ATF on licenses and violations for gun stores
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WTVQ) — With a pending lawsuit for families and survivors of the Old National Bank Shooting, there are many questions lingering over licenses and violations for gun stores.
“There are more than 130,000 licenses in the United States,” says Special Agent in Charge of the ATF in Louisville, Shawn Morrow.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is mainly responsible for regulating the firearms and explosives industry.
“There are about seven or 800 operations investigators, those are the investigators at ATF that are responsible for inspecting license applications,” he adds.
But what makes a business eligible for a federal firearms license or FFL? For beginners, there can’t be a history of violating The Gun Control Act.
“They also have to demonstrate that they’ve got a premise premises that are suitable for operating a firearms business. If someone is interested, then they will complete an application to apply for that license, that application goes to the ATF,” said Morrow.
What’s important, a firearms dealer must look at that applicant to make sure they can or can’t buy a gun.
“They will sit down with them and go through the application and talk about their requirements in terms of record keeping in terms of conducting background checks in terms of making sure that they have a safe and secure inventory and that they have a good accounting for all the guns that they intend to have in their business,” also says Morrow.
If the license is granted, the ATF will continue its relationship with the business through audits and inspections.
“We’ve noticed that they’ve maybe violated the Gun Control Act,” adds Adam Rogers, who is the director of industry operations for the ATF in Louisville.
But, what happens when a reports reveals there have been violations?
“We’re gonna go back and figure out if they continue to do that, generally speaking, if fails, we have a very compliant population of FFLs. But if we find one that is conducting, or having a few or more violations, the Gun Control Act gives us the option to revoke the license and we would revoke based on willful violations,” adds Rogers.
“We only can revoke for willful violations and specifically, we focus on public safety violations. So the public safety violations include things like failure to conduct a background check on a firearms transaction. Yes, the licensees may get a violation for something like failure to file the form properly, forms must be filed in certain ways, whether it’s alphabetical or by date. But generally speaking, we’re not going to revoke for those types of violations; it’s only going to be public safety violations,” says Rogers.
The ATF doesn’t regulate gun stores on preventing sales to someone who’s mentally ill.
