Red flags are easy to see in hindsight, but often much less obvious as they occur. Perhaps someone at Westforth Sports should have eventually become suspicious of Ivery, on the other hand Westforth's procedures are actually considerably more than what the ATF requires or suggests.

Supposedly Ivery purchased 19 firearms over 6 months. There is no description of what he was purchasing but supposedly those 19 firearms totaled just over $10,000 which suggests they cost about $550 average. That is a pretty common price point for a good-but-not-expensive firearm. It's about twice the price of the low-priced pistols one might expect for gun running into Chicago. The ProPublica hit piece doesn't give any information about what Ivery bought. If he was buying several of the same gun, I'd say that should have been suspicious, but from the limited information provided, it is clear he was buying different firearms.

This might come as a shock to gun hating liberals who can't tell one gun from another, but it actually isn't rare for someone to buy a gun that looks good in the store, get home, go to a range to shoot it a few times, then decide they would rather have something different, and buy another. There is no reason why someone coming back to buy a different gun would be a cause for concern at a gun shop, even if they noticed -- a busy gun shop with several employees probably wouldn't even notice. I visit two local gun shops, at one there are only two employees and both know me, at the other there are about a dozen at any time and the only time I recall seeing the same person twice was the office clerk who handles NFA transfers.

Did Westforth know that some of the guns sold in his shop were ending up across the state line in Chicago just 15 minutes away? Sure he did. Any gun shop in Gary Indiana would know that some of their guns were likely to find their way across the state line despite being sold only to Indiana residents with a photo ID and a background check. That's why the democrats running Chicago have always wanted to close down every gun shop in all the surrounding states.

According to ProPublica, Chicago authorities found three guns that Westforth traced as being bought by Ivery. Simple question: Did Westforth sell Ivery any guns AFTER finding that one of his guns was in Chicago? The article doesn't say, but I can guarantee that if he had that would certainly have been included. So what we have here is a gun shop in Gary Indiana, on the Illinois state line, legally selling guns to Ivery who is an Indiana resident who passed the background check. Later they discover that one of the guns Ivery bought was found in Chicago. No more guns are sold to Ivery. But somehow it is Westforth, not Ivery, who is the devil incarnate.