TWIN FALLS - When somebody wants to shoot someone, the gun is almost always nearby.

Jake DeGarmo stole a Rupert man's Winchester 12-gauge shotgun that Johnny Shores likely used to kill Jesse Naranjo in the winter of 2005. Juan Carlos Fuentes Pina allegedly plucked it from inside the meth home they frequented and stuck it in the hands of Shores.

Adam Mower kept a clean record until months before December when he shot Idaho State Police Trooper Chris Glenn. The gun was Mower's, purchased legally from Sportsman's Warehouse. When Glenn stopped Mower's car, Mower looked down at the loaded 9-mm. "The gun was just sitting in my lap still," he later said in court. "I saw the gun and grabbed it."

Donald Brink illegally sawed barrels off people's shotguns to turn a profit. A sawed-off shotgun is what Brink used to kill Brent "Spook" Lillevold inside Lillevold's basement apartment.

And easy access paved the way for Bulmaro Magana to kill his wife in June 2006 in a cornfield southwest of Wendell. Magana had only to grasp his wife Eva's 9-mm Browning pistol resting inside the couple's pickup and shoot her before turning the pistol on himself, said Gooding County Sheriff Shaun Gough.

If a gun owner, who owns his weapon legally and has no criminal record, feels the urge to pull the trigger in a crime, chances are the gun won't come up on police radar.

But even those barred from owning guns have little trouble finding one.

Got a track record? Go burglarize a neighbor. Trade drugs for a gun. Or simply buy a gun from a friend and no one asks that you report it.

"That's an individual transaction and (the federal government) doesn't regulate non-dealers," said Julianne Marshall, spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "We enforce the laws that Congress passes. (We are) not to regulate non-licensees."

Outside of purchases from federally licensed gun sellers, all gun sales go unreported to the federal government and unregulated by Idaho law enforcement agencies. While it's presumed the customers who buy guns legally will use them legally, Mower - and to some extent Magana - prove that's not always true. And there's always the chance a "straw buyer" could turn around and sell it illegally on the streets.

So, local police agencies bank on the Mowers of the world staying cool-headed while they rush to intercept the Brinks, Shores, and Pinas - who have guns illegally - before they use them to commit a violent crime.

"Guns come into our hands more often from other crimes than homicides, a lot of (people) illegally carrying weapons, burglaries, robberies," said Idaho State Police Lt. Dan Thornton.

It's hard not to imagine if Twin Falls police did not intercept about 100 guns a year, how many of those guns might be used to commit crimes in the city. Or, what violent crimes might have befallen the county had the Twin Falls County Sheriff's Office not seized roughly 250 guns in the past two years.

When serving a search warrant in January 2006 on a suspected meth-trafficking den east of Twin Falls, deputies found 22 firearms, including rifles, shotguns and pistols along with other stolen property. Two suspects arrested at the home, Christopher Overlin and Kelly Hood, were convicted felons and therefore barred from possessing firearms.

Did the two suspects steal, buy or trade the guns with someone else? Deputies are uncertain.

"We can't always prove that they are stolen because so few people record the serial number from their guns," said Twin Falls County Sheriff Lt. Don Newman.

But in more than a decade serving the county, Twin Falls County Sheriff Wayne Tousley said he has never traced a gun used in a crime to an illegal sale from a federally licensed firearm dealer. Currently, the ATF is yanking the license from Red's Trading Post of Twin Falls, citing numerous record-keeping errors.

But straw buyers, or people who buy guns from licensed dealers to sell illegally on the street, are harder to track.

That may explain how Victor Capado obtained one of two guns Twin Falls police seized from him. The 15-year-old from the Phoenix area pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after shooting a man in the face in February 2005 with a gun he was not supposed to have. In exchange for his guilty plea, the Twin Falls County prosecutor dismissed the charge of a minor possessing a firearm.

Police seized a .22-caliber Beretta from Capado that another Twin Falls County resident bought in May 1996 at the Idaho Coin Gallery. They also seized a 9-mm Taurus that a Twin Falls resident bought from Sportsman's Warehouse 16 days earlier. If it was stolen, the victim never reported it. Or if the victim reported the theft, he had not marked down the gun's serial number.

"I can't see that we charged this guy with stealing the (9 mm) gun," said Twin Falls police Sgt. Mark Marvin, as he reviewed the two-year-old report. "There's no record or burglary report for that gun."

Many of the stolen and privately sold guns floating around the Magic Valley are almost impossible to trace to a source, law enforcement officials say. Too often legitimate gun owners fail to mark their serial number, so when their gun is stolen there's no record for police to trace.

Cass Friedman covers crime and courts for the Times-News. He can be reached at 735-3241 or cfriedman@magicvalley.com.

Title: A History of Gun Violence Date: Aug. 1st, 2007 A timeline of some Magic Valley cases where guns were used in crimes or related to crimes. PLAY »