Chuck’s Gun Shop & Pistol Range — once described as “Chicago’s most notorious gun shop” — has reportedly shuttered. According to the Chicago Tribune, a locked gate now blocks the front door of the Riverdale, Illinois, store, and a sign taped to the window reads “going fishing forever.”
For decades, Chuck’s Gun Shop, which first opened its doors in 1984, was repeatedly named a top supplier of crime guns recovered in Chicago, and its closure was welcomed by activists who protested the store and questioned its practices. Father Michael Pfleger, who was arrested alongside Reverend Jesse Jackson during a 2007 demonstration for blocking the door to the store, called the closure of Chuck’s Gun Shop “great news for Chicago” on Facebook.
It’s unclear when Chuck’s Gun Shop officially closed. While the store’s website is still online, a neighbor told local news that it had been closed for “at least a couple of months.” According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the store’s Federal Firearms License was active in December 2024 but not January 2025.
Selling crime guns
According to a report published by the City of Chicago in 2017, Chuck’s Gun Shop sold roughly 1,000, or 6.7 percent, of the nearly 15,000 crime guns recovered in the city between 2013 and 2016 and traced back to dealers.1A “crime gun” is any firearm used in a crime or identified by law enforcement as suspected of having been used in a crime. Of those guns, 39 percent were recovered by police within three years of being sold, and 21 percent were recovered less than a year after being sold. According to the ATF, a “time to crime” of three years or less is a strong indicator of gun trafficking.
An earlier report found that Chuck’s Gun Shop had sold over 1,500 crime guns recovered in Chicago between 2009 and 2013. Nearly 35 percent of those guns were recovered within three years of being sold. Yet another report, compiled by Americans for Gun Safety (AGS) using ATF data, found that between 1996 and 2000, authorities traced over 2,300 crime guns back to Chuck’s Gun Shop, making it the top crime gun seller in the nation at the time.
Due to the volume of crime guns linked to Chuck’s Gun Shop over the years, multiple lawsuits, undercover investigations, and news reports alleged that the store failed to stop sales to straw purchasers, or those who illegally buy firearms on behalf of others who are most likely prohibited from owning the weapons or don’t want their names associated with the transactions.
The AGS report noted, “Undercover detectives visited Chuck’s Guns seventeen times — so often that they were on a first name basis with the store clerks.” The group alleged that the clerks “told the undercover investigators how to structure the transactions to avoid ATF attention.” To help disrupt trafficking rings, federal law requires gun dealers to report to the ATF when customers attempt to purchase two or more handguns within five consecutive business days.
Another notorious Chicago-area gun dealer named in many of the same trafficking reports, Westforth Sports, closed its doors in July 2023.
CHUCK’S GUN SHOP: A BAD APPLE
In September 2014, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence launched its “Stop Bad Apple Gun Dealers” campaign outside Chuck’s Gun Shop to call attention to retailers that “turn a blind eye to gun traffickers, straw purchasers and criminals, and flood our nation’s streets with guns used in crimes.”
At the time, John Riggio, the owner of Chuck’s Gun Shop, said that any store that sold “lots of firearms” would have a high number of crime guns traced back to them — a claim disproven by ATF data showing that many of the biggest retail chains do not sell a significant number of crime guns each year. Riggio also blamed people who “don’t store their firearms the proper way” and “live in an area where there’s a lot of break-ins.”
Riggio claimed that “you would never know if someone was buying a firearm for someone else unless they told you or they were next to them pointing the gun out.” But there are several obvious warning signs of straw purchases, including “buyers making multiple purchases of the exact same model of gun, buying sprees over a short time period, large-volume purchases, cash payments and staggered visits to elude multiple-sale reporting requirements.”