Danny Westneat of The Seattle Times writes:

When the husband and wife first met the stranger in a Chevron parking lot last year, he looked sketchy enough they had second thoughts about selling him their new semi-automatic assault rifle.

. . .

It turned out their instincts were right — John Christian Parks had an eight-felony-long rap sheet, for meth dealing and escaping from jail, and was developing paranoid, white-supremacist views. Still, the couple, who did not know who Parks was, sold him the gun for cash and later also sold him a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle — the same type of gun used in the Sandy Hook massacre.

. . .

These are exactly the types of gun sales that Initiative 594, the background-checks measure on the November ballot, is trying to stop. Instead of handing over an assault rifle to a stranger, the sellers would have been required to go with him to a gun shop and subject him to a background check.

Read the full article here.