{ "id": "2000-april-hunting-felons", "slug": "2000-april-hunting-felons", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-april-hunting-felons.html", "year": 2000, "month": "April", "monthNum": 4, "headline": "Hunting felons", "kicker": "GUNS", "author_name": "Janet Roberts", "author_title": "", "affiliation": "St. Paul Pioneer Press", "summary": "The St. Paul Pioneer Press investigated convicted felons who were illegally hunting in Minnesota and found 236 violent felons who had received hunting permits despite being prohibited from possessing firearms, raising questions about state enforcement.", "keywords": [ "felons", "hunting", "weapons" ], "topics": [ "Crime & Justice", "Data & Databases", "Investigative Methods" ], "technologies": [ "Access" ], "full_text": "The story had been done before, but it was ripe for another visit: Convicted felons, who aren't supposed to carry firearms, were hunting in the Minnesota woods with guns.\n\nThe St. Paul Pioneer Press had to look no further than Donald Blom, a suspect in Minnesota's most intensely covered crime in 1999. Charged in the May 1999 abduction and killing of a 19-year-old convenience store clerk, Blom had a pistol, two shotguns and a rifle hidden in his cabin.\n\nBecause of those guns, Blom - convicted sex offender - was found guilty last summer of being a felon in possession of firearms. Among the evidence presented at his federal court trial: Blom's Minnesota hunting license and the registration he filed after bagging a deer.\n\nWe figured Blom wasn't the only felon roaming the woods in flame-orange clothing. Two databases helped us confirm that: one listing people who received special hunting permits from the state Department of Natural Resources, the other a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension database listing convicted felons. We matched names and birth dates to find people listed in both files.\n\nNarrowing list\n\nFrom there, we narrowed the list. State law says people convicted of certain violent crimes are forbidden from possessing a firearm within 10 years of their release from supervision. Because we were unable to determine release dates from the conviction data, we cast a narrower net, winnowing our list to felons convicted of violent crimes within the past 10 years.\n\nWe had to build our own lookup table of violent crimes. Only certain convictions result in the loss of gun privileges. We built an Access table of those crimes, then matched them against our hunters' convictions.\n\nWithin an hour, we found 236 felons who were not supposed to possess firearms but had received hunting permits from the DNR. Some had been convicted of multiple offenses. Our cast of characters included rapists, a murderer and others convicted of violent crimes such as aggravated assault, stalking, armed robbery and possessing a machine gun.\n\nThe actual number of violent felons with hunting permits is surely much higher. Because the state keeps computer records only of special hunting permits - those for hunting bear, turkey, moose and female deer - the newspaper was unable to run criminal checks on the hundreds of thousands of other hunters whose licenses are not computerized.\n\nAlso, our analysis was conservative. We matched first, middle and last names. Felons who didn't list their middle names on their hunting permit applications didn't make our list. And because we narrowed the list by the felon's conviction date rather than release date, we likely missed many other hunters who are not yet eligible to carry a gun.\n\nState response\n\nReporter Amy Mayron's story pointed out that if the newspaper, in an hour's time, could come up with more than 200 likely violators of state and federal weapons laws, the state could do the same. The state's response? They don't have the time or manpower to do the checks.\n\nTheir response had been the same two years earlier, when Twin Cities television station WCCO used the same databases to report that convicted felons were getting hunting licenses and taking game with firearms. The station's report featured a state lawmaker who was outraged by the findings and vowed to pass legislation to force state officials to perform the checks.\n\nOur reporter found that lawmaker equally outraged when she told him that two years later, nothing had changed. A couple of days after our story ran, it was easy to see why. The chairman of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee said he would block any bill that would use hunting permits to check for convicted felons with guns. Lawmakers in Minnesota, where hunting is a rite of passage, are not about to enforce gun laws by snooping on hunters.\n\nA couple of lessons from this story: Don't be dissuaded from delving into a database just because it's incomplete. Even though the licenses of hundreds of thousands of Minnesota hunters never get entered into a computer, those for more than 200,000 others do. Readers are smart enough to understand that if we could delve into an incomplete database and find 200 felons registered to hunt, there's likely a whole lot more hunting felons out there.\n\nAnd don't be afraid to revisit a story that someone else has already done. Sometimes, these stories are just as good the second time around.\n\nJanet Roberts may be reached by e-mail at jroberts@pioneerpress.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2005-january-february-felon-hunters", "score": 0.424 }, { "slug": "1998-april-first-ventures-government-felons", "score": 0.325 }, { "slug": "1997-november-hunting-for-data", "score": 0.286 }, { "slug": "1993-february-taking-bytes-out-of-the-education-apple", "score": 0.238 }, { "slug": "2000-april-young-hunters", "score": 0.219 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-april-hunting-felons.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-april-hunting-felons.json" }