Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Federal law forbids felons convicted of violent crimes from buying guns—but not renting them at stores. Owners of gun stores are not required to perform background checks on customers who merely want to rent a firearm for use at the store’s gun range. But this means someone with a past of violent behavior or mental illness can get their hands on a dangerous weapon and injure others or themselves.
“They can go and play with a gun, handle it, fire it, even take pictures with it to intimidate other people and nobody is going to know about it,” Joseph Vince Jr., a retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives supervisor, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “If they have the gun in the store or out of the store, it is a danger to the public.”
It also can be a danger to the renter. The newspaper reports that in southeastern Wisconsin alone there were at least four suicide attempts within a 14-month span at gun-store ranges.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
No Background Check Needed to Fire Gun on Range (by John Diedrich, Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel)
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