Interference Bloomberg Style

This New York Times piece shines quite a stunning flashlight at Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun operation:

He was arrested in 2005 and accused of using his wife and others as “straw buyers” to acquire more than two dozen sawed-off shotguns, semiautomatic pistols and rifles in Virginia, most of their serial numbers obliterated, and selling them for thousands of dollars in New York City. He faced up to five years in prison if convicted.

What follows is outrageous.  Federal prosecutors wanted to throw the book at this guy.  Bloomberg moved in and cut a deal, and got him off with probation, saying “his cooperation was ‘extraordinary’ and ‘really helpful to the city.'”

So you have a guy the feds managed to catch, who was unambiguously buying guns through a straw purchaser in Virginia, filing the numbers off the gun, and trafficking them illegally up to New York City, and selling them on the streets.  And Bloomberg lets him off with a slap on the wrist?  Why?

Mr. Winfield was no doubt helped by the timing of his case, which occurred as the city was looking for help in two lawsuits it filed in 2006 against more than two dozen gun dealers in Virginia and four other states.

Yep.  Now we know why ATF was pissed at Bloomberg when it happened.  They had an honest to God criminal gun trafficker, and Bloomberg got him off pretty much scott free so he could grandstand in public, crap all over ther rights of businessmen with no connection to his state, and all the while pandering to a fawning media who will congratulate him on doing so much to help rid New Yorkers of the scourge of “illegal guns.”

Well, it looks like the gig is up now.  It’s never been about controlling crime.  It’s about controlling people.  Anyone who says that’s nonsense needs to look no further than Michael Bloomberg.