CRESTWOOD, Ky — When a person goes to purchase a firearm from a licensed federal dealer, they must first fill out a seven-page document and pass a federal background check. This process only takes a few minutes.
“There’s a lot of information. There’s a lot of questions here. There’s disqualifying questions,” said Barry Laws, president of Open Range, a gun range and store in Crestwood.
Laws has been a licensed federal firearms dealer for 16 years.
Some of the disqualifies include being a felon, or not being a U.S. citizen. There’s only one question about mental health, asking if the person has ever been committed to a mental institution or if they have a mental disability.
“If you say yes to that, we can’t transfer a firearm to you,” Laws said.
Like any other business, Laws added his staff reserves the right to not sell someone a gun if they feel something seems off.
“We do profiling here and it's not the kind of profiling that you're going to think is profiling, but we are very sensitive to people’s emotions and how they’re coming across so if there is anything strange about them we halt the process,” Laws said.
Still, Laws believes more can be done to prevent guns from getting into the hands of people looking to cause harm.
One way Laws suggests are well-being checks on people who are denied from purchasing a firearm.
“Just having somebody say, 'hey, are you OK?' Sometimes that’s the difference,” Laws said.
In years past, Laws has reached out to lawmakers to offer suggestions for how the firearm purchasing process could be made safer. Laws said those requests were never answered.
“I have never had a politician reach out to me and ask for my opinion on how to make this transaction safer, how to make our society safer,” Laws said. “We are the safety experts in firearms and I’ve never been reached out to and I think that’s just a travesty.”
In its annual gun law scorecard, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gave Kentucky an F rating.
“The best approach to stopping those kinds of tragedies is to create what’s called an extreme risk protection order,” Lindsay Nichols, policy director for the Giffords Law Center said.
Nichols said one solution is legislation allowing firearms to be temporarily taken away from a person who feels the need to harm themselves or others. A Crisis Aversion and Rights Retention bill was not filed during the 2023 legislative session.
“There are these emergency risk protection order laws which are a good way to solve not just our mass shooting problem but our gun suicide problem and other forms of gun violence,” Nichols said.
Laws said he would support laws like this in Kentucky.
Both agree more needs to be done to address mental health.
“So what is it about our youth, our young people, mostly it seems like, that are taking guns and feel it's appropriate to take another life,” Laws said.
“We need a better approach and we need to prevent access to the weapons that are making these events possible,” Nichols added.
Leaders of Kentucky’s legislature have yet to comment on gun reform laws following Monday’s mass shooting.