{"id":2661,"date":"2015-12-01T16:09:56","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T23:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=2661"},"modified":"2015-12-01T16:20:06","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T23:20:06","slug":"what-is-a-gun-found-at-crime-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=2661","title":{"rendered":"What is a \u2018gun found at crime scene\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(A version of this column appears in the Dec. 10 edition of “Shotgun News.”)<\/em><\/p>\n

In October, jurors ordered a Wisconsin gun store to pay nearly $6 million in damages in a lawsuit filed by two Milwaukee police officers who were shot and seriously wounded by a gun purchased at the store, The Associated Press reports.<\/p>\n

The ruling came in a negligence lawsuit filed by the officers against Badger Guns, a shop in suburban Milwaukee which — according to the AP story — \u201cauthorities have linked to hundreds of firearms found at crime scenes.\u201d The lawsuit argued the shop ignored several warning signs that the gun used to shoot the officers was being sold to a so-called straw buyer who was illegally purchasing the weapon for someone else.<\/p>\n

Officer Bryan Norberg and former Officer Graham Kunisch were both shot in the face after they stopped Julius Burton, 19, for riding his bike on the sidewalk in the summer of 2009. Investigators said Burton got the weapon, a Taurus .40-caliber handgun, a month earlier \u201cafter giving $40 to another man, Jacob Collins, to make the purchase at the store in West Milwaukee,\u201d reports the AP\u2019s Greg Moore, who graduated Wayne State University in downtown Detroit and joined The AP in 2011.<\/p>\n

One bullet shattered eight of Norberg’s teeth, blew through his cheek and lodged in his shoulder. He remains on the force. Kunisch was shot several times, lost an eye and part of the frontal lobe of his brain. His wounds forced him to retire.<\/p>\n

Jurors, understandably sympathetic to the shooting victims, ordered the store to pay Norberg $1.5 million, Kunisch $3.6 million, and punitive damages of $730,000. The officers’ lawyer said he anticipates years of appeals.<\/p>\n

The case gained national attention when presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said she\u2019d push to repeal the law that Badger Guns’ lawyers said shielded the store from such claims.<\/p>\n

Authorities have said more than 500 firearms \u201crecovered from crime scenes\u201d had been traced back to Badger Guns and Badger Outdoors, making it the “No. 1 crime gun dealer in America,” according to a 2005 charging document from an unrelated case. Norberg and Kunisch cited that detail in their lawsuit, saying it showed a history of negligence.<\/p>\n

Damages unlikely to stand<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cBurton pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree attempted intentional homicide and is serving an 80-year sentence,\u201d Moore of The AP reports. \u201cCollins, the man who purchased the gun, got a two-year sentence after pleading guilty to making a straw purchase for an underage buyer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where to begin? No, crazy young men should not be shooting police officers -\u2013 officers who had not even seen a need to draw their own weapons — while being stopped for a minor infraction. Putting this deranged perpetrator away for 80 years (given the way our parole and probation system work) probably makes sense, if he can\u2019t be executed.<\/p>\n

But if the shooter had to find someone else to make a \u201cstraw purchase\u201d for him, that means he knew it was illegal for him to obtain the weapon on his own — he probably would have been turned down based on his history of psychiatric treatment, even if he weren\u2019t underage. Right?<\/p>\n

Burton \u201cgave $40 to another man\u201d to buy him the Taurus pistol? Quite a bargain. In fact, that pistol lists at about $300, plus tax. Does the reporter mean Burton \u201cgave Collins the $320 purchase price, plus an additional $40\u201d? Why would a reporter want to make it sound like such weapons can be bought for $40?<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s not fail to note that the law against serving a \u201cstraw man purchaser\u201d creates a \u201cthought crime.\u201d What Jacob Collins went to jail for was legally buying a gun while intending<\/em> to deliver it to someone else. If I buy a gun intending to make it part of my personal collection, but then get tired of it or see a chance to make a profit and so give it away or sell it to someone else two years later — a private sale without any \u201cbackground check\u201d — that\u2019s perfectly legal. Six months after I buy it? Perfectly legal. Two months later? I\u2019m probably OK. Six days after I buy it? It could now be up to a judge and a prosecutor and possibly a jury stacked through \u201cvoir dire\u201d questioning to decide whether I \u201charbored the thought\u201d of transferring it to someone else on the day I signed the \u201cyellow form.\u201d I could go to prison based on what they think I thought.<\/p>\n

If this doesn\u2019t make you uncomfortable, it\u2019s probably because you\u2019ve never bought a gun. But buying booze for someone else is also illegal. Ever take a bottle of wine to someone else\u2019s house? Are you sure<\/em> they didn\u2019t later give a glass to anyone under 18? Look up Martin Niemoller.<\/p>\n

