D.A. pushes effort to stop illegal gun buys
Law enforcers: ‘We’re all in this together’
NORRISTOWN » While Montgomery County’s Violent Crime Unit and its local law enforcement partners continue to crack down on gun trafficking networks and straw purchases, the county’s top prosecutor also is looking to gun shop operators and legislators to help with the fight.
“This is one of the huge, growing problems that we are facing in Southeastern Pennsylvania. It’s a problem because it puts guns in the hands of people that are not allowed by law to buy their own guns,” Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele said last week as he announced the dismantling of a major gun trafficking network that relied on straw purchase schemes.
“Straw purchases and the sale of those guns to people who cannot buy their own firearm legally are dangerous to the safety of all of our communities, and ghost guns are just as dangerous, if not more. Gun trafficking is a significant threat to public safety and should concern every law-abiding citizen,” Steele added. “We’re all in this together.”
A straw purchase occurs when a person with a clean background purchases firearms on behalf of another person to conceal the true ownership of the firearm. Those who are unable to legally purchase firearms include convicted felons, domestic violence offenders, juveniles and mentally ill individuals.
“It’s illegal and it’s dangerous,” Steele said. “More needs to be done and everybody’s got to be working together. We’re trying to do our part here in these cases and trying to track down these guns to prevent the loss of life, and that’s the bottom line.”
Steele suggested stronger tracking and reporting mechanisms have to be in place to be able to flag straw purchases to help keep illegal guns off the streets.
“One of the things that we’ve identified in terms of problems that we’re facing right now is that not many of these gun stores are on the EROS system,” said Steele, referring to the Electronic Record of Sale system. “What they’re using is a paper system and then the papers get sent to the state police and it takes time to get (information).”
But EROS, a part of the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General’s Track and Trace Initiative, is a key datadriven tool that can be used by investigators to quickly track gun traffickers’ illegal firearm purchases and uncover those who may be visiting more than one gun store and buying multiple firearms at the same time.
Steele indicated some gun stores have embraced the new technology but not all, which means some gun store operators still record firearms sales on hard copy paper and then send the information to the state police.
“More of the gun dealers need to be on this,” said Steele, urging expanding the use of electronic records rather than paper records. “EROS has to be mandatory.”
Steele has said gun store owners have the experience to be able to identify suspicious behavior and recognize straw purchase indicators and the ability to deny sales at any time. If a sale seems suspicious, gun dealers should notify law enforcement of the factors that led to their concern and let law enforcement do their job and investigate potential illegal firearm purchases, Steele has said.
Steele added gun shop operators need to be aware of “red flags,” such as when two individuals enter a store together and one points to weapons of interest and then the second person fills out the federal paperwork to purchase the guns.
“That’s a red flag that this is a straw purchase. So people have to get better at recognizing those and dealing with it,” Steele said.
Buying multiple guns of the exact same make and model also is a red flag sign of a straw purchase.
One recent investigation revealed that on more than one occasion, a Philadelphia man visited more than one gun store in a day, purchased multiple firearms at the same time, including multiple purchases of the same make and model of a gun, and traveled great distances, logging hundreds of miles, to make the purchases.
“The other thing is people are traveling great distances. They’re not just traveling to a local gun store. They’re going to Lancaster, they’re going to Berks, they’re going to Bucks, and they’re going to all these gun stores in the area and purchasing guns. Why are they traveling those distances to do it? Red flag,” Steele said.
“We need to put more responsibility on gun stores to handle this. I’ll say that they have been very cooperative with us so far, but it’s not enough,” Steele said. “And the Legislature needs to do something about it.”
With charges filed during the most recent gun trafficking investigation, authorities alleged Alexander Aaron Smith, 20, of Plymouth, also purchased ghost gun kits on the internet, assembled the guns and offered them for sale.
“Ghost guns are essentially untraceable because they don’t have serial numbers and seemingly can be purchased without a background check and require minimal assembly. They are illegal in some states, including New Jersey. They are not (illegal) in Pennsylvania right now and they should be,” Steele said. “They are very dangerous to the safety of our community. Ghost guns need to be illegal in Pennsylvania.”
Steele hopes lawmakers start looking at these issues more closely, that “there’s more of an appetite for doing some gun legislation that makes sense, that’s smart on crime, because it needs to happen.”
Steele said law abiding gun owners are also alarmed by gun trafficking and straw purchase crimes.
“I’ve talked to a lot of folks that believe in gun rights and they are more upset by this kind of action than others because it makes legitimate gun owners look bad when this is going on and so I think there’s a recognition that something needs to be done here,” Steele said.
Steele praised lawmakers for previously passing legislation commonly referred to as “The Brad Fox Law,” which sets mandatory sentences for those involved in the straw purchase of guns, “primarily because it is very dangerous and they end up involved in violent crimes.”
The law was named after Bradley Fox, of New Hanover, a five-year veteran of the Plymouth Township police force, who was fatally shot on Sept. 13, 2012, a day before his 35th birthday, by a Lower Merion man armed with an illegally obtained Beretta 9mm semiautomatic handgun as Fox pursued the man on foot near the Schuylkill River Trail after the man fled from a hit-and-run crash on Conshohocken Road. Fox died from a gunshot wound to the head and his killer then turned the gun on himself and died by suicide.
The law imposes a mandatory five-year prison term for a second offense when a gun purchased by someone with a clean record is then resold to someone not legally permitted to own or possess a firearm.
“I often talk about how the straw purchasers sometimes don’t know the seriousness of what they’re getting involved with and that’s part of the message that we’re trying to get out there, to try to deter people from doing this,” Steele said.
“If they don’t understand the consequences (of severe penalties) we really need to push that word out. Someone gets paid for buying guns for someone else and it’s just not worth it, not worth the jail time when somebody is caught,” Steele stressed.
Last week, Steele announced the arrests of 14 individuals who are accused of illegally obtaining and reselling 31 firearms using straw purchase schemes and also dealing in the sale of socalled “ghost guns” in a corrupt organization that operated in Montgomery, Berks, Bucks, Lancaster and Philadelphia counties.
The arrests represented the fourth gun trafficking network that the Violent Crime Unit dismantled since
September 2020.
In September, authorities crushed a gun trafficking network operating in Montgomery, Bucks and Philadelphia counties, alleging nine adults and five juveniles, including some from Norristown and Cheltenham, illegally obtained and sold 44 firearms using straw purchase schemes.
In October, authorities dismantled a gun trafficking network operating in Montgomery County, alleging five Norristown residents illegally obtained or transferred 15 firearms.
In November, the Violent Crime Unit shut down a Philadelphia man’s gun trafficking operation during which he allegedly purchased 36 firearms in eight counties in less than three months and illegally transferred them to others.
During the most recent investigation, only seven of the 31 weapons have been recovered, including one firearm recovered on Jan. 7 during an investigation of a home invasion robbery in Philadelphia, according to authorities.
“The other firearms are still in the wind. We don’t know where they are and that’s the dangerousness of straw purchases,” Steele said.
If anyone has information about any illegal firearms purchases, they are urged to call the Montgomery County Detective Bureau’s Crime Tipline at 610-278-DOIT (3648).
“Let us know information about it, anything we can do to stop the carnage that comes from these illegal guns from being out in our communities,” Steele said.