Gun Store Owner: Changing gun laws won't prevent tragedies

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - The movie theater shooting in Colorado Friday has re-ignited the debate on gun control. A Fort Wayne gun store owner told us banning guns won't stop tragedies from happening.

"There will always be malicious people out there who want to do this and they'll use whatever means," Shaun Beiswanger, the owner of Sniper Company in Fort Wayne, said.

The gun store sells a wide variety of firearms and ammunition, including weapons like the ones used in the theater shooting. One was an AR-15 rifle, one was a shotgun and a handgun with an extended magazine.

"They're not assault rifles," Beiswanger said about the AR-15. "They were once thrown into the assault weapons category, but now people are starting to understand they are just rifles just like any other semi-automatic rifles. We've been shooting for 200 years since the country was founded and there's no reason to not have these rifles. We use them for target practice, sporting, coyotes."

Beiswanger said criminals will always find a way to get weapons and banning them from law abiding citizens won't solve anything.

To get a gun, people have to fill out this form and be approved. Changing the process won't keep guns out of criminals' hands, he said.

"The bad guys never abide by that. The only way they get guns is by theft or lying," Beiswanger said.

The Colorado shooting's been the talk of his store for days.

"They couldn't believe there wasn't one person in there with a concealed weapon who could have stood up and ended it," he said.

In a media release, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence , Dan Gross, said, "This tragedy is another grim reminder that guns are the enablers of mass killers and that our nation pays an unacceptable price for our failure to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people."

In the Colorado case, the accused gunman had no prior record to prevent him from buying guns and ammunition.

"There are questions those gun store owners maybe should have asked," Beiswanger said. "He did seem odd. He seemed nervous. He bought 4,000 round of ammunition and seemed really excited about needing it by a certain date. To me, it doesn't mean much. Maybe he had a competition coming up, but maybe this will lead to more questions. We always reserve the right to refuse a sale."

Beiswanger added that, ultimately, no one can predict what someone will do.

"We can't accuse him of doing something before he did it," he said.

Even though some lawmakers are calling for stricter gun laws now, the chances of that actually happening are slim.

According to Gallup, the number of Americans who wanted stricter laws was 78 percent back in 1990.
In 1995, that number was down to 63 percent. By last year, despite events like Columbine, Virginia Tech, and the Tucson shootings, support had fallen to just 44 percent.

Gun control advocates said the biggest obstacle in getting new laws passed is the lobbying power of the N.R.A.