I went to their website, didn't see any babes- but mighty fine hardware!
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030831/NEWS/308310549/1200&cachetime=5
Babes, bullets, bucks
By MICHAEL BRAGA
[email protected]
A Bradenton entrepreneur with
a colorful past launches a Web site with two sure attention-getters: sexy women and machine guns.
BRADENTON -- There's nothing in particular that strikes you about Andrew Bigelow's gun shop behind the Bob Evans Restaurant on the corner of Cortez Road and 14th Street West.
There are more than a dozen shops like it, tucked away in strip malls, throughout Southwest Florida. Just check the Yellow Pages.
They all peddle shotguns, rifles, pistols and plenty of ammunition. The stores also carry specialty T-shirts, jackets and other paraphernalia for gun enthusiasts.
What sets Heavy Metal Armory apart is cyberspace and Web photos of scantily clad women with machine guns.
The store serves as a back office for Machinegun.com, a babes-with-bullets Web site that hawks machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, silencers and other high-powered weapons and accessories.
The site is perfectly legal.
A special license from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms permits Bigelow to sell fully automatic weapons. He could even carry grenades if he chose.
The store naturally raises the hackles of gun opponents in Southwest Florida who question why anyone would need such firepower.
"It's frightening to see how much weaponry they have for sale," said Susannah Michalson, a Sarasota resident and gun-control proponent. "For people concerned about the safety of children and human life it's a shock."
What makes Bigelow an especially intriguing arms dealer is his volatile business history.
Bigelow initially declined a Herald-Tribune interview, saying a published report would only attract a bunch of "wackos" to his Web site or protests from gun-control advocates. He ultimately agreed to talk.
The gun shop owner made his first splash on the Internet through the pornography industry, operating sites with names such as CyberPimp.com and Pimp.com between 1994 and 2000.
Bigelow's friends recall he left the porn business after he got married. Bigelow said, "I just decided to make a change in my life and not do that any more."
In 2000, he launched a legitimate Internet company -- BigWhat.com, a search engine that provided map-based searches using technology developed by the federal government.
Bigelow raised more than $400,000 from 45 investors -- mostly doctors, lawyers, chiropractors, police officers and gun shop owners in the Sarasota-Bradenton area, according to documents BigWhat sent to investors, which recently were provided to the Herald-Tribune.
The company rented 2,000 square feet in downtown Bradenton and eventually employed 18 workers. By the end of its first year, BigWhat reported it was assisting with nearly 2 million searches a day.
In August 2001, Bigelow sent investors a letter claiming the company was "only a few short months away from profitability," but needed to raise as much as $60,000 to bridge the gap.
Bigelow failed to raise the money he needed, and less than three months later, BigWhat was dead.
Bigelow explained in a Nov. 21 letter to investors that advertising sales, which dropped before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, completely dried up after them, and that there was nothing he could do about it.
What's more, he said in the letter, BigWhat was hit by a spate of fraudulent credit card transactions, totaling more than $40,000. As a result, the company that processed BigWhat's credit card transactions permanently froze its account.
"Without the ability to process transactions or write a check, and mounting bills, we convened many meetings of the board of directors to find any solution besides closing," Bigelow wrote. "In the end there was no alternative but to cease operations."
Investors acknowledged that times were tough when BigWhat died, but some wondered how Bigelow rebounded from the BigWhat bankruptcy so swiftly and successfully.
Howard Curle, a former police detective who invested $10,000 in BigWhat, sent a letter to Bigelow asking to see the company's canceled checks. He said he never received a reply.
"If the money was spent legitimately, I can live with that," Curle said. "It would just be a bad business decision. But if it wasn't spent legitimately, I can't live with that."
Bigelow counters that he did everything he could to provide investors with information and made repeated offers to sit down and talk.
"We provided investors with an 800-page document with a copy of every check and every transaction, item-by-item, from day one," he said.
Bigelow said he never met Curle, and is not sure whether he received the 800-page document. But Bigelow said the documents are available if he wants them.
BigWhat has been sued by one company -- Kansas City-based Searchhound.com, which claimed BigWhat had failed to pay $12,041. The lawsuit eventually was folded into BigWhat's Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings, which were designed to liquidate the company's assets.
No other lawsuits or investigations have been launched against the company, Bigelow said.
