In the summer of 2021, Minneapolis was a city defined by a specific, agonizing brand of grief. We weren’t just mourning general “gun violence,” we were mourning the stolen futures of children.
Six-year-old Aniya Allen was sitting in the back of her mother’s car, eating McDonald’s, when a bullet pierced the metal and glass. Nine-year-old Trinity Ottoson-Smith was doing what nine-year-olds are supposed to do—jumping on a trampoline at a birthday party—before her life was ended by a shooter she never saw.
For years, their families have waited for justice. Last week, they received a version of it. But for anyone who believes that the law should reflect the value of human life, the “justice” handed down to William Burton was nothing short of an insult.
Burton, 31, was sentenced to just three years in federal prison. To the legal system, Burton’s crime was a “paperwork” conspiracy—he was a straw purchaser who lied on federal forms to buy guns for people who couldn’t legally own them. To the families of those little girls, Burton was the silent partner in a double homicide.
And make no mistake: this was no one-time lapse in judgment. Burton didn’t just buy a single gun for a friend. He was a one-man armory.
Evidence revealed that over a staggering nine-month span, Burton purchased at least 43 firearms. He walked into gun shops, looked sellers in the eye, and signed his name to documents asserting these weapons were for him. Instead, he funneled them directly into the underground market. Those 43 weapons became the hardware for a crime wave; they were tracked by investigators to a trail of robberies, shootings, and the two murders that broke the heart of this city.
The three-year sentence Burton received is a glaring symptom of a legal system that remains fundamentally unserious about stopping gun violence at its source. When a man puts 43 guns onto the street in less than a year, he isn’t a “middleman”—he is an architect of chaos. Yet, under current sentencing guidelines, we treat this level of lethal trafficking with less severity than many non-violent drug offenses.
The logic of leniency in these cases is often built on the idea that the purchaser “didn’t know” how the guns would be used. This is a fairy tale. When you buy nearly five guns a month and hand them off to the prohibited and the desperate, you know exactly what the output will be. You are arming the shooters. You are loading the magazines. You are the reason a nine-year-old on a trampoline is no longer safe.
We are essentially telling the William Burtons of the world that the “cost of doing business” for running 43 guns is a short stint in a federal facility. It is a small price to pay for the profit of the sale, but an unbearable price for the families left behind.
This is not about mass incarceration; it is about moral accountability. A gun does not walk into a neighborhood and fire itself. It is brought there through a chain of human decisions. William Burton made the decision to lie 43 times. He made the decision to profit. He made the decision to arm people who had no business carrying a weapon.
When a person provides a weapon to a prohibited seeker, they should be held legally responsible for the foreseeable consequences of that action. If that gun is used in a murder, the “straw buyer” should face a sentence that reflects the gravity of that loss. Three years is not a deterrent; it is a slap on the wrist that mocks the memory of Aniya and Trinity.
As Aniya’s grandfather, K.G. Wilson, told reporters following the sentencing, “Three years? That’s it?” It is a question that should haunt every legislator and judge in this state.
If we want the shootings to stop, we have to make the risk of providing the guns outweigh the reward. We have to stop pretending that the trafficker is a minor player. Without the William Burtons of the world, the shooters would be empty-handed.
Three years will pass, and William Burton will walk free. He will have his life back. Aniya and Trinity will still be gone. Until our laws recognize that those who arm killers are as dangerous as the killers themselves, the “summer of sorrow” will never truly end. It is time to hike the price of these crimes. It is time for the punishment to finally fit the heartbreak.
This is certainly not the outcome anyone would expect or hope for. Which judge? What court? Who appointed the judge? Will the verdict/sentence be appealed? Was this a plea bargain? The fact that these are common questions from a person who is not an attorney means our legal system has become too cumbersome and there are too many “cracks” for defendants to fall through.