The federal law referred to — the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which bars victims of the criminal use of guns from suing manufacturers and gun dealers whose legal products work as they\u2019re supposed to — is still in effect. As socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, who voted for the measure, told CNN earlier this year: \u201cIf somebody has a gun and it falls into the hands of a murderer and that murderer kills somebody with the gun do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible? Not any more than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beat somebody over the head with a hammer.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what are the chances the appeals court will throw out these damages? Or, should they be upheld, what are the chances the families of innocent Americans shot by police officers can now successfully sue the outfits that sold those cops their guns and ammo, since they \u201cshould have known full well that cops often use their weapons to shoot innocent, unarmed persons\u201d?<\/p>\n

I wonder how all the cops who crowded that Milwaukee courtroom in October and applauded this damage award would react if told \u201cSorry, following the deaths of John Geer of Springfield, Va. — shot by police while standing in the doorway to his own home, scratching his nose — and 50-year-old Walter Scott of North Charleston, S.C. — shot in the back as he ran away from North Charleston Patrolman Michael Slager — none of our former suppliers will sell us any more ammo, ladies and gentlemen. So let\u2019s get out those old wooden batons and keep them handy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s dropping all these expensive guns?<\/strong><\/p>\n

While we\u2019re at it, let\u2019s also deconstruct that favorite \u201cfirearms found at crime scenes\u201d statistic. Does that generally refer to incidents where a street gang armed with machine guns massacres a couple police officers, and then — while speeding away — drops one of their fully automatic AK-47s so it can later be \u201cfound at the crime scene\u201d? No. This is a term of art which usually refers either to a suicide gun or a self-defense revolver found in the bedroom drawer of a house where someone was just busted for \u201cdomestic abuse\u201d or \u201cpossession of marijuana\u201d \u2013 someone who never thought of going for that self-defense tool to use it against police, or anyone else.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeapons found at crime scenes\u201d generally do not<\/em> belong to habitual criminals. As John Lott — former chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission and author of \u201cMore Guns, Less Crime\u201d — wrote in the Wall Street Journal of Jan. 17, 2013, \u201cGuns are very rarely left behind at a crime scene. When they are, they’re usually stolen or unregistered. Criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind guns that are registered to them. Even in the few cases where registered guns are left at crime scenes, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed, so these crimes would have been solved even without registration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that you know what a \u201cweapon found at a crime scene\u201d usually refers to, do you think a popular gun shop that\u2019s sold a number of firearms later \u201cfound at crime scenes\u201d \u2013- sales completed only after performing the legally required background checks — has necessarily done anything wrong? Or do you think a news outlet parroting that term without explanation is trying to prejudice you against the specific business in question, or against gun stores in general?<\/p>\n

After reading the initial news stories, did you think this gun shop should be closed down? You did, didn\u2019t you? What if I told you the biggest Chevy dealer in Milwaukee sold \u201cmost of the cars that were involved in hit-and-run accidents in Milwaukee in recent years\u201d? (I made that up, by the way; I have no idea.) Would you conclude that specific Chevy dealer should be shut down? Why not? Because, perhaps, you think the drivers<\/em> were responsible; that every American adult is going to get a car somewhere — that no irresponsible driver is going to be better behaved just because they buy a Ford or a Toyota; that the statistic only reflects the fact that my hypothetical Chevy dealer sells more cars locally than anyone else, that it\u2019s not the fault of a car dealership if some tiny fraction of their customers use those automobiles in an irresponsible way?<\/p>\n

I wish I had better advice to offer on how we should deal with the people who we describe with the imperfect metaphor \u201cmentally ill\u201d \u2013- people who (for better or worse) have been increasingly \u201cmainstreamed\u201d out onto our sidewalks over the past 40 years. I certainly don’t think the “boot camp” atmosphere of our mandatory youth propaganda camps (some still call them “public schools”) — where the disciplining of misfits is increasingly administered by locker-room gang chieftains, as in the old Red Army — has helped. <\/p>\n

What this case really exposes, I fear, is that all this \u201cbackground check\u201d rigmarole inconveniences millions of Americans who have an uncontestable right to own and carry a firearm, without doing much to keep guns out of the hands of lunatics and bad guys — any more than our airport metal detectors (the ones designed to accustom law-abiding Americans to being strip-searched and disarmed) did anything to stop a bunch of Muslim fanatics from hijacking four passenger jets and killing thousands of innocent people on Sept. 11, 2001.<\/p>\n

Yet we keep trying \u201cmore of the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vin Suprynowicz, a former award-winning editorial writer and columnist for the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, is the author of \u201cSend in the Waco Killers\u201d and \u201cThe Ballad of Carl Drega.\u201d His new novel about the War on Drugs, \u201cThe Miskatonic Manuscript,\u201d is due out this month.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(A version of this column appears in the Dec. 10 edition of “Shotgun News.”) In October, jurors ordered a Wisconsin gun store to pay nearly $6 million in damages in a lawsuit filed by two Milwaukee police officers who were shot and seriously wounded by a gun purchased at the store, The Associated Press reports. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,46,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2nd-amendment","category-law-enforcement","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-GV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2661"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2664,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2661\/revisions\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}