BigWhat's April 2002 bankruptcy filing listed debts of $44,000. Two of the largest creditors were fellow Internet companies: Mamma.com and Searchhound.com.
When questioned at the time of BigWhat's failure about what he intended to do next, Bigelow told The Bradenton Herald he was going to take it easy for a while. He said BigWhat had been all-consuming and had ruined him financially.
Two months after the Chapter 7 filing, Bigelow paid $165,100 for a house at Braden River Lakes, while continuing to own a house at 22nd Avenue West, which he purchased for $128,500 in 1998, according to Manatee County Property Appraiser records.
"It was a V.A. (Veteran's Administration) repossession," Bigelow said of the Braden River Lakes home. "I put $3,000 down on it. We're not talking a lot of money. It's a rental house."
Florida Department of State records show Bigelow and his father, Donald E. Bigelow, registered a company called The Gun Search.com in June 2000. Then, one month after the BigWhat bankruptcy, they listed Heavy Metal Armory as a subsidiary of The Gun Search.
Machinegun.com is, in turn, a subsidiary of Heavy Metal Armory and Bigelow has not been bashful about promoting either company. He drives a white Chevrolet Avalanche with the Machinegun.com and Heavy Metal Armory logos emblazoned on every panel.
A visit to Machinegun.com reveals an amalgamation of guns and busty women clad only in bikini bottoms. Listed for sale is everything from a $55,000 experimental M-60 machine gun to a $2,095 CIA breakdown rifle and $2,195 tommy gun.
A visitor can watch a machine gun video, look at pictures of "Hot Girls with Hot Machine Guns" or sign up for the "Knob Creek National Machinegun Shoot in beautiful Bullit County Kentucky."
A sentence on the Web site says Machinegun.com has received 1.7 million requests since May 22. Bigelow declined to say what that translated to in sales.
"We're keeping the doors open," he said. "All is well."
According to Jack Roby, the co-owner of Take Aim Gun Range in Sarasota, Machinegun.com probably is making money. The company has an awesome Web address and the products it sells are in demand by gun enthusiasts, he said.
"Machine guns are very profitable investments," Roby said. "Only so many of each model are made, so they appreciate rapidly in value."
The Federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms heavily regulates the sale of the weapons. It takes six to nine months for a dealer to get permission to sell them and about 90 days for a customer to buy one, according to a spokeswoman at the bureau.
"You can't just walk in a gun store and walk out with a machine gun three days later," said Dave Bristow, spokesman for the Manatee County Sheriff's Office.
Potential owners must submit to extensive background checks. When they purchase a machine gun, they give up their Fourth Amendment right to search and seizure.
"The law allows the ATF to inspect your records and inventory once every 12 months without any cause," according to legal documents on Machinegun.com's Web site.
That kind of scrutiny is not something criminals or terrorists want to submit themselves to. And the cost of weapons places them out of reach of common criminals.
"It's not a sport that anyone off the street can do," Roby said. "It's very expensive. An entry-level weapon costs as much as $2,000, and that's a piece of junk. If you really want to get into it, you have to spend $8,000 to $12,000."
That doesn't include the cost of ammunition, which adds up quickly because of the speed at which these weapons can be fired. It's mostly doctors and lawyers that can afford the sport, Roby said.
Why do they do it? Roby says firing the powerful weapons produces a powerful rush.
"There's nothing like pulling the trigger and having 40 bullets come out at once," he said.
Roby and others maintain that it's unlikely for machine guns to be used in crimes. Handguns are the weapons of choice for criminals because they are lighter, easier to conceal and more difficult to trace.
Manatee County sheriff's deputies rarely come across machine guns in the line of duty, according to Bristow. When they do, there's a greater than 99 percent chance that those guns are purchased illegally, he said.
Still, gun control advocates don't like the idea that machine guns are accessible at all.
"This organization believes that machine guns have no place in American society," said Rob Wilcox, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "They're necessary for the military and law enforcement. But civilians don't need weapons that fire automatic rounds and do terrible damage.
"Just the idea that a weapon, that can kill dozens of people, could get into the hands of a child or a disgruntled employee is scary," he said.
Even some fellow gun shop owners have some uncharacteristic reservations.
"I don't see why anyone needs a fully automatic weapon," said James Morrison, the owner of J.M. Gun Repair on Whitfield Park Drive in Manatee County. "Only the military and police should have access to those guns, not the general public."
