The Gun-Rental Loophole
On the easternmost outskirts of Austin, Texas, there’s a gun club where I used to shoot skeet. Families came on weekends and made a day of it—there were picnic tables, vending machines and barbecue grills. A dog slept on the floor of the clubhouse. The adjacent property was a runway for radio-controlled airplanes, which we could see buzzing around beyond the range of the light target ammo in our shotguns. The outdoor skeet fields were neither as thunderous nor as claustrophobic as the indoor firing range in town. I felt safe there.
At that time, I owned a cheap 20-gauge Winchester semiautomatic, but the club would allow members or their guests to borrow the 12-gauge Berettas they kept on a rack near the front desk. One day the rack was empty, so I asked the woman working the register what had happened to the loaner guns. The club wouldn’t be lending them out anymore, she said, at least not for a while. “We had an accident,” she whispered.
For half a second I was surprised, before I realized that accidents—or worse—were inevitable. Nobody at the club had ever asked me or my guests if we knew how to handle a firearm, and we’d never been subjected to background checks before borrowing a shotgun.
State laws vary, but this is the way most firing ranges operate throughout the country—they require customers to show identification, fill out a waiver of liability and sign a form indicating that they’re mentally competent (which isn’t verified by anybody). It’s certainly not a foolproof system—and in addition to a few accidents, there have been more than a few suicides.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/the-gun-rental-loophole-109687.html
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