COLORADO- Concern mounted all throughout Colorado’s front range this week over acredible threat by the FBI towards Denver area schools.
An 18-year-old woman, Sol Pais, from Florida traveled to Colorado and purchased a shotgun at a Littleton gun shop: Colorado Gun Broker.
The purchase, with a Florida driver’s license and an approved background check, made it completely legal.
Mel Bernstein, owner of Dragonman’s- a gun store and shooting range in El Paso County says sometimes background check results can come back in minutes, other times it takes days.
“It’s not up to us to deny the person, but I can deny the person if I think he’s very suspicious or she’s suspicious,” said Bernstein.
According to Bernstein, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sent out an alert to him Wednesday morning about Pais.
“I hate to say it, but they should’ve been more on the ball,” said Bernstein, who says if the alert had gone out sooner, he believes the situation may have been preventable.
“It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback and say, ‘we should have stopped it here, we could have stopped it here,” said Jacqueline Kirby, Public Information Officer with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.
“There are no two crimes that are alike,” said Kirby. She adds for enforcement, it’s a multi-faceted process.
“When somebody is purchasing a firearm legally, there is no way for law enforcement to know unless that individual is involved with something criminal,’ said Kirby.
When it comes to the background checks done in order to purchase a firearm, those questions deal mainly with the purchasers criminal history.
“have you ever been suicidal, have you ever felt homicidal- none of that is on a background check,” said Kirby.
