-Caveat Lector-
Fairly well balanced story.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cdh/20010422/lo/_too_easy_to_buy_guns_1.html
'Too easy' to buy guns
By Shamus Toomey Daily Herald Staff Writer
After the sound of gunshots finally faded and the last ambulance left JB's Pub last
weekend, the question scrawled on a sign
outside the front door of the devastated Elgin bar remained: "Why?"
In the minds of investigators building a case against the bar patron they say raised
the agonizing question that may have no
comprehendible answer, the question "How?" was not far behind.
How did a convicted felon labeled a "career criminal" two decades ago have access to
an arsenal of guns capable of the carnage
they say Luther Casteel, 42, of Elgin left behind at JB's?
Although a painstaking but imperfect gun tracing process may never yield the specific
answer to that question, authorities say
there is no shortage of answers to the question of how Casteel could have gotten
weapons despite laws prohibiting felons from
possessing firearms.
Federal authorities and gun-control advocates point to a handful of scenarios that
allow felons to circumvent the law by exploiting
loopholes. And although some say where there's a will to find a gun, a felon will find
a way, the scenarios make that road all the
more easy to navigate.
"There's certainly a market out there for people who want guns but can't get them
themselves," said Tom Ahern, a spokesman for
the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is tracing the four guns
police say Casteel used to kill two people and
wound 16 others at JB's April 14.
"We see it time and time again."
Navistar revisited
The rampage at JB's came just months after convicted felon William Baker stormed into
the Navistar engine plant in Melrose
Park and killed four people before putting his .38 Special in his mouth and firing,
taking his motive with him.
Police say Baker, 66, of Carol Stream, bought the four guns he toted legally, but he
never turned them in as required after he was
convicted of molesting a 12-year-old girl in 1997. He later was convicted of felony
fraud for stealing used engines from Navistar,
but he held onto his guns then, too.
Not relinquishing weapons after a felony conviction is one way for felons to stay
armed. In the aftermath of Baker's spree, Illinois
Attorney General Jim Ryan proposed better ways to compel felons to surrender their
guns, but he stopped short of advocating
police search homes following convictions.
"Prior to Navistar, courts weren't fully investigating and asking the questions,
especially for first felony convictions," said
Naperville-resident Todd Vandermyde, a legislative liaison for the National Rifle
Association, which supports Ryan's attempts to
get felons to turn over state Firearm Owner Identification, or FOID, cards and guns.
"I think Navistar showed us that was not
happening."
State Senate Democratic leader Emil Jones has offered up a proposal that would have
local police search the homes of FOID
card and gun owners convicted of felonies, but critics have questioned the
constitutionality of that.
Another way felons can get guns around the nation is at gun shows, a topic far more
divisive than FOID card revocation.
At gun shows, enthusiasts in Illinois can browse the firearms being sold by both
federally licensed and unlicensed dealers who
work side-by-side because there is no regulation demanding all be licensed, said
Kirsten Curley, spokeswoman for the Illinois
Council Against Handgun Violence.
"There is a gun show every weekend somewhere in Illinois," she said.
If you buy a gun from a federally licensed dealer, you have to undergo a background
check on the spot, the majority of which are
concluded quickly, gun control advocates say.
But there is no check done by the unlicensed dealer, just a review of the buyer's FOID
card. That is imperfect, gun-control
advocates contend, because the card holder may have been convicted of a felony after
getting the card. Baker, for example,
renewed his FOID card just before he pleaded guilty to the molestation charge. His
card still was valid when he barged into
Navistar, officials say.
State Rep. Jeffrey Schoenberg, an Evanston Democrat, has proposed a bill that would
force unlicensed dealers at guns shows to
use a licensed dealer to conduct a background check on site and sign off on the sale.
"Closing the gun show loophole would eliminate a major source of illegally obtained
firearms," said Schoenberg, who is "very
optimistic" of its passage in the Senate now that it has cleared the House, making it
one of the few gun-control bills to see much
progress this spring.
The NRA opposes the bill because of its broad definition of gun shows. Vandermyde said
the wording of the bill would make any
official gathering of a gun enthusiast group a "gun show," including local club
meetings. Casting a net that wide is unfair to club
members who may want to sell a gun to a friend or acquaintance who has a valid FOID
card, he said.
"It would be the equivalent of saying you cannot sell a car unless it went through a
car dealer," Vandermyde said.
FOID fraud
Another loophole, according to Curley, are the laws on how an Illinois resident can
obtain an FOID card. Curley argues that a
felon easily can take his own photo and send it into the state with another person's
personal information and obtain an FOID card
by mail. That way, a dealer will recognize a potential buyer's face in the FOID card
photo but run the background check on a
different person - one with a presumably clean record, she said.
When the check comes back clean on criminal and mental illness history, the dealer
then unwittingly would sell a gun to a felon.
There is proposed legislation in Springfield now that would transfer digital driver's
license or state ID photos onto FOID cards to
prevent the scam. The NRA's Vandermyde took that proposal a step further, suggesting
the state use driver's licenses as FOID
cards now that the ID cards have become "a cornerstone of our society," he said.
One gun per month
Another prominent loophole is the straw purchaser, a gun buyer with a clean record who
then illegally sells the guns to felons - or
anyone with cash - at high markups.
"A lot of gang members with prior felony convictions can get guns," acknowledged the
ATF's Ahern. "They have people make
straw purchases for them, people who make a profit from it.
Said Curley: "It's too easy."
One of the gun control measures proposed in the wake of the Navistar shooting is a
plan to limit the purchase of guns to one a
month per person.
A goal of that bill, said state House co-sponsor Lou Lang, a Skokie Democrat, is to
severely curtail the ability of a straw purchaser
to buy and to unload weapons.
The bill narrowly failed to make it out of a committee this spring but still has life,
Lang said.
But even if it - or the other proposed measures - become law, it is difficult to stop
a person intent on causing mayhem from doing
so. Attorney General Ryan acknowledged as much in the days after Baker's rampage in
Melrose Park.
"There is probably nothing we can do that can guarantee something like this won't
happen," Ryan said at the time. "But I think we
should take reasonable steps to prevent it from happening."
G
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