Almost two decades have passed since John A. Mulioli Jr. accidentally shot and killed one of his friends.
Not a day passes, he says, when he doesn't think of Victor Frankl and the moment that changed his life forever.
Mulioli was 19 years old and with some friends at a home in St. Davids. He was showing a vintage handgun, a .22-caliber Rossi nickel-plated pistol, to Frankl when the gun suddenly fired. Frankl fell to the floor with a bullet wound to the chest.
"He basically died in my arms," Mulioli said quietly, staring off into the distance.
A lot of people might come away from a tragedy like that and never want to go near a gun again. Mulioli is not one of them.
Reared around firearms and educated about them by his father, Mulioli has become a dedicated amateur gunsmith. In his home office decorated with war memorabilia, bookshelves are packed with repair manuals for various guns.
The only thing standing between him and a promising second career, Mulioli said, is the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).
Now Mulioli is taking on the bureau in federal court. He is fighting what are probably long odds to convince a judge that ATF acted arbitrarily and unfairly when it denied his application - first in 1991 and again last year - to restore his federal firearms privileges.
Without a federal firearms dealer's license, Mulioli cannot order gun parts and supplies and cannot legally work as a gunsmith.
"The accident, it was an accident, and I paid my debt to society for that accident," said Mulioli, 37, at his home in a rural area of Chester County near Malvern.
"I am the one who has to wake up with the thought of Victor Frankl's death on my conscience.
"I mean he's buried not far from here. I pass his grave every day. And there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about that. But I go out of my way to make sure that nothing like that will ever happen again."
Jack Killorin, a spokesman for ATF in Washington, said he could not discuss Mulioli's case because of agency confidentiality rules and because of Mulioli's pending federal lawsuit.
Mulioli's guilty plea to involuntary-manslaughter and firearms charges in Frankl's death - all misdemeanors under state law - appears not to have been the main reason ATF rejected his application.
