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SALT LAKE CITY — The police chief of Utah's capital city believes easy access to guns is partly to blame for domestic violence crimes.
Chief Chris Burbank said he supports placing additional restrictions on who can obtain certain types of firearms during a discussion Wednesday on crime rates with KSL's The Doug Wright Show.
"I don't care what side of the issue you're on," Burbank said. "It is an access to firearms issue when someone can walk a school, walk in our mall, walk into a bank or abuse their spouse with a firearm. That is unacceptable."
Salt Lake City has seen its share of gun violence in recent years.
An 18-year-old man used a pistol-grip shotgun to kill five people and wound four others during a February, 2007 attack at the Trolley Square mall. Officers then shot and killed him.
In August of 2010, Salt Lake City police officers confronted a heavily armed and armored gunman outside the Grand America Hotel. They exchanged fire. The officers used handguns but the shooter had a .223-caliber rifle. A patrolman was shot in the leg and the suspect, a U.S. Army deserter, was killed.
Burbank stopped short though of advocating a complete ban on certain types of weapons.
We need to do something about it and arming the citizenry is not going to solve that problem.
–Chief Chris Burbank
"I'm not one that says we take guns away from people or anything else. But there are certainly people you can't argue should not have access to firearms because of their propensity for violence, because of what they've done in the past."
Burbank said restrictions already exist for ownership of fully-automatic weapons or those with shortened barrels. He said people are allowed to own those weapons, but only with a special permit. Those restrictions, in Burbank's view, could be expanded to cover other types of guns.
"There's a category of weapons that people can still have access to," Burbank said, "but they have to go through a process by which they register and we determine if they are valid individuals to have those firearms."
Burbank's comments came on the same day that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reconsider an earlier decision dealing with concealed weapons permits. In February, the appeals court justices struck down a San Diego County, California rule requiring people seeking a concealed weapons permit to show cause beyond simple self-defense.
Burbank though said an expanded gun ownership permit system would constitute a "common sense" solution.
"We need to do something about it and arming the citizenry is not going to solve that problem," Burbank said.
