KARE 11 Investigates: Man handcuffed after retailer sold him a stolen gun

kare11 ^

[algore]

It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 27, 2021. Umon Moore was with friends, including a woman and teenage boy, doing target practice.

The group had five handguns and a rifle lying out on an old cement graffiti-covered bridge railing on a back-country road in Tennessee. They had been shooting down into a riverbank.

Sgt. Key with the Sheriff’s Office rolled up and informed them that you can’t shoot from a bridge or roadway.

Bodycam video reviewed by KARE 11 shows the entire interaction was polite and respectful by all involved.

The deputy seems inclined to just give the group a warning, but first asks if he can run the firearms to ensure they’re not stolen.

The group on the bridge has no objections.

He begins calling in serial numbers to dispatch to run through NCIC – a database of stolen guns maintained by the FBI.

The first two guns come back clean, then Sgt. Key calls in a Springfield XD-40 – a .40 caliber semiautomatic handgun.

It comes back stolen

After 33 minutes in handcuffs on the side of the road, Moore was set free to call Scheels in Minnesota to try and confirm his story.

“Call ‘em,” Key said. “And if they can fax that information to us at the Sheriff’s Office it goes a long way.”

Records show Scheels sent over documentation confirming that Moore bought the handgun from them. The stolen firearm was confiscated, he was let go.

On the body camera footage, both the deputy and Moore seem perplexed as to how a major sporting goods store like Scheels could have sold a stolen gun

[Spktyr]

There is a national database - but only for actual VINs, i.e., post 1980 cars. There’s no standard for chassis numbers before then, no universal format for them and lots of duplication that would make trying to track pre-standardization numbers a nightmare.

1980-on cars have the standardized seventeen character VIN we know today and all of those are in ‘universal’ databases that are easily searched.