A police chief’s nightmare: Gun sold at auction used by buyer to shoot at officers
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The sale of seized guns by the city of Wichita
More than 2,000 firearms have been sold by City Hall since 2015, when it held its first gun sales in compliance with the state law that was passed a year earlier.
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Wichita is selling guns seized in crimes but receiving less than half of the proceeds
A police chief’s nightmare: Gun sold at auction used by buyer to shoot at officers
See what firearms seized in crimes have been sold by the city of Wichita since 2017
Dion Lefler talks about how he went about reporting the story
See inside the Wichita Police Department’s gun locker
A gun seized in a crime is sold back into circulation by the police department, falls into the wrong hands and is used to shoot brother officers.
Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay has been there.
“I kind of lost my breath, like I’d been punched in the gut,” Ramsay said of the day he learned that a gun sold by his department had been used in a shootout in another town that left two police officers wounded.
When he was chief of police in Duluth, Minn. in 2015, the city made national news after a disgruntled man armed with a shotgun opened fire on police officers during a city council meeting in the Minneapolis suburb of New Hope.
Ramsay said he got the bad news when the sheriff of Hennepin County, a friend of his, called to tell him the gun used in the shooting had been bought from Duluth police in an online auction.
Ramsay then had to call New Hope’s chief, also a friend in Minnesota’s tight-knit police community.
“I obviously just had a terrible feeling about the whole incident,” Ramsay said. “I talked to the chief and of course, you know, relayed my feelings on the incident, concern at what had happened.”
The only fortunate part was that neither of the officers died from their gunshot wounds, but it was still traumatic for all involved, Ramsay said.
“It was beyond just the physical harm, but it was also the psychological,” he said. “Oftentimes we think in terms of, you know, we say that someone has non-life-threatening injuries. But a lot of the times those shootings and these traumatic injuries . . . the long-term psychological impact can be worse than any physical injury. That’s true for any victims of violent crime.”
Other police officers at the New Hope council meeting returned fire and killed the gunman, identified as 68-year-old Raymond Kmetz.
In the shootout, one of the officers was shot by Kmetz. The other was hit with a stray bullet fired by the officer who killed Kmetz.
A failed landscape contractor, Kmetz had previously expressed multiple and varied grudges against city officials and police, who he blamed for his business and personal failures.
It’s a rare incident, but a classic example of how crime guns that are sold through online auctions can wind up with the wrong people and be used to commit more crimes, despite the safeguard of requiring that they be sent to a federally licensed firearms dealer who runs background checks before handing over the weapon.
Kmetz had a long history of mental problems and a record of arrests for assault, stalking, terrorist threats, burglary and destruction of property, according to reporting done at the time by WCCO-TV in Minneapolis.
With that rap sheet, there was no way Kmetz could have passed a background check to buy weapons.
So after purchasing the firearm online, he recruited a friend to pick up the gun and take the background check for him.
It’s called a “straw purchase” in the gun world and Kmetz’s friend wound up sentenced to a year in jail for it.
The dealer who ran the check and delivered the firearm — who was later sued by the wounded officers — told WCCO that the mismatch between the name on the order and the name of the man who picked up the gun didn’t raise any red flags for him.
“I see it all the time,” he said. “People get their bidding numbers turned off so they sign up with a new name, a new Yahoo email account, to become a bidder so that they can buy things.”
Ramsay said he never expected guns sold from his department’s property room would cycle back to someone like Kmetz and be used to attack police.
“We sold only hunting guns,” Ramsay said. “Hunting guns, it was different in my mind than assault rifles and handguns. But obviously this was a shotgun.”
Starting a few months before Ramsay arrived here in 2015, Wichita has sold 2,082 police-seized weapons back into circulation.
About 77% of those are handguns, 13% shotguns and 10% rifles.
“The legal advice I have is this is all dictated by state statute,” Ramsay said. “We don’t really have a choice.”
In Duluth, Ramsay halted all police gun sales after the New Hope shooting.
“We stopped selling them immediately and were reviewing it,” he said.
Ramsay said he didn’t finish that review because Wichita hired him soon after and he left Duluth.
A department spokesman confirmed that Duluth no longer sells any guns and hasn’t since the New Hope shooting.
This story was originally published August 29, 2021 at 5:05 AM with the headline "A police chief’s nightmare: Gun sold at auction used by buyer to shoot at officers."
