The Long Chain

When 27-year-old Marquisha Wiley went out for a fun evening with friends in October 2021, she didn’t know Seventh Street Truck Park bar in St. Paul, Minnesota, would be host to a shootout between two gunmen. When the shooting stopped, she would lay injured along with 14 other innocent bystanders. Those 14 survived. Marquisha didn’t. 

Marquisha’s story, like nearly every instance of gun crime, happens at the end of a long chain of events. Our criminal justice system tends to focus on the person at the end of that chain — the one firing the gun. While it’s important that perpetrators of gun crime are held accountable, there are other links in that chain that deserve our attention. Further up the chain, there are many parties whose actions, or lack thereof, make gun crime possible and even foreseeable. If public safety officials don’t pursue those parties, they will never have to answer for their behavior. But if we look in the right places, use the right tools and take the right actions, we can perhaps prevent gun crime and the tragedies it causes before they happen. 

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Don’t get me wrong: Prosecuting individuals who commit violent crime is an essential tool of accountability and an important step on the road of healing for victims and justice for communities. It is and will continue to be an important tool in our toolbox and is one I am proud to use as attorney general. It is not, however, the only tool we have at our disposal to keep people safe.

Across America, the role attorneys general play in criminal prosecution varies widely. In some states, they do it all, and in some states, they do none of it. Here in Minnesota, responsibility for prosecuting felonies rests with county attorneys in Minnesota’s 87 counties, and they prosecute the vast majority of felonies committed in Minnesota and have original jurisdiction to do so. The attorney general plays a limited but important role in criminal prosecution: Under the law, my office can assist in criminal prosecutions only when a county attorney or the governor formally requests our help — often in situations where a county may not have the resources or expertise to handle a complex case. We are always ready to step in and lend a hand when we’re called upon to do so. In the last five years, we have helped 39 Minnesota counties prosecute more than 100 criminal cases, and I’m proud that our track record is stellar.

But across all 50 states, attorneys general have broad authority in civil law to protect consumers and advance economic opportunity. In Minnesota, my office uses this authority every day to protect consumers from fraud, to make sure workers get paid what they deserve and to help maintain a level playing field for businesses that play by the rules, among many other ways.

But attorneys general need not limit our broad consumer-protection authority in civil law only to helping consumers, as important as that is. Whether or not attorneys general have original criminal jurisdiction, we can also use our broad civil-law authority to advance public safety. This includes working to keep communities safe from gun violence. Because for every offender who pulled the trigger, there could be someone in a corporate boardroom who also bears some responsibility for a life cut short.

We’re doing this in Minnesota.

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The two men at the center of the St. Paul shooting that killed Marquisha Wiley, Terry Brown and Devondre Phillips, were criminally charged by the county attorney with murder and attempted murder. Both were convicted and sentenced to long terms in prison, as well they should have been. But what do we find when we follow the chain of events? During their investigation, law enforcement discovered that James Fletcher Horton Jr. (not among the shooters) had purchased and provided at least one of the guns found at the scene in St. Paul. Horton is known as a “straw purchaser,” someone who uses a clean criminal record to pass a background check and buy guns on behalf of others who would have been prohibited from possessing them.

Straw purchasing is illegal under federal and Minnesota law. Like the shooters, Horton was ultimately held responsible for the role he played. He was charged by federal prosecutors with making false statements during the purchase of a firearm. He pled guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison.

But even further up the chain is Fleet Farm, a regional sporting goods retailer based in Appleton, Wisconsin. Over a four-month period, a Fleet Farm store in Minnesota sold Horton 24 firearms, including one found at the scene of the St. Paul shootings.

The red flags were there for all to see. Some of these purchases were just days apart. Horton would often take pictures of the firearms Fleet Farm had available for purchase. At one point in the middle of this buying spree, a Fleet Farm manager raised to his supervisors that the frequency of Horton’s purchases and his behavior seemed suspicious, but his concerns were ignored.

Their inaction was dangerous. Weapons purchased by Horton turned up all over the Twin Cities: one at the scene of Marquisha’s death, another fired in the middle of Minneapolis and yet another found by a 6-year-old boy in his front yard. Gun dealers like Fleet Farm sell an inherently dangerous product, and though there are few regulations on the sales of firearms, dealers are required by law to ensure they are only selling firearms to those who can lawfully possess them for their own use — similar to the regulations on any dangerous product. In my office’s view, Fleet Farm failed to perform this crucial function.

