Out-of-state sales
Sales from "personal" collections
Straw man purchases happen when someone who is prohibited from buying guns gives the money to another person who can buy guns. Very few people are ever brought up for charges of this type even though it often takes place right under the dealer's nose. The VPC states, "At a 1993 hearing on federal firearms licensing before the crime subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, one of the few convicted criminals for this offense, Edward Daily III, testified that he regularly used straw purchasers to buy handguns at gun shows in Virginia. The 22-year-old Daily traded the guns for narcotics in New York City. At the hearing, then-House Crime Subcommittee Chair Charles Schumer (D-NY), who has played a leading role in documenting gun show abuses, questioned Daily as to the role gun shows play in criminal trafficking. Daily testified, "At each gun show, there were about, maybe 250 tables with different gun dealers, and we would visit maybe 20, 30 tables. Some of them saw me every weekend, and they knew me....'Hi. How's it going....Are you picking up any guns today?'" Representative Schumer asked Daily whether "this was always at gun shows?" Daily responded, "Always at gun shows."
The VPC points out one common story as told by the National Association of Stocking Gun Dealers' Bill Bridgewater who asserts that gun show violations occur all the time. "If you can't see them you're blind. When you go to a [North Carolina] gun show and you see every state licensee around you for 250 to 300 miles and you chat with various folk standing behind their table of handguns...[from Ohio, Florida, Virginia], does that give you a clue? There are a lot of [illegal sales being committed] under the color of an FFL traveling state to state every weekend and attending firearms shows and selling firearms unlawfully in those states. The principal reason they do is that at every gun show in this nation no one pays any attention to the law." Another FFL dealer, Richard Yarmy, illegally sold guns to New York City criminals for years before being caught.
Personal collections, VPC concludes, are also another good source for gun trafficking. Many unscrupulous dealers use their family and friends as purchasers who are merely augmenting their own hobby while others state that they are merely selling their very own collection. In defining the threshold of activity one must cross to be categorized as a "dealer," The Firearm Owners Protection Act, also known as the McClure-Volkmer Act, specifically excludes a person who makes "exchanges or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection...or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms."
Therefore, private individuals selling firearms at gun shows from their "personal collections" are not required to obtain a Federal Firearms License, and as noted earlier, need not comply with the recordkeeping and reporting requirements that apply to license holders. In addition, unscrupulous dealers can thwart gun control laws by transferring weapons to relatives' or friends' "personal collections," to be resold with no record of the ultimate purchaser.
Progun lobbyists will also argue that we already have enough gun laws out there and that they are good enough to protect us going forward. But as in the cases cited above, where people circumvent the law on purpose, a law is only as good as its enforcement. When the letter of the law becomes a shallow and moot point, it ceases to be effective. Let's look at just one case where a person commits a crime using a firearm in the murder of others, is arrested and convicted, and then returns to their vice upon release back into society.
We need to look no further than www.justicejournalism.org's discussion of an all-but-forgotten story of absurdity about our quasi nonexistent gun control laws. This real-world example highlights the absurdity of some firearms protocols in America, whether you are pro-gun or pro-gun control. On March 23, 1998, two boys in Jonesboro, Ark., stole into the woods and hunkered down on a hill that afforded a good view of a local school. One of them, Mitchell Johnson, 13, directed the other, Andrew Golden, 11, to go inside the building and activate a fire alarm. Golden then ran to rejoin Johnson at the vantage point. As students and teachers began filing out of the building, Johnson and Golden opened fire with three rifles they took from the home of Johnson's grandfather. They fired for 5 minutes as terrified kids scrambled for cover. The boys killed four girls and a female teacher and injured 10. They were prosecuted and convicted of murder, but under the state and federal laws that the applied, the boys could be held only until they turned 21.
Johnson was freed on his birthday in 2005. Arkansans were stunned to learn that no law would prevent him from buying and owning firearms. His mother assured the edgy city that young Johnson had discovered God and planned to study to become a minister. On Jan. 1, 2007, police in Fayetteville, Ark., pulled over Mitchell Johnson's van for a traffic violation. He was carrying a loaded 9mm pistol. Of course he was never going to buy a gun again, and even if he did, he'd never use it again, right? Would YOU feel safe and secure knowing that YOUR neighbor spent seven years behind bars for killing people with a gun and now owns guns again? Would you applaud the US and Arkansas legal systems for their handling of this case and their 'reform' of this person?
It used to be that citizens were worried about rampant violence and people out of control who decided to take the law into their own hands. In the 1800s, American states began reining in vigilantism and Wild West lawlessness by limiting the rights of citizens to carry concealed weapons. That pendulum began to swing back in 1987 when Florida became the first state to enact a "right-to-carry" law. About half of all states now have some form of the law, with most enacted since 1995. It is estimated that as many as 400,000 or more people in Florida carry concealed weapons. However, currently there are no statistics to track their usage. There is no way of knowing whether these guns are reducing crime or increasing it and if the NRA and other progun lobbyists have their way, there will never be any statistics to prove it one way or another. About the only study to date reviewing such data, More Guns, Less Crime, by John Lott, actually concluded that "getting rid of older black women will lead to a more dramatic reduction in homicide rates than increasing arrest rates or enacting shall-issue laws." Americans are creating more and more illegal guns in our society and as a result, are buying more and more guns to protect themselves from the illegal guns they themselves create.
One more example of the absurdity of the American gun culture. A New York Daily News criminal reporter, David J. Krajicek, was sent to Georgia a few years back to follow up on reports that gun dealers there were selling guns to New Yorkers who paid below city prices for the guns and who would, upon their return to NYC, turn around and sell them to miscreants including Jamaican Posse members to be used in commissions of crime. Before he left Georgia to return to NYC, he stopped in Atlanta to interview a regional official of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The reporter was blown away by the ATF officer's remarks by saying that violence in New York was not necessarily a concern in Georgia. The officer said, "Why should people down here care if a bunch of Jamaicans in New York are shooting themselves up? Why should law-abiding citizens give up their ability to buy firearms because one posse shoots another posse in Brooklyn with a gun somebody happened to buy in Georgia?" If that's the response of our "protectors of our society," then we can only sit and watch capitalism at work unchecked. As long as the guns are taken illegally out of the state and use in crimes in other states, the legal authorities turn a blind eye.
In reality, the idea of the US making ALL guns illegal is totally absurd. Only the brain dead would ever believe this possibility could even exist. There are, however, many who champion this statement and perpetuate it wherever possible, and many of them are gun dealers. Every few years rumors begin to circulate that the current standing president is going to prohibit ALL guns in private hands. Proof is never given of this, of course, but there are many misquotes, and innuendos for the investigative and logically challenged members of society to begin their famous headless chicken routine and open up their wallets and credit cards in order to get "their last possible purchases" before the curtain falls. When the curtain doesn't fall, these people completely forget the lies, innuendos and false statements which ultimately led to their illogical headless chicken routine, and the rumors start once again. I know of no other industry that can constantly dupe tens of millions of Americans in this manner on such a consistent basis and in such a lucrative way.
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