Tuscaloosa Gun Store Owner Says Arrest & License Revocation Hearing Are Retaliation

The owner of a gun store in Tuscaloosa says his arrest last month and efforts to revoke his business license are unwarranted retaliation from city officials after a summer interaction with a police officer at the shop.

Josh Wakefield has run Guns and Ammo on Greensboro Avenue in Central Tuscaloosa for 15 years. As the Thread exclusively reported, the city council has set a hearing for September 30th to consider revoking his business license and his privilege to apply for another.

On Thursday, Wakefield and his attorney, Josh Swords, talked to the Thread about what led to the hearing and how the entrepreneur wishes all the trouble could have been avoided.

Different Rules for Buying and Selling

The store is a federal firearms license holder, and when they sell to an individual, they are legally obligated to ensure the buyer is not prohibited from owning a gun. They do so using the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, which is not a gun registry but instead a list of those who are banned from possessing a firearm - mainly convicted felons and undocumented immigrants. If a buyer passes that background check, they can purchase a gun from a federally licensed dealer.

Things work differently when a store is buying a weapon - they are not expected or even allowed to run a NICS search before a purchase. Instead, Wakefield said he enters extensive information about the seller and the gun to LeadsOnline. This third-party site maintains a massive database of stolen items, sends an email to TPD after the sale is reported and will alert investigators if the weapon has been stolen.

That process often takes days, Wakefield said, and since only a very small percentage of guns sold to the shop end up being stolen, the store generally pays the customer, buys the weapon, and voluntarily surrenders it to TPD if it does turn out to be stolen.

Until a very recent change made in early August, there was no way for gun store or pawn shop owners to run an instant check on whether a gun had been stolen - they could only ensure that buyers were cleared for purchases.

Suspicious Seller Draws TPD to Guns & Ammo

With all that context in place, Wakefield told the Thread that his store had bought a handful of firearms from a seller in late June and submitted all required information to the TPD so police could search LeadsOnline and ensure all the guns were above board.

Apparently, at least one of the firearms they bought in June was one of many that had been reported stolen from hunting camps in neighboring counties. The hit drew a TPD investigator accompanied by an FBI agent to the Tuscaloosa gun store on at least three occasions in July and early August.

It's important to note that these visits are permitted under municipal law - the Tuscaloosa code governing secondhand dealers sets many rigid rules for pawn shops, gun stores, and other such businesses in the city.

The stores must collect information about and photograph anyone who sells to them, make regular reports to the TPD about goods sold to the store, and must always allow police to enter and inspect the store.

"The area and the premises where any person regulated by this article stores or keeps secondhand goods purchased or acquired in the business shall be open to inspection to any police officer or official of the city at all times during business hours," the city law says. "It shall be unlawful to deny such an inspection or otherwise violate this section."

So when the TPD investigator and FBI agent came by Guns and Ammo in July to investigate the allegedly stolen guns, they were well within their rights and were met with cooperation. Workers at the store reportedly pulled and offered the weapons in question and provided info to TPD on all three occasions they visited.

The investigator also reportedly told Guns and Ammo on July 28th that they had bought a stolen firearm and seized it, then accused the store of purchasing another gun from the same seller, a felon, on August 2nd.

"But we didn't have any way of checking the person to see if they're a felon [during a purchase, not a sale,]" Wakefield said. "We don't have a list of people to verify - there's no way of checking to see if he was a felon."

"Everybody thinks that you've got access to everybody's background on any gun dealings, and people don't understand that you don't have that," Swords said. "No gun store has that."

The final "friendly" visit came on August 7th. An aggravated but calm employee informed the TPD investigator that he was not the store owner and threatened to report the law enforcement officers for trespassing, as they had entered the store unannounced and disrupted business hours for the third time in a month.

This did not go over well - surveillance footage reviewed by the Thread showed the employee calling a non-emergency dispatcher before the TPD officer took the phone from him, identified himself, and said that the trespass complaint was not valid.

When it became clear that TPD would not send an officer to address a complaint involving one of their own, the gun store worker resumed cooperation and produced a rifle for the police to inspect. They then requested indoor and outdoor surveillance footage showing the time of the sale in question. The worker told them only Wakefield - the store's owner - could access the cloud storage where clips from shop cameras are saved. There is no physical DVR or tape machine in the shop.