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030831/NEWS/308310549/1200&cachetime=5
Babes, bullets, bucks
By MICHAEL BRAGA
[email protected]
A Bradenton entrepreneur with
a colorful past launches a Web site with two sure attention-getters: sexy women and machine guns.
BRADENTON -- There's nothing in particular that strikes you about Andrew Bigelow's gun shop behind the Bob Evans Restaurant on the corner of Cortez Road and 14th Street West.
There are more than a dozen shops like it, tucked away in strip malls, throughout Southwest Florida. Just check the Yellow Pages.
They all peddle shotguns, rifles, pistols and plenty of ammunition. The stores also carry specialty T-shirts, jackets and other paraphernalia for gun enthusiasts.
What sets Heavy Metal Armory apart is cyberspace and Web photos of scantily clad women with machine guns.
The store serves as a back office for Machinegun.com, a babes-with-bullets Web site that hawks machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, silencers and other high-powered weapons and accessories.
The site is perfectly legal.
A special license from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms permits Bigelow to sell fully automatic weapons. He could even carry grenades if he chose.
The store naturally raises the hackles of gun opponents in Southwest Florida who question why anyone would need such firepower.
"It's frightening to see how much weaponry they have for sale," said Susannah Michalson, a Sarasota resident and gun-control proponent. "For people concerned about the safety of children and human life it's a shock."
What makes Bigelow an especially intriguing arms dealer is his volatile business history.
Bigelow initially declined a Herald-Tribune interview, saying a published report would only attract a bunch of "wackos" to his Web site or protests from gun-control advocates. He ultimately agreed to talk.
The gun shop owner made his first splash on the Internet through the pornography industry, operating sites with names such as CyberPimp.com and Pimp.com between 1994 and 2000.
Bigelow's friends recall he left the porn business after he got married. Bigelow said, "I just decided to make a change in my life and not do that any more."
In 2000, he launched a legitimate Internet company -- BigWhat.com, a search engine that provided map-based searches using technology developed by the federal government.
Bigelow raised more than $400,000 from 45 investors -- mostly doctors, lawyers, chiropractors, police officers and gun shop owners in the Sarasota-Bradenton area, according to documents BigWhat sent to investors, which recently were provided to the Herald-Tribune.
The company rented 2,000 square feet in downtown Bradenton and eventually employed 18 workers. By the end of its first year, BigWhat reported it was assisting with nearly 2 million searches a day.
In August 2001, Bigelow sent investors a letter claiming the company was "only a few short months away from profitability," but needed to raise as much as $60,000 to bridge the gap.
Bigelow failed to raise the money he needed, and less than three months later, BigWhat was dead.
Bigelow explained in a Nov. 21 letter to investors that advertising sales, which dropped before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, completely dried up after them, and that there was nothing he could do about it.
What's more, he said in the letter, BigWhat was hit by a spate of fraudulent credit card transactions, totaling more than $40,000. As a result, the company that processed BigWhat's credit card transactions permanently froze its account.
"Without the ability to process transactions or write a check, and mounting bills, we convened many meetings of the board of directors to find any solution besides closing," Bigelow wrote. "In the end there was no alternative but to cease operations."
Investors acknowledged that times were tough when BigWhat died, but some wondered how Bigelow rebounded from the BigWhat bankruptcy so swiftly and successfully.
Howard Curle, a former police detective who invested $10,000 in BigWhat, sent a letter to Bigelow asking to see the company's canceled checks. He said he never received a reply.
"If the money was spent legitimately, I can live with that," Curle said. "It would just be a bad business decision. But if it wasn't spent legitimately, I can't live with that."
Bigelow counters that he did everything he could to provide investors with information and made repeated offers to sit down and talk.
"We provided investors with an 800-page document with a copy of every check and every transaction, item-by-item, from day one," he said.
Bigelow said he never met Curle, and is not sure whether he received the 800-page document. But Bigelow said the documents are available if he wants them.
BigWhat has been sued by one company -- Kansas City-based Searchhound.com, which claimed BigWhat had failed to pay $12,041. The lawsuit eventually was folded into BigWhat's Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings, which were designed to liquidate the company's assets.
No other lawsuits or investigations have been launched against the company, Bigelow said.
