Los Angeles -- The man arrested at Los Angeles International Airport with a trunk full of guns and nearly 1,000 rounds of ammunition said Saturday that he is a law-abiding weapons enthusiast who had no idea he might be breaking the law.
A day after he was arrested for suspicion of felony transportation of an assault rifle, Phillip Dominguez said he's confident he'll be exonerated.
"Our Second Amendment rights are being trampled in the name of law enforcement," Dominguez said. "I'm a law-abiding, taxpaying gun enthusiast. I have no felonies - up until now."
Airport police saw it a little differently.
"He just made a very bad decision, and should not have been carrying those weapons," airport police Sgt. Jim Holcomb said on Friday. A call to an airport police spokesman seeking comment was not immediately returned Saturday.
Dominguez, 47, of Orange, said he went to LAX to pick up a friend from Baltimore on Friday. They intended to go target shooting at an outdoor range in San Bernardino County.
As Dominguez entered the airport's ring road, his truck was pulled over for inspection. Dominguez says he knew police would want to look inside the locked cover of the truck bed so he got out, opened it and declared that he had firearms there.
Dominguez said he had 16 pistols, including an 1858 black-powder Army revolver. He also had five rifles -- one of them an assault rifle -- and nearly 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
Dominguez said he didn't think he was breaking any laws since all the weapons and ammo were in separate, locked boxes. At least half a dozen times since Thanksgiving, Dominguez said he made similar stops at the airport carrying his guns and never saw a police checkpoint.
He showed officials the paperwork proving the assault rifle was registered and gave them the keys and combinations of all the lockboxes, he said. The Bushmaster "Shorty," a semiautomatic rifle modeled on the military's AR15, was the reason he was finally arrested.
"It posed no threat to nobody," said Dominguez.
Dominguez said he got state permission to own and use the assault rifle last month but the approval letter didn't mention it was illegal in California to make a pit stop while transporting the weapon from his home to the gun range.
That code requires that "registered assault weapons may be transported only between specified locations," according to the Web site of the California attorney general's office.
Dominguez said he was handcuffed, taken to a jail, and held for six hours before he was booked. He was released at around 11 p.m. after his family posted $50,000 bail. But his guns and his truck were confiscated.
He faces a Feb. 6 arraignment.
Dominguez, who owns a construction company, says he doesn't blame airport authorities for stopping his truck for inspection but he believes he isn't the target of the gun law.
"I am being charged for a law that is meant for ex-felons and bank robbers, that kind of individual," Dominguez said.
Dominguez says some Internet writers have been questioning his intelligence -- if not his sanity -- for hauling his stash of handguns and rifles to a place where folks might be jittery about terrorism.
The man who owns about 80 guns, however, remains defiant and said he'll be well-armed in a different way when he confronts his accusers in court.
"I'm contacting their worst nightmare -- an attorney," he said.
