STAUNTON, Va -- In a world where Amazon.com and other websites can track your purchases, some would imagine that buying ammo and firearms would be more difficult than pressing the buy now button.
That was all it took for James Holmes, the man who police say shot and killed 12 people on Friday. Holmes was able to stock up on thousands of bullets before he reportedly opened fire in the movie theater.
Now the question is why were any of his purchases not noticed?
Right now, there is no restriction on the sale of bullets in the United States. In fact, local gun dealers said the thousands of rounds that Holmes bought is not an abnormal purchase.
"There are a lot of recreational shooters. Six-thousand rounds of ammo is nothing to a shotgun shooter,” said Chris Kincheloe, a firearms dealer at Nuckols Guns. “He's shooting 50 rounds at time during one course of fire. So, 6,000 rounds of ammo, is not that much."
A recreational shooter may shoot off about 500 rounds in a weekend. Kincheloe said people regularly purchase mass amounts of ammo, so there was no red flag there.
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