Anti-gun WaPo targets legal gun dealer

While making preparations to spend the day at the range with own handguns, I ran into a Washington Post article in which they try to shame a legal gun dealer in Prince George County, Maryland out of business. The title of the article is “Realco guns tied to 2500 crimes in DC and Maryland” written by David Fallis.

Fallis argues that because Realco, the gun dealer, has been linked to so many gun crimes in the Metro DC Area, it must be doing something wrong. The issue here is “straw purchases” – one buyer who can pass the background check buys a gun and then sells it to someone who can’t pass a background check;

Glenn Ivey said that after he became Prince George’s state’s attorney in 2002, he asked law enforcement colleagues if he could do anything about the flow of guns from Realco, which he said he knew of from his time in the 1990s as a prosecutor in the District.

“I had an eye toward trying to take action,” Ivey said. “The feedback we got was: They are doing it the way they are supposed to. They are following the letter of the law.”

Asked about Realco, ATF spokeswoman Clare Weber said stores with greater numbers of traces are inspected more frequently.

“The number of traces that come back to a [gun dealer] is not a revocable offense if the dealer is found in compliance with record-keeping requirements,” she said.

Prince George County is a high-crime area which borders on DC’s notorious Southeast neighborhood. Criminals routine cross back and forth across the DC-MD boundary. Crime, of course, follows them. In fact, Martin O’Malley, the incumbent governor of Maryland, brags that he’s reduced crime in Maryland, when all he’s done is chase it back to DC. Four years ago, DC’s Police Chief Ramsey bragged that he had reduced crime in DC when all he had accomplished was chasing criminals to Prince George County.

Obviously, the county needs a gun store for law abiding citizens to purchase protection from the scores of criminals, so closing it is not a rational option…well, except to the Washington Post which really doesn’t care about PG County’s residents.

If there’s a high crime rate, and an elevated number of criminals, it makes sense that there would be some illegal purchases. So prosecute the folks who resell their guns to criminals – not the gun store owners who are following the law.

Of course, the Washington Post advocates closing the store for no other reason than it’s in a bad neighborhood. It’s not the gun store’s fault that the gun is resold.

[August, 2007], prosecutor Ivey joined Jesse L. Jackson’s Rainbow/Push Coalition and others outside Realco in a “protest against illegal guns.” Inside the shop, Maryland State Police pored over Realco’s paperwork. Investigators found little of concern.

Yeah, marching with the Rainbow/PUSH coalition really elevates the prosecutor’s character in my estimation. His motivations are more about politics than about concern for the law abiding citizens. He should be protesting outside the homes of straw buyers if he wants to make a valid statement.

Drag the right wingnuts into it;

In a May 2006 straw purchase, a man bought a handgun at Realco for a felon friend who wanted to shoot abortion doctors. The plot was foiled after the felon’s family called authorities weeks later.

Criminals are criminals. Throw them both in jail, just quit dragging the rest of into it.

Once out, [Erik Dixon] met Cathy R. Anderson, 31, and soon asked that she buy a gun for him. In January 2007, the pair visited Realco, where she made a down payment on a Glock .45, signing a form saying she was buying the gun for herself. Dixon was in the store with her, she later told police.

She told investigators she didn’t know of his criminal past. She said she never touched the gun after she picked it up on a return trip to Realco.

“I took it back to Erik’s truck and gave it to him,” she told police.

And yet she’s still walking around’

“That was then; this is now,” she said. “. . . I’m sorry for what happened.”

OK, well, ‘sorry’ makes it all better.

Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists, Media