By Lisa Brown, St. Louis Post-Dispatch –
ST. LOUIS — The offices of Cat5 Commerce, a Chesterfield, Mo.,-based online retailer that sold an assault vest, two magazine pouches and a knife to Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes earlier this month, are facing a backlash over the sales.
Cat5, which operates 10 websites that sell a variety of products from running shoes to hiking boots, processed Holmes’ $306.79 order on July 2, just weeks before Holmes allegedly opened fire in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater on July 20, killing 12 people and injuring 58. Holmes paid an additional $15.63 for the items, purchased on TacticalGear.com, to be shipped by expedited 2-day air, according to an account released by Cat5.
Since details of Holmes’ order were revealed over the weekend, the Chesterfield company that sold him gear has been inundated by angry phone calls and emails, according to its CEO, Chad Weinman. “Much of this communication has been quite hostile and threatening in nature,” he wrote in a statement posted on the company’s website Monday.
“We have been falsely accused of selling Mr. Holmes firearms and ammunition over the Internet illegally without conducting the mandated background checks. Some members of our customer relations team have been brought to tears by people insisting that we have ‘blood on our hands.’ ”
In an interview Monday with the Post-Dispatch, Weinman said he has been in contact with law enforcement agencies in recent days to provide details about Holmes’ order. “We have an open dialogue with various law enforcement agencies, and we’re providing them with any information they need in the investigation,” he said.
TacticalGear.com caters largely to police officers looking to augment their equipment and members of the military who don’t want to wait on permission from the bureaucracy for new combat gear. But it also sells to hobbyists such as survivalists and paintball-gun enthusiasts. The site receives “thousands” of orders daily, sometimes from entire platoons that are about to deploy to war zones.
So the order from Holmes didn’t stand out, Weinman said.
“There’s a whole range of consumers who have an appetite for these products, and 99.9 percent of them are law-abiding citizens,” Weinman told The Associated Press. But he said that “it makes me sick” that Holmes bought material from him. He added that he doesn’t sell guns or ammunition and that he was “shocked” at the amount of bullets that Holmes allegedly bought online.
Cat5, which is privately held, was founded in 2004 and has 40 employees. Between 75 percent and 90 percent of sales on TacticalGear.com are to law enforcement and military customers, Weinman said.
Over the weekend, a Cat5 executive said in an interview with local television station KMOV that increased scrutiny should be placed on online sales of ammunition and firearms, which it does not sell. That interview also has prompted angry phone calls to the company from gun rights advocates, Weinman said.
“We want to set the record straight and publicly state that we fully support the Second Amendment,” Weinman said in the company statement. “The spirit of what we were trying to communicate was that tactical clothing and equipment should not be put in the same category as firearms and ammunition.”
Weinman said his thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the Colorado shootings and their families. “The suffering the families are going through, I can’t imagine what that is like.”
