It doesn't take much more than cash to buy a weapon from an unlicensed dealer at a gun show in Minnesota, a fact known to seasoned gun buyers and proven by activists' hidden-camera videos. Yet most people assume the state's rules on background checks for gun purchases would prevent that, said Duluth Police Chief Gordon Ramsay. The misunderstanding is so widespread, Ramsay said, that he recently found himself telling another police chief about the gun show loophole.
"He didn't know," said Ramsay.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Fixing that loophole in Minnesota and elsewhere while tightening the federal background check system is the focus of a national Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign that stopped Friday at Minneapolis City Hall. Surrounded by relatives of local people killed in shootings, the mayors and police chiefs of St. Paul and Minneapolis, along with Ramsay, urged support of legislation to prevent felons, domestic abusers or the mentally ill from buying weapons.
"There has to be a reasonable background check," said St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman.
OTHER RESTRICTIONS
Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan said he supports federal legislation that would ban ammunition magazines that hold a large number of bullets. The high-capacity magazines, which have been legal since a ban expired in 2004, were used by shooters in the recent Tucson, Ariz., shooting that killed six; in the Virginia Tech slayings in 2007 that left 33 dead, and in the 2009 attack at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13.
The Fix Gun Checks campaign's most visible spokesman has been Omar Samaha, whose sister Reema was among those killed in the Virginia Tech shootings. Samaha, who two years ago purchased guns with no questions asked at a gun show in Virginia for the ABC News program "20/20," said the gun show loophole hasn't changed yet, despite public support for its end.
