Virginia Tech: Gun dealer's now sold guns for 5 murders.

Like everyone else, I've been watching the news about the Virginia Tech Massacre.

I was watching Larry King last night and one of the guests was the owner of the pawn shop where Cho purchased or picked up the weapons he used in the killings.

He talked about a completely normal and legal sale. 

The owner came across as a calm older guy running a business and when he mentioned he'd received nasty calls and emails and that he'd run a background check and nothing came back so there was nothing he could do, my reaction was that he was completely blameless...

Sometimes I read news from other countries. In reading about these killings on the BBC, I came across the following paragraph that caught my attention.

John Markell, the owner of the Roanoke firearms shop really have wanted to sell Cho the 9mm Glock if he had read some of these pages? After all four guns sold from his shop had already been reportedly involved in other homicides.

Evidently John Markell has sold the weapons that have been used in five separate homicide incidents with at least 36 people dead. (32 at VT and four others.) That's quite a record. I wonder how much money his pawn shop has made from the sale of those five weapons?

Sometimes it might be good to question whether you're really contributing to society in a beneficial, not just blameless, way. 

Comments

[Darren Johnson]

Interesting...it's a tough one, because I have a hard time arguing that the store owner should not be in the business of selling guns. It's a completely legal business. Although he's not contributing to society in a beneficial way, there are millions of businesses (smoking, fast food, etc.) that have the same problem.

As far as the other 5 weapons being used, it's surprising that NONE of those buyers came back with suspicious background checks...makes me wonder how strict he is on the background check part of the equation. Obviously he has a reputation for being the "go to" guy in town to get a gun from (my guess).

In the bigger picture, this was just a messed up college kid with serious emotional problems. No gun control or anything else can really prevent that in the future. The whole thing is terrible.

[David / Headwaters Bamboo]

I wonder if in addition to running a background check if they could use Google to run a check as well. It would be interesting to see what would come up... Maybe we need a smart software-type to write to tool for gunshop owners to search the web to see what these folks are saying...

[Winta Smooth]

i think the gun shop iwner is innocent. Under state law if no criminal background check is pesent there are no illegal actions. it all plays in the second ammendment. thats why the people who bought guns to kill other people were put on trial, because it was thier actions

[bis owner]

The guns sold cannot be defined by anything other than an object misused by the owner. This could also be described as a car dealership that sold cars where the owners were drunk and caused injury and death. Does this mean that any car dealership has to assume responsibility for car every they ever sold?

[Jeff Barson]

Oh, there's a difference.
The primary use of a car is to drive your kids to school.
The primary use of a hand gun is to shoot someone.

I'm not saying that then gun shop owner is any more responsible. He's selling something whose primary purpose is to shoot people.

[Joe Zilinski]

The primary use of a gun is not to shoot people, simlpy to shoot, just as the primary use of a car is to drive. You can shoot paper (like most do), or shoot a living animal or person. You can drive your kids to school, or you can run over an animal or a cheating ex.