Jury Rules Gun Shop Liable for a Weapon That Wounded Police Officers

Jurors order a Wisconsin gun store to pay almost $6 million to two Milwaukee police officers who were shot and seriously wounded by a gun purchased at the store.

Badger Guns will have to pay almost $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages to officer Bryan Norberg and retired officer Graham Kunisch.

When police began investigating how Burton obtained the weapon, they found surveillance footage of him at Badger Guns a month before the shooting.

During the trial, the gun store’s lawyers and staff maintained that Badger Guns had never intentionally sold weapons to criminals.

The officers’ lawsuit sought almost $10 million in damages, and at its conclusion Norberg was awarded $1.5 million for medical expenses and lost income and Kunisch $3.5 million in damages, reported CNN.

There are now a half dozen other lawsuits pending against gun dealers or gun stores, accused of allowing the illegal sale of firearms and Tuesday’s verdict could impact those and future cases.

The lawsuit calls on the suburban municipalities to do more to make sure that gun stores are following proper procedures under state and federal law, including how to sniff out straw purchasers.

Jurors sided with the officers, ruling that the store was negligent in selling the gun.

“Getting a case like this even before a jury is a herculean task”, said Ladd Everitt, director of communications for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence in Washington, D.C., referring to the law as the “gun industry immunity law”.

“We’re talking 450 to 530 gun traces that were coming back to the store” per year, Diedrich said. The victims have to prove that the dealer failed to follow the law.

The act does not protect companies that can be shown to have sold guns illegally, however, prompting the straw purchase negligence lawsuit against Badger Guns, which Skaggs described as an egregious case. ATF officials recommend gun shops look for obvious signs someone is buying a gun for someone else- if one person is dealing with the gun but another comes in at the last minute with the paperwork, or if there is an exchange of cash during the transaction.

Walter and Michael Allan and Beatovic were present in court at times during the trial but did not turn up for the verdict on Tuesday.

And the appeals process could drag on for years, Dunphy said, before there is any hope of Norberg and Kunisch receiving any of the jury’s awards. Rather, they said Collins and Burton went out of their way to deceive the salesman.

“Whether they are going to see a dime of it or not, that’s an open question”, he said.