A mentally ill man gets hold of a gun and kills his mother. Nothing unusual in gun-crazy USA, right? Hardly worth even mentioning.
Except the story of how this clearly deranged man bought the gun is worth recounting. It shows how the laws and procedures for gun purchase need to be changed - NOW! You see, two days before the tragic incident, the man had tried to purchase the pistol at the sporting goods store Cabela's, but the alert staff realized something was amiss:
On the evening of May 1, a noticeably distraught Andrew Leighton walked into the outdoors superstore in Scarborough looking to buy a handgun. He passed the mandatory criminal background check – he had no felony convictions or involuntary commitments for psychiatric treatment -- but he was so agitated and erratic that the staff wisely declined to make the sale.
.But Andrew Leighton was not to be deterred. The very next day Leighton returned to the same Cabela's. This time, the staff sold him the pistol. And to make amends for the inconvenience Cabela's gave Leighton the bullets at no extra charge.
This attention to customer service - at least when it comes to selling guns - has made the Cabela brothers very rich indeed:
About one-third of Cabela's $3.1 billion in sales last year came from firearms, ammunition and accessories, and a substantial amount of its all-important sales growth came from its gun business. Cabela's first-quarter 2013 same-store sales growth was 24%, but it was only 9% excluding firearms and ammunition. The company set a new record for first-quarter revenue, which increased 28.7% to $802.5 million.
Still, some of the Cabela employees are not sleeping well over this episode, and have reached out to the local newspaper to express their remorse:
Another employee, in a telephone conversation with Press Herald reporter David Hench, said "it was very well known on the gun counter, this guy was not quite right."
"We're all told to keep an eye out for things like this," the second employee said. "It's just the ball got dropped in a bad way."
But, hey, another victory for the Second Amendment.