Kesselrings! Awesome to hear that name again. We use to get a few of the boys together and go down and stock up. Obliviously in the good old days.
Skagit County gun shop may have been worst in U.S.
April 30, 2014
BURLINGTON, Skagit County — For more than 65 years, Kesselring Gun Shop has been a firearms fixture in the Northwest, arming hunters, target shooters and police from one of the largest inventories on the West Coast.
Until surrendering its federal firearms license last October, the family-owned gun store also may have been the worst gun retailer in America.
It was nearly a decade ago when inspectors with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) first visited the sprawling gun store — three flat-roofed white buildings clustered on a gravel lot along Old Highway 99, some 70 miles north of Seattle. There they discovered that 2,396 guns — including hundreds of assault-style rifles and handguns — were either stolen, lost or unaccounted for.
Unable to show inspectors the required paperwork about who had the guns, Kesselring’s owners were hindering police efforts to trace any guns found at crime scenes, putting the public at risk.
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“Stunning,” said James Zammillo, a former ATF deputy assistant director, placing Kesselring’s lapses in national perspective. “That is just an incredible number.”
Much about the Kesselring store and ATF’s efforts to regulate it defy credulity.
In its 2005 inspection, the ATF not only discovered 2,396 unaccounted-for weapons but also a host of other illegalities: failing to secure caches of explosive powder; selling guns to customers who couldn’t pass background checks; not confirming buyer identity in 78 instances; neglecting to report missing guns to law enforcement.
Over the next five years, the gun store, run by three Kesselring brothers, continued its high-volume business unabated.
Eventually, the ATF found another 94 missing weapons and more gun-law violations. Also troubling, it determined that in two different years, Kesselring exhibited what ATF considers a “red flag” for possible gun trafficking: having 10 or more guns a year with a short “time-to-crime” — from sale to being used in a crime — of under three years.
But only in 2010, a year after the store had a record $14.6 million in sales, did ATF ask Kesselring’s owners to attend a warning conference about the 5-year-old violations. It took another three years — marked by many more background-check and record-keeping violations — before the agency forced Kesselring to surrender its firearms license for “willful” misconduct.
The eight-year, slow-motion enforcement of Kesselring Gun Shop mirrors problems at ATF over the same time. The agency is tasked with regulating the gun industry, but members of Congress — under relentless pressure from the powerful gun lobby — have made it almost impossible for the ATF to do so, cutting funding and imposing regulatory restrictions.
For one, ATF has too few inspectors to do the job, according to the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General.
In 2012, the Seattle division, for example, had only 27 inspectors to cover 4,006 licensed gun dealers in five states and Guam. It was understaffed by 32 jobs, making it the third-worst of ATF’s 25 divisions for understaffing.
“ATF is regulating the industry with one arm tied behind its back and the other one hampered as well,” said Zammillo, who retired from ATF and works as an industry consultant. “Gun laws are weak. I don’t expect it to change in my lifetime.”
The ATF is a “whipping post” for both the anti-gun left and the pro-gun right, said Special Agent Cheryl Bishop, spokeswoman for the Seattle division.
“They say, ‘Here’s a shovel and a pick, now dig a tunnel under Mount Rainier,’ ” Bishop said. “Then they come back a year later and say, ‘Gee, you didn’t get very far.’ ”
Hunting innovation
Kesselring Gun Shop opened in 1947 after Clarence Kesselring, a machinist and self-taught gunsmith, invented and later patented a revolutionary removable scope mount for hunting rifles. In doing so, he made his tiny shop a destination for big-game hunters from around the world. Kesselring mounts are still highly prized and sought after today.
For the past 60 years, the store has sold guns and shooting supplies only. Its aisles bristled with racks of assault-style rifles, shotguns and hunting firearms, and its counter cases displayed hundreds of handguns. Cases of ammunition were stacked thigh-high in every available space in between.
Over the past decade, Kesselring has routinely posted annual sales of more than $10 million, records show. In 2009, after President Obama was elected and the National Rifle Association warned that he was “coming for our guns,” the gun store posted record receipts of $14.6 million. Its inventory routinely included more than 8,000 guns.
Read the whole story here: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/skagit-county-gun-shop-may-have-been-worst-in-us/
