NRA lobbyist, arms dealer played key role in growth of civilian market for military-style guns "He came off like something of a dandy and a hustler, glad- handing with everybody," recalled Johnny Aquilino, a former NRA communications director. LaPierre, by contrast, was remote and quiet, a hand-wringer with an obsessive interest in the intricacies of the legislative process who wore wrinkled suits and carried sheaves of paper - the congressional record, vote counts, handwritten notes - around the organization's 16th Street NW headquarters. But the two men struck up a partnership. Vos would be temporarily hired as a lobbyist for the NRA, helping LaPierre press the gun lobby's agenda on Capitol Hill. And when Vos formed the company Blue Sky Productions, which would become involved in importing tens of millions of dollars of military rifles, LaPierre signed on as his partner, state and federal records show. Together, the two friends would play an instrumental role in the early growth of America's civilian market for military-style weapons. The legislative changes that LaPierre supported as the NRA's chief lobbyist in the mid-1980s opened the door to the import of military-surplus weapons, which effectively had been banned for two decades. The legislation helped make a new, more powerful class of firearms more readily available to civilian gun owners and begin to shift the profile of American gun ownership. The arms deal put together by Vos's company - a $58 million venture to import 50-year-old American-made M-1 rifles from South Korea back to the United States - proved so lucrative that other gun merchants immediately tried to follow their lead. Other importers would seek to bring in more military weapons, not just American but also foreign-made arms such as Russian Kalashnikovs and Israeli Uzis, and new business associations sprang up to represent their interests in Washington. The Blue Sky deal may have helped whet the appetite of American consumers for more and more military-style weapons. Before long, American manufacturers stepped up domestic production of such firearms, including semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity pistols, to meet the burgeoning demand. Some in the gun industry say this transformation was inevitable, regardless of the Blue Sky deal, as technology evolved. Just as cellphones became lighter and more powerful, they say, so did firearms. But Josh Sugarmann of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center says that the 200,000 rifles imported by Blue Sky were "basically the first of the military weapons marketed to the civilian population. If you were going to draw an "assault weapons timeline," it would start with the M-1 and eventually end up where we are today."