WASHINGTON -- More than 90 guns that police recovered from crime scenes last year have something in common, according to a national study: They were sold by a single dealer in Overland Park, Kan.
That puts the supplier on a list of 137 gun sellers across the country who sold at least 50 weapons ultimately used by criminals in 1998. Over the last three years, 232 such guns were traced back to the Overland Park merchant.Who is the dealer in question?
The study, prepared for U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, offers no names, only cities where the sellers are located, based on raw data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Overland Park police were not aware until contacted by The Kansas City Star that so many crime guns had been traced to a location in that city.
The local ATF office thinks it knows the dealer's identity, but refuses to release the information to reporters, saying it would violate policy.
Interviews with area gun store owners, law enforcement officers and gun data researchers, however, indicate -- but do not confirm -- that it is The Bullet Hole, a well-known store and indoor pistol shooting range off Shawnee Mission Parkway in Kansas.
The owner of the store, Richard Stovall, agreed he could be the dealer because he sells by far more guns than any Overland Park dealer.
"I'm not trying to deny it because we do sell a high volume of firearms," Stovall said. "It could be me. How can I say it's definitely not?"
There is no allegation that The Bullet Hole broke laws. In fact, federal and state records going back almost 10 years show Stovall has not been accused of any firearms violations. Many police officers buy guns and practice at The Bullet Hole, he said.
"I run my shop straight up, just like you're supposed to," Stovall said. "The problem is, we don't know where a gun goes when it leaves here."
That guns sold legally do not always stay in the hands of the original buyers is a key point of the study. While dealers must make background checks of buyers, later deals between individuals are unregulated, although it is illegal to sell a gun to a known felon. Some guns are stolen from buyers and later used in crimes.
"We are finally understanding how guns flow from being a legal object to an illegal object," said Jim Kessler, who as Schumer's policy director oversaw the study.
Schumer's study this summer continues to draw attention nationwide amid debate on how to stem gun violence. Schumer is using it to pursue further gun control legislation.
By using ATF gun trace data, which is not released to the public, the study found that just 1 percent of the nation's gun sellers supplied almost half of all weapons recovered in crimes -- about 34,600 weapons -- last year.
What's more, 13,277 of those guns came from the 137 dealers -- just one-tenth of 1 percent of sellers -- which each sold more than 50 such "crime" guns last year.
The Overland Park dealer was the only area merchant to make the list of 137, with 92 guns traced back from 1998 crimes, 59 from 1997 crimes and 81 from 1996.
Stovall acknowledges getting 50 or more trace notices a year from the ATF. While just his estimate, it is much higher than the number of notices reported by about 20 local dealers contacted by The Kansas City Star. None of the others thought it could be the seller in question.
About 10 of the 30 licensed dealers in Overland Park could be not be reached, most having unlisted numbers. They are apparently small or individual sellers, based on information from other dealers in the city that had never heard of them.
Open seven days a week and evenings, when most dealers are not, Stovall's Overland Park store pegs its gun sales at 2,000 to 3,000 a year. The number of trace notices Stovall receives represents only a small percentage of the number of firearms he sells a year.
"I tell you, nobody in this town sells as many guns as we do," Stovall said. "If I was getting a high percentage of my business traced back, yeah, I'd want to know what we've done wrong."
Only two of 1,502 licensed gun dealers in Kansas sold more than 25 guns used in crimes last year, the study said. The second one sold 41 and also is in Overland Park, Kessler said.
All but a few of the 30 dealers in Overland Park told The Star they sold fewer than 50 guns a year. The Second Amendment store, however, sells about 1,200 guns a year, according to its owner, Bob Lockett.
Lockett said he was assured by an ATF source that he was not the dealer who sold the 232 crime guns over the three years. Lockett also doubted he could be the dealer who sold 41 guns in 1998 because he said he had only three trace notices from the ATF last year.
Managers at two other high-volume gun dealers -- Arms Mart Inc. in Independence, Mo., and C.R. Specialty Inc. in Kansas City, Mo., and Shawnee, Kan. -- said they only got three or four traces a year. Both stores estimate selling more than 1,000 guns annually.
"There are a lot of gun dealers who sell a lot of guns and they don't end up on this list," Kessler said.
In Missouri, only five of 3,716 dealers had 25 or more guns traced back from crime scenes.
Two of those Missouri dealers, one in St. Louis and one in Dellwood, a St. Louis suburb, showed up on Schumer's list. Of weapons showing up in 1998 crimes, the Dellwood dealer sold 113 and the St. Louis dealer 71. In the previous two years, they respectively sold 216 and 126 guns that showed up in crimes.
It could not be determined if any of the three other dealers with at least 25 traces were from the Kansas City area.
The Bullet Hole is one of the best known and most visited gun shops in the region.
"We try to make a fair living and service the customers," Stovall said.
Bob Mosley, director of compliance for the ATF regional office in Kansas City, said that he was almost sure he knew the identity of the dealer in the Schumer study but that such information was considered part of crime gun investigation. He would only say that a high-volume gun dealer would be the logical source of numerous crime guns.
"We are familiar with the trace data, and I can assure you if we saw any trace of criminal violations we'd be acting immediately," Mosley said.
Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass said he had been unaware of the study. "Obviously, I'm a little concerned that any one dealer, whoever it might be, would be a location where criminals get their guns," he said. "We'll take a look and try to do whatever we can to reduce that."
