The St Louis Post Dispatch posted this story over the weekend. A special investigation into the "shady" world of online ammunition sales. I consider this the first shot in an attempt to move the debate to restricting the availability of ammunition since restricting firearms isn't getting any traction.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/multim...tml_3e70a8af-dc60-5d52-b7fc-98476c257d28.html
I'm sure that Frankel will get a Pulitzer for this. As far as I know, no laws were violated, but the author sure works hard to make the online ammunition sales industry look like they are up to something nefarious. I don't know if this story has been syndicated yet but it's out there and if you read it you will see how all the sound bite phrases for the antis are there....waiting...
http://www.stltoday.com/news/multim...tml_3e70a8af-dc60-5d52-b7fc-98476c257d28.html
How The Aurora Shooter Got His Ammo
By Todd C. Frankel | Post-Dispatch© 2013 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
S
tart with the FedEx packages. Follow the trail. That’s what police in Colorado did. They wanted to learn how the gunman got his bullets, how he accumulated an arsenal of more than 6,000 rounds before he walked into an Aurora, Colo., movie theater last July, where he fatally shot 12 people and wounded 58. Where did that ammunition come from?
The answer appeared to be an online company in St. Louis, a detail widely reported one year ago. But recently released search warrants and additional reporting by the Post-Dispatch have shed new light on the path traveled by those thousands of rounds.
The trail leads not to St. Louis but to Knoxville, Tenn., and on to Atlanta, to a secretive 4-year-old company considered to be among the nation’s top online ammunition dealers. Its founders — a pair of former real estate developers — sell bullets using far-flung P.O. boxes, different corporate identities and online marketing tactics that have offended even some firearm enthusiasts. By last summer, these entrepreneurs stood perfectly positioned to close on a quick, legal sale to a deranged killer.
The story of how the Aurora gunman got his 170 pounds of ammo — a transaction that received far less attention than how he obtained his firearms — is a journey into the divisive debate over gun violence, about how guns and ammo flow through the nation and the companies that profit along the way.
Each shooting briefly revives talk about banning certain guns or magazines while another often common feature goes overlooked: the ammo stockpiles. In Newtown, Conn., authorities are looking into how the gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School acquired more than 1,600 bullets. A thwarted plan by a former student to shoot up the University of Central Florida in Orlando earlier this year led police to 1,000 rounds of ammunition. And then there’s the 6,000 rounds in Aurora.
It wasn’t always possible for someone to buy so many bullets so quickly, with so little scrutiny. And it wasn’t always so difficult to track where those bullets came from.
It can feel like chasing a ghost.
Just try to follow the trail.
I'm sure that Frankel will get a Pulitzer for this. As far as I know, no laws were violated, but the author sure works hard to make the online ammunition sales industry look like they are up to something nefarious. I don't know if this story has been syndicated yet but it's out there and if you read it you will see how all the sound bite phrases for the antis are there....waiting...