Despite Fleet Farm allegedly failing to perform this crucial gatekeeping function, however — unlike the shooters and the straw purchasers — the gun dealer did not face any immediate legal repercussions.

In October 2022, my office sought to ensure that Fleet Farm would be held accountable for its inaction, just as Horton, Brown and Phillips were for their actions. My office filed a lawsuit against Fleet Farm, alleging that they negligently entrusted firearms to straw purchasers, aided and abetted straw purchasers’ violation of the law and permitted a public nuisance that endangers the public health and safety of Minnesotans.

We’re demanding that Fleet Farm turn over the profits from its unlawful firearm sales and strengthen their oversight of future firearm sales through training, more customer screenings for repeat buyers and supervision from an independent monitor. Our case has cleared numerous challenges and is currently pending in federal district court. If successful, the measures we seek could save lives by keeping more guns off the streets and out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have access to them.

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Fleet Farm is by no means the only corporation whose inaction has led to gun crime and its tragic consequences. In May 2021, 21-year-old Charlie Johnson was enjoying a night out, celebrating his coming graduation from the University of St. Thomas the following morning. He would never reach that milestone. A gunfight broke out between two assailants outside the Monarch nightclub in Minneapolis, and dozens of bullets sprayed the sidewalks in seconds. Eight bystanders were injured. Two people were killed, including one of the shooters and Charlie Johnson.

Jawan Carroll, the surviving shooter in the gunfight that took Charlie Johnson’s life, was convicted on nine counts of murder and attempted murder and sentenced to 70 years in prison. But once again, we must look further up the chain of events to get a fuller picture of accountability.

The weapon that killed Charlie was a modified Glock handgun. Whereas standard, semiautomatic Glock handguns fire one bullet with each trigger pull, the handgun in this case had been converted into a fully automatic weapon using a simple, cheap device called a “Glock switch.”

Glock switches can be purchased online for as little as $10, and installing one doesn’t require any special tools or technical know-how. Once converted, these handguns can fire continuously with virtually no delay between rounds. This makes the recoil much harder to control, and consequently aiming becomes much more difficult even for trained shooters, greatly increasing the potential risk to any bystanders.

This is a growing problem in my city: Rounds of machine-gun fire detected in Minneapolis went from 154 in 2020 to nearly 2,600 in 2023. And each one of those rounds has the potential to kill.

Glock has known about this issue for decades and has taken no action to address it. Gaston Glock, the founder of Glock, Inc., showcased a handgun in automatic fire mode using a Glock switch as far back as 1988. Over 35 years later, Glock’s handgun design hasn’t changed, and the company has yet to face any accountability for the deaths made possible by its refusal to fix the design flaw.

In December 2024, my office sued Glock, Inc., for its violation of several Minnesota consumer protection, negligence and product liability laws. We are not asking Glock to stop selling firearms: We are asking Glock to change the design of its semiautomatic handguns available to the public so that they cannot be easily converted into illegal machine guns. Our ongoing case has the potential to make a big impact in keeping streets safer in Minnesota and beyond; Attorney General Matt Platkin of New Jersey announced a similar suit against Glock on the same day we filed ours. 

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The firearm industry is a powerful one, with fleets of lobbyists that tilt the laws in their favor and well-resourced legal teams prepared to fight tooth and nail against any attempt at holding them accountable. That has made taking them to court a daunting task and has likely kept many potential suits from ever being filed. But we can’t afford to ignore the courts as an important aspect of the fight against gun violence.

Guns are the leading cause of death for young people in our country, cutting short more young lives than cancer or car crashes. It’s true that U.S. Supreme Court decisions like New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen have made it harder to hold gun companies accountable for their role in these tragedies, but that is even more reason to get creative and strategic in our efforts. It is my responsibility, and the responsibility of every attorney general or elected official, to use every tool at our disposal to address this issue. And people across this country should hold every one of their elected officials accountable for that responsibility.

Those of us tasked with upholding the law can’t just prosecute shooters and hope for a better tomorrow. We have to look at every link in the chain: The companies that let guns find their way into the hands of people who shouldn’t have them; the manufacturers that allow their guns to be easily made even more dangerous than they already are. Criminal law is insufficient to go after these upstream issues. Marquisha and Charlie should still be with us, but effective use of civil law could be a path to a world with fewer tragic stories like theirs.