How Chuck’s became a symbol of what’s wrong with America’s gun laws

RIGHT next to Travis Funeral Home & Cremation Services, a dignified-looking canopied establishment offering funerals for $3,995, sits Chuck’s Gun Shop, a retailer of shotguns, rifles, pistols and semi-automatic guns, as well as ammunition, knives and holsters. The store in Riverdale, a suburb of Chicago, advertises itself as “your friendly neighbourhood gun shop”, but in recent years Chuck’s has acquired national notoriety as possibly the worst of the “bad apple” shops that supply a high percentage of guns recovered at crime scenes. “Criminals will always get guns because Chuck’s sells to the criminals,” is a frequent saying of Father Michael Pfleger, a pugnacious Catholic priest, who has led several demonstrations in front of Chuck’s.

On a wintry day in March, Chuck’s is businesslike and friendly. Asked whether a foreigner can buy a gun (most cannot), Ted, an avuncular, moustachioed salesman, replies: “This is America, you can get anything you want,” before offering a quick tour of the shop’s shooting range, a low-lit room with four 50-feet lanes and a rubbish bin riddled with bullet holes. He explains that all buyers must apply for a Firearms Owners Identification (FOID) card from the Illinois state police, who will check the applicant’s criminal background, a process which can take up to ten weeks. Anyone with a FOID card can buy a gun, though once a purchase is made Chuck’s will hold on to the gun for 24 hours, during which the shop’s personnel are required to check whether the card is still valid. The cooling-off period is meant to prevent impulsive acts of violence.

Why has Chuck’s become the favourite whipping boy of gun-control campaigners? According to the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence, more guns used in crimes between 1996 and 2000 were traced to Chuck’s than to any other gun-dealer in the country—2,370. And from 2009 to 2013 more than 1,500 guns found at Chicago crime scenes were traced to Chuck’s, more than the next two dealers combined. The average number of crime guns traced back to other gun-dealers in the area during the same period was three.

John Riggio, the owner of the shop, does not give interviews nowadays. In the past, he has said that he follows Illinois’s relatively strict gun laws meticulously. Neither he nor a member of his family has ever been charged with wrongdoing. (Chuck’s has been a family business for 50 years.) Mr Riggio has also argued that he cannot control what happens when someone leaves the shop, especially if the buyer is a straw man. “We don’t buy that argument,” says Dan Gross of the Brady Campaign. If shops follow the Brady code of conduct, drawn up to prevent dangerous people from getting guns, argues Mr Gross, they won’t sell to straw buyers or gun-traffickers. The code includes looking out for tell-tale signs of straw purchases, such as a clueless buyer of a gun (likely to be under instruction), or someone waiting in the car outside while a purchase is being made. It also suggests limiting sales to one handgun per civilian every 30 days, and keeping an electronic inventory of all sales that is backed up regularly.

The two most effective reforms to reduce gun violence, according to Adam Winkler at the University of California, Los Angeles, would be a federal universal background check and a crackdown on rogue gun-dealers. Current rules on background checks apply only to licensed gun-dealers, but up to 22% of gun sales take place at gun fairs or over the internet, which do not require such checks. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he argues, needs money and orders to go effectively after gun-dealers who overlook fishy sales.

It would also help if straw purchasers were punished more harshly. According to Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago, who conducted interviews with inmates of Cook County jail, the country’s biggest, for a study he co-wrote on the provenance of their weapons, most got their guns through a family member or a friend, rather than stealing them or buying them directly. Many admitted they thought they needed a gun because they feared others with guns. “I would rather be judged by 12 than carried by six,” they said. It may not be a coincidence, after all, that a funeral parlour set up shop next to Chuck’s.