Venues May Have Gun Checks Outside

Gun-rights advocates who hold concealed-weapons permits can set up their own gun-storage lockers outside Olympic venues during the Games--as long as they pay for them and thread the city’s bureaucratic-permit maze.

“We don’t see why we should have to pay for it, but yes, we would,” gun-rights advocate Winton Clark Aposhian said Wednesday.

“I’d love to do that, actually. We haven’t been given the go-ahead. We’ve just been getting the brushoff.”

The idea, though, is fine with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and the attorney general’s office.

Olympic organizers are standing by an earlier decision not to provide weapons-storage lockers inside venues.

“If [gun storage] is outside the venue, we have no jurisdiction,” organizing committee spokeswoman Nancy Volmer said.

“If a private group wants to provide that service, and wants to do the legwork, there’s no law that prevents them from doing it,” said Rick Cantrell, spokesman for Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff.

John Sittner, director of Olympic planning for Salt Lake City, said setting up gun-storage lockers outside the venues would require a city permit, obtained from the city’s property-management office.

Sittner said the permit, which could be revoked, would be like those issued to vending carts at a “negligible” cost.

Weapons were outlawed from the 10 competition sites, nine blocks of downtown Salt Lake City in the secure Olympic Square area and at other Olympic sites as part of a 1999 deal between lawmakers and gun-rights groups.

Utah has issued 41,800 concealed-weapons permits. Aposhian said he probably would need no more than 30 lockers, which would cost $300 to rent.