An unidentified California man reportedly sidestepped federal law and shot himself to death after renting a gun at a shooting range, KTXL-TV reported on Wednesday.
The man acquired the gun early Wednesday afternoon at Guns, Fishing & Other Stuff, a shooting range in Vacaville. The store’s owner, Travis Morgan, told KTXL anyone renting a gun to use at his store’s shooting range must sign a waiver.
However, while federal law requires a background check for people purchasing firearms, it does not do the same for anyone renting a gun at establishments like Morgan’s, enabling the man to take the gun to the range, located in the store’s basement, and turn it on himself.
Morgan said this was the first incident of his kind at his store, which left his staff “overwhelmed.”
“We’ve been trying to find what we could have done differently,” Morgan told KTXL. “We have monitors in the range, we have people down there, and he turned around for one second.”
A similar incident took place at Center Mass, another local shooting range, in March 2012,when a Sacramento man was found dead from a single gunshot to the left temple. The Solano County Coroner’s Office determined that the man’s death was a “possible suicide, not an accident.”