If you think that the story of a journalist purchasing an AR-15 from a gun shop in seven minutes was terrifying, then you might want to avert your eyes from this next bit. An editor for the Vermont-based altweekly Seven Days was able to purchase the same gun with no background check out of the back of a car in a Five Guys parking lot.
And even crazier, that sort of transaction is completely legal in Vermont, home of the United States’ most lax gun laws.
While it took him a little longer than that Philly AR-15 purchase, clocking in at 9 minutes, Paul Heintz was able to purchase the weapon used in the Orlando nightclub shooting just days before without filling out any paperwork or even providing identification. Heintz did everything in his power to make the sale seem sketchy and still walked away $500 poorer and holding a rifle that had been used in many of our most recent and horrific mass shootings.
“Does it shoot as-is? Hoping to buy ASAP,” he wrote to a seller he found on the online gun marketplace Armslist. And when the seller asked him to bring ID, he asked if they could “skip that step.”
“If you are visibly of age then yes,” he responded.
Here’s how the sale went down, via the article:
“A little after 5 p.m., a young man wearing a blue flannel shirt, Carhartts and Timberlands approached me outside the Five Guys, which is sandwiched between a Chipotle and a GNC in a busy shopping center next to Interstate 189. The seller was tall and rail-thin, with short blond hair and stubbly facial hair.
…
The man pointed to his car across the parking lot and suggested I move mine to the space next to it. He opened his rear passenger-side door, apologized for the car’s messy state and unzipped an olive green carrying case. The weapon was a generic AR-15, with a Radical Firearms mid-length barrel, an Aero Precision lower receiver and a Walther PS 22 red-dot sight. It came with three empty 30-round magazines. …He handed me the weapon, the barrel of which protruded from the carrying case. I placed it in the backseat of my car and covered it with a jacket.”
After he handed over the weapon to an absolute stranger, the dealer didn’t even bother to count the money he was being paid for the rifle. Makes the idea of a temporary moratorium on assault-rifle sales seem a little bit more reasonable, doesn’t it?