Apparently, some retailers, such as Wal-Mart, ask customers to furnish contact information and show a photo ID when they buy ammunition. The retailers share this information with local police or agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The sellers of ammo are not required to maintain lists of purchasers or share them with authorities. It's all done voluntarily.
The ATF runs background checks on those who buy ammunition and, should they stumble across felons, they go after them to see if they're packing a firearm.
If you've been convicted of almost anything in state or federal court, and you have bullets, you go to federal prison.
The feds can send you away for 15 years.
This Steve Morton was facing that penalty as a result of going to Wal-Mart and buying ammo.
He's lucky the case was moved to state court, where Morton pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a handgun. Rasin sentenced him to the mandatory five years in state prison. She says Morton was shocked that the purchase of a box of bullets could send him back indoors for so long.
The case raises this question: Why not require criminal background checks for the purchase of ammunition? At the least, Wal-Mart should put up a sign at the sales counter: "It is a federal crime to be a felon in possession of bullets. If you've done time, don't even think about buying them from us."
It might hurt sales, but it could also prevent a crime - or at least slow a bad guy down.
"If the record checks were done pre-sale and people with records were screened out, we would be preventing the commission of the crime of felon-in-possession," Rasin says.
She thinks the DOC and the Department of Parole and Probation need to do what the feds have been doing for the last couple of years and give paroled felons full warning about the consequences of getting their hands on guns and bullets.
The Morton case was hardly the first time the feds had traced the purchase of ammunition to a convicted felon.
In January 2006, Baltimore detectives got the ammunition sales logs at the Wal-Mart on Port Covington Drive and checked it against criminal records. That led them to Donta Tyrone Gillie, who had multiple drug convictions in Maryland.
In searching Gillie's house in the 1200 block of Madison Ave., cops found three boxes of .25-caliber ammo, a handgun, a Beretta .25-caliber, semiautomatic handgun with a tan holster and a magazine with eight .25-caliber cartridges. According to the U.S. attorney's office, Gillie told the officers that he paid $40 for the handgun for his personal protection and purchased the ammunition to celebrate New Year's Eve.
A federal judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
You have been forewarned, Maryland felons. My job is finished here.
dan.rodricks@baltsun.com
Drug dealers, former drug dealers and others with criminal records can obtain information about re-entry programs and jobs by contacting columnist Dan Rodricks at 410-332-6166 or at dan.rodricks@baltsun.com. Additional information about job placement programs for ex-offenders is online at baltimoresun.com.
