000

A Nevada pawnshop that sold a semiautomatic pistol used in the slaughter of eight people in a San Francisco law firm has agreed to pay the victims’ families $150,000, lawyers said Thursday.

The settlement by Camco Inc. marks the “first time that a gun seller has paid damages to a victim for the sale of a particular kind of gun,” Sarah Brady, chairwoman of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, said in a statement.

In July 1993, Gian Luigi Ferri, a mentally disturbed man with a grudge against lawyers, killed eight people and wounded six in a downtown law office, then killed himself.

Camco operated Superpawn, a Las Vegas pawnshop where Ferri bought one of the guns.

The sale was legal, but the lawsuit alleged that the seller should have known the gun was inappropriate for legitimate uses and was attractive to those contemplating violence.

The pawnshop’s lawyer, Phillip Emmons, said the settlement was “basically an economic decision.”

A trial is tentatively scheduled for September in a lawsuit against Navegar Inc., which makes the TEC-DC9 pistols used by Ferri.

That suit says the guns were illegal in California and were marketed in a way that made mass killing foreseeable, with ads advertising the guns as fingerprint-resistant.