2aguy
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- Jul 19, 2014
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This article by Kevin Williams looks at a straw buyers, people with clean records who buy guns for criminals...making background checks useless....and universal background checks just as stupid....
And why won't prosecutors go after straw buyers...since they bitch about gun crime so much....
America Should Be Prosecuting Straw Purchasers, Not Gun Dealers, by Kevin D. Williamson, National Review
The crime was, and is, seldom prosecuted, and, before the Burton-Collins incident, offenders would “typically get probation or less than a year in prison because of their clean records and the notion they have not committed a violent crime, according to a review of five years of federal court records,” as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in 2010.
Wisconsin isn’t alone in its nonchalance. California normally treats straw purchases as misdemeanors or minor infractions. Even as the people of Baltimore suffer horrific levels of violence, Maryland classifies the crime as a misdemeanor, too.
Straw buying is a felony in progressive Connecticut, albeit one in the second-least-serious order of felonies. It is classified as a serious crime in Illinois (Class 2 felony), but police rarely (meaning “almost never”) go after the nephews and girlfriends with clean records who provide Chicago’s diverse and sundry gangsters with their weapons. In Delaware, it’s a Class F felony, like forging a check. In Oregon, it’s a misdemeanor.
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I visited Chicago a few years back to write about the city’s gang-driven murder problem, and a retired police official told me that the nature of the people making straw purchases — young relatives, girlfriends who may or may not have been facing the threat of physical violence, grandmothers, etc. — made prosecuting those cases unattractive.
In most of those cases, the authorities emphatically should put the straw purchasers in prison for as long as possible.
Throw a few gangsters’ grandmothers behind bars for 20 years and see if that gets anybody’s attention.
In the case of the young women suborned into breaking the law, that should be just another charge to put on the main offender.
Why do the prosecutors focus on law abiding gun dealers....?
This is why....
The focus on gun shops isn’t about effective law enforcement; it’s about bureaucratic laziness:
It’s a hell of a lot less work to lean on federally licensed retailers with fixed addresses and regular business hours than it is to go chasing Joe Gangster’s rap-sheet-free little brother all over Baltimore on a misdemeanor charge.
In reality, the authorities do very little to counteract straw purchasing, because it is a difficult crime to prosecute — see Special Agent Jones and his “really hard” standard above — and nobody’s career gets made on a straw-purchase case.
On a quick side note on gun laws and low crime rates...
Vermont, it bears noting, has basically no gun laws — you don’t need a permit, or even to be a U.S. citizen, to carry a concealed handgun, or to wear one openly on your hip — and basically no violent crime, either, which throws a monkey wrench or three into the popular progressive model of correlation touching those questions.
And why won't prosecutors go after straw buyers...since they bitch about gun crime so much....
America Should Be Prosecuting Straw Purchasers, Not Gun Dealers, by Kevin D. Williamson, National Review
The crime was, and is, seldom prosecuted, and, before the Burton-Collins incident, offenders would “typically get probation or less than a year in prison because of their clean records and the notion they have not committed a violent crime, according to a review of five years of federal court records,” as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in 2010.
Wisconsin isn’t alone in its nonchalance. California normally treats straw purchases as misdemeanors or minor infractions. Even as the people of Baltimore suffer horrific levels of violence, Maryland classifies the crime as a misdemeanor, too.
Straw buying is a felony in progressive Connecticut, albeit one in the second-least-serious order of felonies. It is classified as a serious crime in Illinois (Class 2 felony), but police rarely (meaning “almost never”) go after the nephews and girlfriends with clean records who provide Chicago’s diverse and sundry gangsters with their weapons. In Delaware, it’s a Class F felony, like forging a check. In Oregon, it’s a misdemeanor.
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I visited Chicago a few years back to write about the city’s gang-driven murder problem, and a retired police official told me that the nature of the people making straw purchases — young relatives, girlfriends who may or may not have been facing the threat of physical violence, grandmothers, etc. — made prosecuting those cases unattractive.
In most of those cases, the authorities emphatically should put the straw purchasers in prison for as long as possible.
Throw a few gangsters’ grandmothers behind bars for 20 years and see if that gets anybody’s attention.
In the case of the young women suborned into breaking the law, that should be just another charge to put on the main offender.
Why do the prosecutors focus on law abiding gun dealers....?
This is why....
The focus on gun shops isn’t about effective law enforcement; it’s about bureaucratic laziness:
It’s a hell of a lot less work to lean on federally licensed retailers with fixed addresses and regular business hours than it is to go chasing Joe Gangster’s rap-sheet-free little brother all over Baltimore on a misdemeanor charge.
In reality, the authorities do very little to counteract straw purchasing, because it is a difficult crime to prosecute — see Special Agent Jones and his “really hard” standard above — and nobody’s career gets made on a straw-purchase case.
On a quick side note on gun laws and low crime rates...
Vermont, it bears noting, has basically no gun laws — you don’t need a permit, or even to be a U.S. citizen, to carry a concealed handgun, or to wear one openly on your hip — and basically no violent crime, either, which throws a monkey wrench or three into the popular progressive model of correlation touching those questions.
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