Wakefield said he was in the pool that afternoon and didn't hear his phone ring as the employee tried to call him so he could share the requested footage with the police. Uttering something about "the easy way" and "the hard way," the officers left to obtain a search warrant.

Less than 24 hours after the tense visit, Wakefield had emailed the requested surveillance footage to the TPD investigator—but it was too late.

TPD Raids Guns and Ammo

The next day, on August 8th, two Guns and Ammo employees and a service dog inside with them were surprised when a huge number of Tuscaloosa Police officers entered the shop, disarmed the workers, cleared the building with guns drawn, and set about thoroughly searching the premises.

Armed with a search warrant from Judge Joanne Jannik, police officers sacked the store. Wakefield said instead of just looking for the video footage they asked for and were ultimately provided, officers went through everything, including more than 400 firearms in the building.

The dozen-plus officers also unplugged or physically turned every surveillance camera in the business while they were inside, Wakefield noted.

Clerical Errors Lead to City Charges

TPD officers left with more than 20 weapons, and soon after, they arrested the store employee who'd tried to report the alleged trespassing the day before. Later on August 8th, they also arrested Wakefield.

Neither man is accused of violating state or federal law; instead, they are charged with 26 total violations of the Tuscaloosa municipal code.

Wakefield said most of the violations are the result of bad bookkeeping, not malice or negligence, and others don't seem justified at all.

For instance, when a store like Guns and Ammo purchases a firearm, it is required to hold the gun for 10 days before selling it again or removing it from the property, giving investigators enough time to determine if the weapon had been reported stolen.

Wakefield is accused of selling five guns before those 10 days expired, but he told the Thread that evidence will show all five guns were stored on-site and were being held on layaway until the required time passed - none had actually been sold or left the building.

All the other 21 charges reportedly relate to failing to provide TPD with a full photo of sellers who offloaded guns at the shop. City code requires the shop to take a facial close-up picture of anyone selling a firearm and submit it to the police department as a digital file.

During their search, TPD reportedly found 21 used guns for which they did not have a photograph of the seller, leading to more charges against Wakefield and his employee.

Wakefield made no excuses and said he has located the required images for all 21 firearms. Each seller was photographed, but in these cases, the pictures were not properly uploaded and attached to the necessary documentation for TPD. The store is willing to provide documentation demonstrating that the photos exist.

"There are no state law, misdemeanor, felony or gun law violations," Swords said. "This is all over code about bookkeeping for secondhand goods, and the response by Tuscaloosa was to file all these charges in municipal criminal court and come after a business license."

Hearing on License Revocation Set for September 30th

After the dust settled after their arrests - both Wakefield and his employee bonded out of custody quickly - the Tuscaloosa City Council has scheduled a September 30th hearing to consider revoking the business license at Guns and Ammo, which is also allowed under city code.

"The conviction of any person licensed to engage in the business regulated by this article for violating any of the provisions of this article [...] shall be cause for the revocation of the business license," according to the city code.

A city spokesperson declined to comment on the matter before the facts are presented at the end of the month.

Wakefield said he believes the raid, the charges filed against him, and the revocation hearing are personally motivated - a case of sour grapes after his employee was short with the TPD investigator and FBI agent and asked them to leave.

"I feel like it's retaliation from [the investigators] towards us," Wakefield said. "It's just a way for him to use his police powers to get back at me and [my employee] for telling him he was trespassing."

Swords said that, given that none of the layaway guns were actually sold and that the required photos for all the other violations do exist and will be provided to TPD, he's hopeful that the municipal charges can be dismissed.

He's also confident, following an outpouring of support for Guns and Ammo on social media, that there will be a strong showing at the hearing on September 30th to support the store as it fights to retain its business license.

"We're thankful for the community support, the friends and customers, law enforcement customers, attorney customers, the local professionals, chess players, and everyone else who visits the store," Swords said. "They're what's going to carry us through this whole thing."

The plan for now is to continue business as usual. Wakefield said the store is open every day except Sunday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Even after this trouble, Wakefield said if he's able to keep his business license, the store isn't going anywhere.

"I love my location and I love Tuscaloosa," Wakefield said. "I'd rather stay where I'm at."

For more coverage of this case and the September 30th hearing, stay connected to the Tuscaloosa Thread.