The ATF has been on a nationwide drive to trace more crime guns. It followed the histories of almost 200,000 guns last year, up from 34,000 in 1990, said ATF spokesman Jeff Roehm in Washington.
Mosley said there could be many reasons, in addition to high total gun sales, that certain dealers sell a lot of guns that eventually are used in crimes.
"It could be location, price, inventory; it could be all over the board," Mosley said. "Sometimes, for whatever reason, people who want to come into illegal possession of firearms choose one particular dealer for straw purchases of firearms."
Straw purchasers are people who buy guns for someone else, often someone who has a criminal record and can't pass background checks. Because the purchaser signs a form stating the gun is not being bought for another person, the dealer is making a legal sale.
One law aimed at straw purchasers requires dealers to notify the ATF if one person buys more than one handgun in five days.
Stovall said individuals sometimes bought several handguns at one time, perhaps as gifts or to give to family members for protection. "I've had customers who have bought four or five guns and the ATF has contacted them," Stovall said.
All but three of the 232 crime scene guns sold by the Overland Park dealer were later recovered outside Kansas, according to the data sorted by Schumer's office.
Some dealers found that statistic hard to believe, given the proximity to Kansas City, Kan., a relatively high-crime area. ATF officials, however, did not dispute the numbers, noting that Overland Park also is near Kansas City, Mo.
Kessler said straw purchasers in Kansas might be supplying guns to criminals in Missouri, where gun sales are more regulated.
In Missouri, any resident wanting to buy a handgun must get a permit from the county sheriff. That requires a $10 fee and a background check by the sheriff's office as well as the usual check by the dealer.
In Kansas, state law allows the buyer to get a handgun without a permit, although the dealer still runs a background check.
Straw purchases may be more attractive to residents of Kansas than of Missouri because they wouldn't need to take the extra step of going to the sheriff.
"If someone wants to buy a gun for other than a good reason, they want to have as little of a paper trail as possible," Mosley said. "That's a common experience."
A Missouri resident cannot avoid getting a permit by simply making a gun purchase in Kansas. Under federal law, the gun would have to be transferred to a Missouri dealer for the sale, and then the sheriff's permit would be required.
There does not appear to be an inordinate number of guns recovered in Kansas City that are traced to The Bullet Hole or any other Overland Park dealers, Kansas City police officials said.
In an analysis of 498 successful traces of guns used in 1998 crimes, Kansas City police and the ATF noted that 90 (18 percent) came from Kansas.
Although the state of Kansas does not require a permit, Kansas City, Kan., has a city ordinance requiring its own permit for handguns bought in the city. Permits cost $50, take about two weeks to get and require a background check, said KCK police spokesman George Sims.
Sims said no one had obtained a permit in the last two years.
That is probably because any buyer who sees a gun he wants at a KCK pawnshop can have it transferred to a dealer outside the city for the sale. That avoids the cost and wait for a city permit, although not the federal background check.
Stovall said he reviewed his gun trace notices after a Star reporter contacted him about the Schumer study. He said he discovered that many of the traced guns were ones he sold for pawnshops in KCK.
He said he sold 300 to 500 guns a year to people who had a gun transferred from KCK sellers, primarily pawnshops. The Bullet Hole collects a $20 fee for paperwork and the background check and is recorded as the seller, although the KCK dealer collects the price of the gun from the buyer.
Stovall said he was reviewing that practice. "If this is my problem, I'm already working on it," Stovall said.
Lockett, owner of the Second Amendment, said he would not sell to buyers who have guns transferred from KCK. "They are skirting the law in Kansas City, Kansas, and I will not assist them," Lockett said. "KCK, right or wrong, says, 'Get a permit.' "
Some competitors said The Bullet Hole also stocked an especially large inventory of used and low-price handguns, but Stovall said that wasn't true.
Stovall retorts that the types of handguns traced by the ATF to his store are usually not cheap brands, but quality semiautomatic models. Those are the kind that are stolen, because of potential resale value, and prone to turn up in crimes, he said.
The number of licensed gun dealers in the United States has dropped dramatically, from 286,531 in 1993 to less than 105,000 today, said Roehm, the ATF spokesman in Washington. An increase in application fees from $30 to $200, along with an ATF requirement that dealers now prove compliance with any state and local regulations, are probably responsible, he said.
But many people still get dealer licenses, even though they have no visible sign of a gun business. In Overland Park, for example, gun licenses are registered to addresses that include a chiropractor's office, a Christian bookstore and an architectural firm.
A 1986 law that limits ATF inspections of dealers to once a year also reduced penalties for record-keeping errors and forced prosecutors to prove a dealer "knowingly and willingly" sold guns to straw purchasers or criminals.
As a result, prosecution of gun dealers is still relatively rare. Between 1994 and 1998, only 131 dealer licenses were revoked. During that time, the ATF denied 534 of 147,579 renewal applications, while 14,631 dealers withdrew their applications for various reasons.
Schumer thinks the ATF should be allowed to do "unlimited stings" on stores found to sell more than 25 guns used in crimes. The senator's report noted that 23 of the 137 dealers he listed had since closed or seen revocations of their licenses.
The goal of ATF traces and of studies such as Schumer's is to help uncover channels of gun sales to criminals, Kessler said, adding: "Straw purchases is the next place to go in terms of law enforcement and guns."
(C) 1999, The Kansas City Star