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Goodbye, Westforth Sports of Gary, Indiana.
Good riddance to an arms dealer whose careless practices resulted in hundreds of guns flooding into Chicago.
The nonprofit newsroom Pro Publica recently obtained a deposition the store’s owner gave in 2022, after being sued by the city of Chicago. In his sworn remarks, Earl Westforth described his unbelievably shoddy “system” for determining who could buy guns at his loathsome store.
As the deposition makes clear, the “system” amounted to Westforth and his staffers selling guns to just about anybody, whenever they felt like it. Some of those customers then traveled a few miles across the border into Chicago, where they sold the guns illegally at a profit, and in some cases then came back to buy more.
One notorious patron of Westforth Sports was Darryl Ivery Jr., an Indiana resident who in 2020 bought 19 guns in six months, spending over $10,000. He paid in cash and walked out with multiple guns at a time. Those actions are red flags for “straw sales” — when a gun is purchased with the intent of reselling it to a violent felon, an underage teen or someone else who can’t buy one legally. At least some of the guns purchased by Ivery, who pleaded guilty to lying on federal gun paperwork, wound up in the hands of violent criminals in Chicago.
As Pro Publica reported, police found a handgun that Ivery purchased at Westforth Sports on a teen caught breaking into a South Side apartment. Another gun went to a man accused of threatening a motorist with it in a road rage incident. Still another was found on a teen suspect in a 2020 shooting less than a month after Ivery had bought it from Westforth. In his sworn statement, Westforth said that he wasn’t required to determine a customer’s intent before selling a gun. As for Ivery, Westforth said, “Maybe the guy just likes guns.” Right.
Researchers at the University of Chicago figured out that this one small Indiana retail outlet was the third-largest supplier of firearms recovered by Chicago police, accounting for more than 850 guns between 2009 and 2016.
Westforth Sports faced legal battles, scrutiny from federal regulators and public denunciations over its many years in operation, and we’d like to tell you that the law finally forced it to close. In actuality, Westforth was able to fend off those challenges and leave the gun biz on his own terms earlier this year, announcing a “retirement sale” to liquidate remaining inventory.
What does this tell us about the state of gun regulations? Pro Publica’s story about Westforth showed how America’s 60,000-plus gun shops have little financial incentive to turn away questionable buyers and face scant penalties for engaging in illegal transactions.
We will add the obvious truth that gun rules vary by state, and, in that regard, Indiana is a terrible neighbor.
Illinois has some relatively strict rules, including a ban on private purchases of assault-stylerifles that the U.S. Supreme Court recently let stand despite complaints from gun lovers. Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, on the other hand, signed a bill into law last year that eliminates altogether the license requirement for carrying a handgun in his state, despite pleas from law enforcement — and this page — to veto it. Indiana lawmakers had previously made the permit free of charge and available without any training requirement, so its remaining purpose was mainly to assist police in determining whether someone was legally carrying a gun during a traffic stop.
Sorry, officers, but Holcomb and the Republican majority in Indiana’s statehouse decided your safety wasn’t worth requiring their fellow Hoosiers to fill out a simple form.
As this page noted when pleading with Holcomb to veto the permitless-carry measure, “Surely, no reasonable person could support making getting a gun in Indiana even easier yet.”
Alas, nothing about Indiana gun regulation is reasonable, and it is beyond frustrating that year after year, decade after decade, Chicago bears the brunt.
Chicago Tribune Opinion
After presiding over initiatives to loosen gun restrictions, Holcomb earlier this month signed a bill outlawing a recent invention called a “Glock switch” that can turn a semi-automatic gun into a machine gun. The federal government already had outlawed the device.
Too little, too late, Governor.
Some of us remember the oft-contentious meetings of the Tribune Editorial Board with Richard M. Daley during his long tenure as the city’s mayor. The board and Daley argued back and forth about many issues. But when asked to name the biggest problem facing the city, Daley gave a short, simple answer: guns.
As Daley well understood, many of those guns used in Chicago crimes came from Indiana, and he didn’t mince words denouncing the lax rules and uncaring attitudes of elected officials across the border.
On that point, he got no argument from us.
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