Guns used to kill police officers: Where they come from and how they get in the hands of criminals

By Cheryl W. Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 21, 2010

Hattie Louise James was sitting on her front porch in Charlotte when two police detectives emerged from their car. There had been a shooting, they said. Two officers were dead. The gun had been traced back to her.

"I liked to had another heart attack," said the 72-year-old James, a retired hospital worker.

The .32-caliber revolver used to kill Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers Sean Clark and Jeff Shelton in April 2007 started out as a legally owned weapon. James bought it in 1991 at Hyatt Coin and Gun Shop in Charlotte, but it was stolen a year later from her husband's car. Fifteen years after that, it passed into the hands of 25-year-old Demeatrius Montgomery. This September, Montgomery was convicted of gunning down the officers outside a low-income housing complex in northeast Charlotte.

Clark and Shelton are two of 511 police officers killed by firearms in the United States from the beginning of 2000 through this past Sept. 30. The most recent local death occurred in June, when Maryland State Trooper Wesley Brown was slain while working off-duty at a restaurant in Prince George's County.

(More here.)