BigWhat's April 2002 bankruptcy filing listed debts of $44,000. Two of the largest creditors were fellow Internet companies: Mamma.com and Searchhound.com.
When questioned at the time of BigWhat's failure about what he intended to do next, Bigelow told The Bradenton Herald he was going to take it easy for a while. He said BigWhat had been all-consuming and had ruined him financially.
Two months after the Chapter 7 filing, Bigelow paid $165,100 for a house at Braden River Lakes, while continuing to own a house at 22nd Avenue West, which he purchased for $128,500 in 1998, according to Manatee County Property Appraiser records.
"It was a V.A. (Veteran's Administration) repossession," Bigelow said of the Braden River Lakes home. "I put $3,000 down on it. We're not talking a lot of money. It's a rental house."
Florida Department of State records show Bigelow and his father, Donald E. Bigelow, registered a company called The Gun Search.com in June 2000. Then, one month after the BigWhat bankruptcy, they listed Heavy Metal Armory as a subsidiary of The Gun Search.
Machinegun.com is, in turn, a subsidiary of Heavy Metal Armory and Bigelow has not been bashful about promoting either company. He drives a white Chevrolet Avalanche with the Machinegun.com and Heavy Metal Armory logos emblazoned on every panel.
A visit to Machinegun.com reveals an amalgamation of guns and busty women clad only in bikini bottoms. Listed for sale is everything from a $55,000 experimental M-60 machine gun to a $2,095 CIA breakdown rifle and $2,195 tommy gun.
A visitor can watch a machine gun video, look at pictures of "Hot Girls with Hot Machine Guns" or sign up for the "Knob Creek National Machinegun Shoot in beautiful Bullit County Kentucky."
A sentence on the Web site says Machinegun.com has received 1.7 million requests since May 22. Bigelow declined to say what that translated to in sales.
"We're keeping the doors open," he said. "All is well."
According to Jack Roby, the co-owner of Take Aim Gun Range in Sarasota, Machinegun.com probably is making money. The company has an awesome Web address and the products it sells are in demand by gun enthusiasts, he said.
"Machine guns are very profitable investments," Roby said. "Only so many of each model are made, so they appreciate rapidly in value."
The Federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms heavily regulates the sale of the weapons. It takes six to nine months for a dealer to get permission to sell them and about 90 days for a customer to buy one, according to a spokeswoman at the bureau.
"You can't just walk in a gun store and walk out with a machine gun three days later," said Dave Bristow, spokesman for the Manatee County Sheriff's Office.
Potential owners must submit to extensive background checks. When they purchase a machine gun, they give up their Fourth Amendment right to search and seizure.
"The law allows the ATF to inspect your records and inventory once every 12 months without any cause," according to legal documents on Machinegun.com's Web site.
That kind of scrutiny is not something criminals or terrorists want to submit themselves to. And the cost of weapons places them out of reach of common criminals.
"It's not a sport that anyone off the street can do," Roby said. "It's very expensive. An entry-level weapon costs as much as $2,000, and that's a piece of junk. If you really want to get into it, you have to spend $8,000 to $12,000."
That doesn't include the cost of ammunition, which adds up quickly because of the speed at which these weapons can be fired. It's mostly doctors and lawyers that can afford the sport, Roby said.
Why do they do it? Roby says firing the powerful weapons produces a powerful rush.
"There's nothing like pulling the trigger and having 40 bullets come out at once," he said.
Roby and others maintain that it's unlikely for machine guns to be used in crimes. Handguns are the weapons of choice for criminals because they are lighter, easier to conceal and more difficult to trace.
Manatee County sheriff's deputies rarely come across machine guns in the line of duty, according to Bristow. When they do, there's a greater than 99 percent chance that those guns are purchased illegally, he said.
Still, gun control advocates don't like the idea that machine guns are accessible at all.
"This organization believes that machine guns have no place in American society," said Rob Wilcox, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "They're necessary for the military and law enforcement. But civilians don't need weapons that fire automatic rounds and do terrible damage.
"Just the idea that a weapon, that can kill dozens of people, could get into the hands of a child or a disgruntled employee is scary," he said.
Even some fellow gun shop owners have some uncharacteristic reservations.
"I don't see why anyone needs a fully automatic weapon," said James Morrison, the owner of J.M. Gun Repair on Whitfield Park Drive in Manatee County. "Only the military and police should have access to those guns, not the general public."
