Category: Crime

Apparently the Mini-14 was the “most military weapon allowed in Norway.” The pretext he used to get it was deer hunting. The irony is that a Mini-14 is not generally enough gun for hunting, though I don’t know, maybe deer are smaller in Norway.

In regards to the Glock 17:

Getting a permit for the pistol proved more difficult, as he had to demonstrate regular attendance at a sport shooting club.^[21] He also bought 10 30-round magazines from a US supplier. In November, December and January he went through 15 training sessions at the Oslo Pistol Club, and by mid-January his application to purchase a Glockpistol was approved.

We’ve seen this before. Mass killers seem to be willing to jump through whatever hoops you put in front of them. He even went to Prague in an attempt to illegally obtain firearms, but was unsuccessful. Sounds like he wanted specifically an AK-47, and I guess didn’t realize the Czech equivalent is this rifle.

“Norway’s tough firearms laws prove easy to ignore” I’ve been watching some of our opponents over the weekend coming to terms with how this happened. How did he get the gun? You know, we’ve been telling you it doesn’t work. Either way, one thing is certain, Norway’s gun laws are about to get much tougher.

Even as an opponent of gun control, if you asked me what kind of potential killer gun control would be most likely to deter, I would have suggested mass shooters, since they usually come from law abiding backgrounds, and may not have the black market connections to illegally obtain firearms. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. These kinds of mass killings seem to happen in countries with strict gun laws as readily as those in countries with relatively free gun laws. The death tolls seem to be generally higher in the more restrictive countries as well.

This guy isn’t the sharpest tack in the box:

“He is alleged to have said during one encounter with a confidential informant,” Hogsett said, “that he did not believe in paperwork – federally required reporting – he did not believe in paperwork because that would be, quote, ‘telling the government where you got your gun.’”

A charging affidavit also alleges Mullendore sold seven guns to federal informants, including one unregistered Cobray nine-millimeter machine gun.

I just kind of wonder, if you’re going to peddle guns on the black market, ignore the paperwork requirements, and fail to do the background checks, why bother with the FFL? It’s kind of like, if you were a gang of armed robbers, walking into the police station and asking for all the proper business permits for your hideout.

The gun blogosphere is ablaze with this video hawked by Mayors Against Illegal Guns showing a one Adam Gadhan, a high ranking American-born Al-Quaeda operative, naively posting that machine guns can be had at US gun shows without background checks. Most people have focused on the ridiculousness of this assertion, but I think more interesting is the fact that Adam Gadhan is a prohibited person under current federal law because he’s currently under indictment for treason against the United States.

While it’s still an open constitutional question as to whether an indictment is sufficient due process to warrant even temporary removal of a the Second Amendment right, the chances are, because of the temporary nature of the prohibition, it very well may be sufficient. For instance, it’s sufficient to keep a person in jail if a Judge perceives they are a threat to the public, are a flight risk, and the crime is sufficiently heinous. Courts would weigh that against a temporary restriction of one specific right. Since indictments are generally only requires for sufficiently infamous crimes, this might be sufficient to remove the right pending trial on the charges.

So I think it’s safe to say MAIG is full of crap when it’s suggested that our current laws are insufficient to stave off the possibility of known terrorists getting their hands on firearms through legal channels (as opposed to black market channels, where they can get them readily — see Mumbai). Personally, I feel safer living in a country where my fellow citizens are ready, willing and able to shoot back, than I would be in a country like India, where the population has neither the ability, inclination, or training to do so (which apparently applies even to the police). I don’t give a Mumbai style attack much chance even in a place like New York City, where emptying the magazine into the suspect seems to be the standard drill. Our cops shoot back, and in most of other other cities, our citizens do too.

Criminologist Gary Kleck has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal:

High-volume trafficking, with or without the involvement of corrupt or negligent dealers, probably supplies less than 1% of the guns in criminal hands. Illicit gun sellers are instead more likely to be burglars who sell a few guns (typically fewer than a half dozen a year) along with all the other saleable property that they steal.

The view that extensive, organized trafficking is important in arming American criminals is based on isolated anecdotes about the occasional large-scale trafficking effort uncovered by law enforcement authorities and on interpretations of highly ambiguous ATF gun “trace” data.

Read the whole thing.

As if they are supposed to somehow be immune to the predations of whack jobs:

Dutch churches held memorial services for the victims on Sunday as the media analysed the “un-Dutch” nature of the shooting, which they said was more common in countries like the United States.

“An un-Dutch drama,” the NOS public broadcaster labelled the killing.

But disaster management professor Eelco Dykstra told the station: “This type of thing can happen anywhere.”

If one counted the number of mass shootings proportional to country size, Europe “is more affected than America,” he said.

They seem surprised their gun laws didn’t work. To tell the truth, if there was any type of crime one would think gun control would have any logical possibility of stopping, it would be this type. Unlike gang members, mobsters, and drug dealers, random whack jobs aren’t likely to have too many black market connections, and one would think are more likely to need to rely on legal channels. But yet we have seen this is not necessarily the case. It happens countries with very strict gun laws, as in Brazil, Germany, and now the Netherlands.

Nonetheless, my prediction is that the Dutch will restrict firearms even further, and pretend to have dealt with the problem. The mass delusion that these laws work will continue until the next incident, when the ratchet will be tightened even further.

Howard Nemerov has some excellent analysis of the UN’s gun data, and notes that it does not jive with their purported agenda of small arms control. I did some quick analysis of the same data about a month ago, but Howard’s is more thorough. I did not have time to look at suicide data, but he did and found no correlation.

International comparisons are always difficult because of how different countries measure crime. One must always be careful not to assume correlation is causation, but that’s never stopped our opponents from drawing conclusions that make them feel good.