The Louisville bank shooter's gun could return to the streets. Here's how to stop it.

It’s time to realize that if we’re going to get anything accomplished when it comes to guns and the easy availability of them that makes our streets and office buildings war zones, we’re going to have to do it without the help of Republican lawmakers.

The ones in Kentucky, at least, don’t have the guts to stand up to the National Rifle Association, to even pass things like a red flag law that would allow courts worried about people’s mental well-being to bar them from owning guns.

Once we realize that, we can start to fix the problem.

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First, we need to make sure guns that have been used to kill and maim people don’t make it back onto the streets where they can kill and maim people again.

Gun proponents argue that it wasn't the gun's fault. I don't care.

As someone who has had someone close to me killed by someone with a gun, it would absolutely break my heart to think that gun is ever again used to take a life.

But it's wrong not just on a personal level but on a public policy level as well.

Selling guns used in crimes to the highest bidder

It seems simple enough to me: Government shouldn’t be in the business of increasing the flow of cheap, used firearms to the streets. Not now. Not ever.

But that’s exactly what we’re doing with a ridiculous 25-year-old Kentucky law that requires guns used in crimes be auctioned to the highest bidder. And we know those guns are being used to commit crimes.

I’ve written about this and even attended one of the Kentucky State Police-run auctions after a kid shot up Marshall County High School, killing two classmates.

That gun will likely be sold at auction, too, if it hasn’t been already.

The gun that a 25-year-old used on April 10, killing five at the Old National Bank in Louisville, will likely be auctioned as well at some point after the police finish examining it and it is no longer needed by the courts.

Mayor Craig Greenberg came into office promising to make inoperable the guns used in crimes but quickly learned he couldn’t do that without breaking the law – and so in an act of disobedience, he’s simply having their firing pins removed.

It’s not much. It's hardly anything at all.

Gunsmiths can replace the firing pins in a matter of minutes in most cases.

But there is something Greenberg can do.

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I've seen damage guns do firsthand: As a doctor, I've seen what an AR-15 does to the body. Unless we act, so will many Americans.

Back in 1990, a year after the shooting at Standard Gravure in Louisville, in which Joseph Wesbecker killed seven people and wounded 13, the Louisville Police Department might have figured it out for us.

Following the shooting, Wesbecker’s son asked to have his father’s AK-47-style rifle and 9mm handgun returned to the family.

State law, at the time, allowed the police department to destroy guns of those who were convicted of crimes. The problem was that Wesbecker killed himself after shooting his victims – so he was never convicted.

There was real concern that a judge would have no option but to turn over the guns to Wesbecker’s son.

That’s when then-Chief Richard Dotson called in for backup from the feds. He asked then-U.S. attorney Joe Whittle, a Republican, to help.

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The federal government has broad authority to seize and destroy any weapon involved in any crime that violates a federal law – even if the person committing the crime isn’t convicted.

The city quietly turned Wesbecker’s weapons over to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The U.S. attorney’s office decided that it had authority to take the guns because the Standard Gravure shooting occurred inside a business and therefore interfered with interstate commerce.

The federal government clearly could seize the AR-15-style rifle used at the Old National Bank based on the interstate commerce clause.

In fact, many, if not most, guns used in crimes in Louisville could be seized by the federal government because so many involve illegal drugs and gang activity, or are being wielded by someone with a felony on their rap sheets.

A former assistant U.S. attorney told me that the Department of Justice might not intervene if the state objected – but that if the city and the state cooperated on such an agreement, this might just work. The U.S. attorney’s office, under both Republicans and Democrats, has long worked to remove guns used in crimes from the street.

I’ve asked both Mayor Greenberg’s office and Gov. Andy Beshear’s office their thoughts on what Louisville did with Wesbecker’s guns,  and whether they’d be up for trying the same thing with the gun used at Old National Bank and other guns used to kill and maim.

I haven’t heard back.

If anything is going to get done on this front, though, it will have to be because of Greenberg and Beshear doing an end run around Kentucky's GOP-controlled legislature.

That's because Kentucky Republicans have shown us they aren’t willing to take on the NRA.

Joseph Gerth is a columnist at the Louisville Courier-Journal, where this column first ran. Follow him on Twitter: @Joe_Gerth