An Emerging Tactic In The Gun Control Battle: Taking Retailers To Court

If you want to know how a felon buys a gun, think about how a teenager might buy alcohol.

First, find a willing friend or family member, or maybe even a stranger at a liquor store who wants to make a quick buck. Then give this person some cash, tell them your drink of choice, and wait.

If you’re careful, this transaction — called a “straw purchase” — is impossible to detect. Clerks don’t often hassle a person over 21 who walks alone into a liquor store.

The stakes are higher in an illegal gun purchase: It’s a felony. Guns are more expensive. A background check is required. And guns are weapons.

In April 2014, a shotgun purchased by a straw buyer was used in a shooting rampage that killed three people at the Jewish Community Center and Village Shalom retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas.

The shooter currently sits on death row, and the straw buyer is now a felon. The purchase also put the spotlight on Walmart, which sold the shotgun, in the form of two lawsuits filed by the victims’ families.

Experts say those lawsuits — and a growing cohort of similar cases across the country — are opening a new front against the gun industry by making one simple argument: Retailers must do more to ensure guns aren’t sold to people who aren’t supposed to have them.

The straw purchase

As a convicted felon, it was illegal for white supremacist Frazier Glenn Cross Jr. to purchase or possess a gun.

Four days before Cross murdered three people in Overland Park, he and a friend named John Reidle went to a Walmart near Springfield, Missouri. The duo walked out with a Remington Model 870 pump-action shotgun, which Cross later used to kill two of the three victims.

Because parts of the court record are sealed, it’s not clear exactly how the purchase transpired.