All you need to know about this story . . .
is this:
Kessler acknowledged there is nothing to indicate that the 120 stores sold the guns illegally or knew they were selling to criminals. He compared them to the liquor stores of his youth.
But the alarmists state:
About one of every seven guns linked to American crimes or considered suspicious from 1996 through 2000 can be traced back to the same 120 gun stores, a gun safety group said Monday, urging the government to set up a watch list of irresponsible or corrupt gun dealers.
Of the 373,006 guns traced from crimes during the five-year period, 54,694 came from the 120 stores, according to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives. The data, which surfaced in a lawsuit by the NAACP against gun manufacturers, was made public by the Washington-based Americans for Gun Safety Foundation.
January 13th, 2004 at 4:19 pm
Badger Outdoor in West Milwaukee was right at the top of the list, with 1,906 traced guns. After much discussion it was finally acknowledged that “some” of these had never been used in a crime. An unknown number had been stolen and recovered or turned in by unappreciative heirs, and only 40 had been used in the commision of a murder.
Badger is a volume dealer, and the closest surviving dealer to Milwaukee’s inner city. Even if you take the large number of 1,906, this was only about 2% of their sales. I would expect, given their location, that they are the largest seller in the area of guns used by armed citizens to deter crime, but this is never tracked.
Some Milwaukee area politicians tried to use these numbers to get Badger shut down, but they had defenders in the community. Not only was it proved that they had a spotless record regarding the legalities of their sales, but they documented that the police had ignored their reports of customers who, altho legal, may have been straw buyers.