A Major Straw Purchasing Case Against Gander Mountain ​Hopes to Provide ​a​ Playbook for Cracking the Gun Industry’s Legal Immunity

They made an odd pair, the scruffy 61-year-old William Spengler and his 22-year-old neighbor, Dawn Nguyen, when they went to browse long guns at a Gander Mountain sporting goods store near Rochester, New York. In a scene later described in court papers, Spengler — a convicted felon who was prohibited from purchasing a firearm — spoke for the two when a clerk asked if they needed help. When it was time to close the deal on an AR-15 rifle and a pistol-grip shotgun, it was Nguyen who stepped forward to apply for a background check and hand over more than $1,400 in cash, without buying ammunition or bothering to ask questions about the guns. When the sale was complete, Spengler scooped the weapons off the counter and they left the store.
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The Brady lawyers assert that Gander bears liability in the shooting (of two firefighters) because the store ignored the protocols established by the gun industry’s own trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). In its anti-straw purchase program, “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy,” the NSSF provides retailers with questions meant to smoke out suspicious buyers. The guidelines instruct clerks to ask, for instance, for details about how a buyer plans to use their purchase. If someone claiming to be the intended owner of the gun doesn’t respond reassuringly, the “Don’t Lie” program recommends refusing the sale. In its suit, Brady argues that Gander failed to follow the NSSF’s guidelines when it sold the weapons to Nguyen.
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http://www.thetrace.org/2016/04/lawsuit-against-missouri-gun-seller-plcaa/
Lawsuits Against Gun Sellers Almost Never Make it to Trial. This One Will.
The Missouri Supreme Court will allow a woman to sue a gun dealer despite PLCAA, a law that shields manufacturers and retailers from most liability suits.

In 2012, Janet Delana called a pawn shop in Odessa, Missouri, and begged an employee not to sell a gun to her suicidal, schizophrenic daughter. She told the worker at Odessa Gun & Pawn Shop that 41-year-old Colby Sue Weathers had been suffering from severe delusions and had purchased a pistol from the store a month earlier with the intention of killing herself — but her father had found and discarded the weapon. According to court documents, Delana asked the employee to keep a note with Weathers’s identifying information next to the register so that if she returned, the clerk on duty would know not to sell her a firearm.

Missouri law allows gun sellers to refuse a sale, for any reason. But the employee told Delana that he couldn’t make any promises. Two days later, the pawn shop sold Weathers a Hi-Point .45-caliber pistol, which she then used to shoot and kill her father.
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(O)n Wednesday, after considering the case on appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court determined that the case could proceed to jury trial — one of the few gun seller negligence cases to do so since PLCAA (sic) was enacted. The court ruled that while Delana couldn’t bring a general negligence claim against the gun shop, the lawsuit could proceed with a “negligent entrustment” claim. The seven-judge panel was unanimous in its decision.