Wal-Mart Halts Gun Sales After State Laws Broken

The California attorney general’s office said Friday that Wal-Mart stores in the Central Valley committed nearly 500 violations of the state’s gun laws, including selling weapons to felons and releasing firearms to buyers before the end of the required 10-day waiting period.

In each of six stores audited by investigators, “there were violations of such magnitude that we are convinced it is not an isolated problem but a systemic, statewide problem,” a spokeswoman for Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said.

A spokesman for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said the company agreed to temporarily halt firearms sales in California -- the first time the nation’s largest retailer has stopped gun sales across an entire state -- because the company is committed to correcting the problem by retraining employees.

“There have been a number of changes in firearms laws in California over the past two years,” said Wal-Mart spokesman Robert McAdam. “All the violations are not in the nature of giving guns to people who shouldn’t have them. Most of the violations have to do with our failure to complete the proper forms or to complete the forms in their entirety.”

In a statement released late Friday, Lockyer praised Wal-Mart for “acting promptly and responsibly.” Violations of the type found at Wal-Mart are misdemeanors, officials said, but criminal charges will not be filed because the company is cooperating.

Lockyer said the investigation began after firearms inspectors, conducting routine checks at a Wal-Mart in rural Turlock on March 18, turned up so many violations of state law -- 94 -- that they moved the following week to other Wal-Mart stores in Merced and Los Banos.

In two weeks, the team found nearly 400 more violations in six stores in the Central Valley and the Sacramento area. The violations, state officials said, occurred during a period of six months to one year. None of the stores was fully in compliance with state gun laws.

Wal-Mart employees at the Los Banos store, Lockyer said, sold a shotgun to a man convicted of spousal abuse and a “long gun” to a customer who had been convicted of felony drug charges. State and federal laws prohibit selling guns to felons or to those convicted of domestic violence.

Those guns have since been seized by law enforcement officials, who confiscated four additional guns from the buyer with a drug conviction and a high-powered rifle from a man previously jailed for spousal abuse. Their names were not released, but authorities said both face new criminal charges for possessing the weapons.

Lockyer said clerks at the Los Banos store also sold guns to two buyers before the end of the required 10-day waiting period. Three other times, Wal-Mart employees sold firearms after the buyers’ 30-day application period had expired, he said.

The most common violations, according to Lockyer’s office, included failure to electronically scan buyers’ driver’s licenses, failure to get thumbprints and selling before the end of the waiting period, which allows authorities to check criminal records.

Wal-Mart’s McAdam said many of those waiting-period violations came because clerks started the clock the day the potential buyer came into the store rather than the following day, as mandated by law -- often a difference of just 12 hours.

The action taken against Wal-Mart -- the nation’s largest firearm dealer -- is by far the most sweeping in recent years against improper gun sales at stores, said Hallye Jordan, a spokeswoman for Lockyer’s office. In the last three years, Jordan said, gun dealers’ licenses have been revoked just 10 times, and none of the dealers had more than a few locations. Those cases, she said, generally involved illegal weapons.

“It’s not criminal intent,” Jordan said of Wal-Mart’s violations. “It’s poor management, poor communication and poor training.”

The news comes at a bad time for Wal-Mart as the Bentonville, Ark.-based company embarks on a dramatic expansion across California. Wal-Mart -- the No. 1 company in the Fortune 500, with revenue of $247 billion -- now has 137 stores in California, 118 of which sell firearms.

Luis Tolley, head of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, questioned whether action against Wal-Mart should be confined to California.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “If the attorney general has found hundreds of violations in just six stores in one month, how many will there be across the country? We have much better enforcement [of gun laws] in California than most states, so what do you think is happening in those states that don’t have such great enforcement?”

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Times staff writer Steve Berry contributed to this report.