This article is sure to outrage. Firstly, it gives an account of a criminal gun trafficker, who’s turned his life around you see, but he wants the legal dealers he criminally deceived to pay too:
“I’m supposed to have remorse for what I did. But you wanna tell me these bastards [the gun dealers], they sit back, and they say, ‘Oh well, you know, [Jerome], that was on him whatever he did after that,'” he says, his voice gravelly and angry but still quiet. “If I should feel remorse, these motherfuckers should feel remorse, too. Because I came in there, and they took the money, and they took the money, and they took the money, and they took the money, over and over and over again. And these fuckers are sittin’ in their houses, their nice little house, they go on sellin’ guns, day out and day in, with no consequence. None. None.
So he basically lied to a number of Philadelphia gun dealers about being the true purchaser, and now he wants them to feel sorry with them? Sorry, you’re the criminal asshole. The big question I have is why, if he was doing this in the 90s, is he still not in prison. It’s ten years for every illegal gun they can prove federally. Oh, but we have a former ATF agent too, who complains it’s just too hard to lock up FFLs:
THEYï’RE GETTING AWAY WITH IT: Joseph Vince spent 28 years with ATF, helped compile a database that traces where guns found in crimes came from and authored the 2004 report on Colosimo’s. He says the standard for prosecuting straw sellers is too restrictive: “You have to prove that they willfully did it, that they intentionally wanted to do it, that they absolutely knew what they were doing was wrong. The truth level is so high, it’s higher than any other [crime] I know of.”
Apparently he doesn’t like Mens Rea, a basic concept in our legal system that says for most serious crimes you must have intent to commit the crime. The article is so riddled with inaccuracy and distortion I could write a dissertation on it. In one shot they show pro-gun counter-protesters and claim them to be anti-gun protesters.
This article was fascinating. What it shows is that politicians are passing gun laws that mean nothing in an effort to appease both the pro-gun and anti-gun people.
The old saw is “Criminals are going to have guns anyway” but where do criminals get those guns? Are they importing them from Russia? No. They get them right here in the USA.
The great thing is that the straw buyer is blaming the legal gun dealers, but a few paragraphs down it turns out that a bunch of the FFLs he used were the ones who ratted him out.
Citypaper has a comments section too :)