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(KSL News) An injured survivor of the Trolley Square shootings has filed a lawsuit against the gun store that illegally sold a modified shotgun to Sulejman Talovic. Carolyn Tuft seeks damages for her injuries and for the death of her 15-year-old daughter. Should that gun store be liable for what a person does with a gun that it sold?
In a live debate on Eyewitness News at 6:30, Toni Marie Sutliff, of the Gun Violence Prevention Center, said she has a hard time answering that question. "The tragedy is we don't have the right laws on the books that would have prevented this tragedy in the first place. So whether they're liable or not, we just don't seem to have the reasonable gun laws in place."
For example, Sutliff says Utah doesn't require a waiting period, which she believes would have given the gun store time to look over the paperwork and make sure they had filled out it appropriately and that they were selling the appropriate gun to the right person. She says that waiting period would also have given Talovic a cooling-off period to rethink what he was going to do with the gun.
Clark Aposhian, of the Utah Shooting Sports Council, says even if the state had a waiting period, Talovic had passed that period of time when he committed the crime. "Mr. Talovic waited beyond the typical five- to 15-day waiting period before he did his heinous act, which is typical in most states. A 15-day waiting period being about the maximum," he said.
Aposhian says the state of Utah requires gun dealers to perform an instant ground check, and that the state's laws are actually stricter than federal laws, as far as releasing a firearm to an individual goes.
The rule broken in the Talovic case deals with the type of shotgun that was sold and how it was modified. It is illegal to sell the type of gun Talovic bought to a person under 21 years old. Talovic was only 18 years old but was able to purchase the gun anyway.
