When the cops shot this man in a weapons raid, the entire conversation on guns in America changed
After Kenyon Ballew was paralyzed, the NRA shifted the gun-control debate
On a late spring night in 1971, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were aiming for efficiency. They had obtained search warrants for two addresses in an apartment complex, at 1014 Quebec Terrace, in Silver Springs, Maryland, and planned to inspect them one after the other. The first and primary target yielded unimpressive results — agents barged in with their guns drawn on an 8-year-old child and his babysitter, and left a note for the absent man of interest.
At around 8:30 p.m on June 7, 1971, authorities still had a chance to perform a successful raid on a second apartment. A couple of months earlier, Montgomery County detectives extracted a confession from a teenage burglary suspect, who witnessed within the apartment a stockpile of firearms and grenades. Its tenant, Kenyon F. Ballew, a press operator at the The Washington Post, did not have any grenades registered to him, placing him, if the informant was to be believed, in violation of federal law. Further information collected by detectives, including Ballew’s previous arrest for carrying a concealed firearm, as well as witness accounts of him “playing” with grenades in his backyard, enabled authorities to secure a search warrant for Ballew’s apartment in addition to the search already intended.
About 12 men from the ATF and the Montgomery County police went on the raid, wearing plain clothes to blend in as they navigated the high-crime area of the apartment complex. They also chose to enter through the laundry room.
The officers put over their clothes arm bands that displayed their badges. A special agent named William H. Seals knocked on the door. Following no response, he shouted, “Federal officers with a search warrant, open up.” With no reply from inside, Seals claims to have heard the sound of someone moving away from the door. The authorities, worried about the suspect’s escape or retaliation, scrambled to break down the door with a battering ram. They succeeded after several blows, and found on the other side of the threshold an improvised furniture barricade. Upon entry, special agent Seals saw Ken Ballew standing naked and pointing a gun toward him.
Ballew had rushed for a replica 1847 Colt cap-and-ball pistol, assuming a criminal break-in attempt, though the officers said they had announced themselves. The reason for Ballew’s nudity was initially disputed, with Ballew claiming he was in the middle of bathing, while agents claimed he was “bone dry.” Seals yelled that the suspect had a gun, and shot toward Ballew, before taking cover behind a wall. Another officer entered and fired a few rounds, striking and shattering a fish tank. A third officer came after him, one county policeman Louis Ciamillo, whose bullet struck Ballew in the head. As Ballew fell, his weapon fired toward the floor. The injury would leave him paralyzed for life.
Agents and officers discovered inside Ballew’s live-in girlfriend, Saraluise McNeil, who clutched her own pistol and wore nothing but her underwear. She was ordered to surrender, and thrown into the hallway as the inspection began. She cried “Help, murder, police!” as she passed Ballew’s bleeding body.
Ballew was taken to the hospital, and authorities searched his apartment, finding “a large quantity of firearms, powder, ammunition, primers, fuses and other firearm parts,” as well as five grenade parts in various stages of assembly, though court documents suggest none were completed. Still, a federal court decided that the “grenades together with the powder seized were in combination both designed and intended to be used as destructive devices,” justifying the raid and warrant, though the U.S. attorney ultimately decided not to prosecute.
Ken Ballew sued the government for his injuries, and lost. The judge determined that Ballew’s decisions and behavior — including his stock of weapons, his barricading of the door, and his being armed when the officers entered — meant that “his injuries were the direct result of his own contributory negligence.”
What proved even more consequential for United States politics was the way in which this clumsy and near-deadly raid was taken up by gun owners, the National Rifle Association, and concerned members of Congress. The furor came but a few years after the Gun Control Act of 1968, a bipartisan piece of legislation made possible by a few shared horrors, including the knowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president with an NRA-promoted, mail-order gun, and that open-carry laws make for frightening displays when demonstrated by black activists.
Members of Congress expressed concern about the precedent set by the raid, which was not only injurious but conducted on questionable grounds, depending almost entirely on informant testimony. “I am thoroughly appalled by this revelation of the reckless, brutal, and inept methods employed by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division,” said Representative Gilbert Gude, of the Maryland district where the raid took place. “This kind of stormtrooper exercise may have been commendable in Nazi Germany, but it must be made unmistakably clear to the ATFD that it is intolerable here … In my opinion, the manner in which this search was conducted was not only unreasonable, it was high-handed and incredibly stupid, if not criminal.”
In a 1979 oversight hearing on the ATF by the Committee on Appropriations, the Ballew raid was cited as a “classic case of BATF’s using the law in such
a fashion to cover improper activities.”
The raid was especially useful to the NRA. The NRA’s magazine published a six-page article under the headline, “Gun Law Enforcers Shoot Surprised Citizen, Claim Self-Defense,” writing of a “Boy Scout leader who displayed an American flag in his window,” who was found “merely holding” a replica cap-and-ball pistol. They published certain falsehoods, like that the woman in Ballew’s apartment was his wife, and that he was bathing when the raid began (further investigation confirmed the bathtub was last used to clean Ballew’s fish tank). The paralyzed Ballew was later brought out at NRA events in his wheelchair, wearing a sign that read “Victim of the Gun Control Act.”
Few people, if any, came forth to defend the manner of the inelegant and almost fatal raid, but lawyers did approach special agent William Seals to defend him in what they considered an easy case against the “malice” of the NRA’s smear campaign, and their continued manipulation of the truth to their own ends. Seals, being too preoccupied to take on the effort of being a high-profile litigant, declined to file suit.
The raid remains a point of disgrace to the gun-rights cause, with one board member of the NRA claiming ten years ago that the Ken Ballew shooting was “the first of a long chain of Gestapo-like raids, sieges, and questionable arrests” conducted by the bureau, presaging the more horrific raids on Waco and elsewhere.
The often overlooked Ken Ballew raid marks an important divergence from the general agreement on responsible gun policy that gained momentum in the 1960s. As journalist Sarah Ellison wrote in Vanity Fair: “If one is looking for the moment when the worldviews of gun enthusiasts and gun-control advocates began to diverge, the Ballew case is it.” Our realities, like stray and frantic bullets, have moved farther apart ever since.
