Posted by
John Caile on Sunday, December 13, 2009 11:51:35 AM
A scumbag street hustler dies in a shootout with police, and all New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg can do is talk about where the shooter got his gun. But given Bloomberg's obsession with piling mountains of gun regulations on the decent citizens of New York, rather than going after the thugs and gang-bangers who prowl the city's streets, we aren't the least bit surprised.
No sooner had the gun smoke cleared from Times Square than the New York Mayor was touting the incident as "proof" that more and stricter gun laws are needed. And not just in New York - Bloomberg has been on a crusade to spread his gun control gospel to surrounding states as well - he has even tried to sue legitimate gun dealers in states like Virginia.
But in fact, the case of William Martinez, the CD-hawking rapper wannabe who tried to kill a plainclothes police officer, is a perfect example of why all gun control measures put forth by the likes of Bloomberg are ultimately doomed to failure. Because, not surprisingly, Martinez didn't buy the gun legally - street thugs like him almost never do.
Nor do they go to gun shows, as is often claimed by the anti-gun lobby. Legitimate studies have shown time and again that the "gun show
loophole" is a myth fabricated to justify ever more useless regulations on the 80 million legitimate gun owners who never commit crimes of any kind. A recent 5 year study of over 800 attacks on police officers, conducted by the University of Minnesota at Mankato, in concert with the FBI, confirms the fact that virtually all of the attackers obtained their guns illegally - and not one came from a gun show.
Criminals use two primary methods to obtain guns, neither one of which will ever be prevented by any gun regulation. They either buy them off the street from other criminals who have stolen them, or they get someone with no criminal record (often a girl friend) to buy the gun for them. This is called a "straw man purchase" and is already a felony.
It's too early to tell, but a straw purchase may very well be what was involved in Martinez's case - the woman who originally bought the gun he used purchased it only two months ago, and (conveniently?) reported it stolen just weeks later. But whether the gun Martinez used was genuinely stolen or a straw purchase, the plain fact is that no gun law of any kind would have prevented it.
Naturally, gun control lobbying groups like the Virginia Center for Public Safety (don't ya just love those "nice" sounding names they give themselves?) always claim that "more gun laws" will somehow magically help. According to their spokesperson, "If all guns were required to be registered, police could've tracked this stolen gun sooner."
Now, exactly HOW this could have been accomplished they can't say, since in almost all such cases, the gun is not recovered until AFTER it has been used. More to the point, since no criminal is going to be "on paper" for any gun, and street-gang "protocol" is to "ditch" the gun within minutes of its being used (in a dumpster or down a sewer), no registration scheme is likely to result in catching the killer, let alone stopping a shooting before it happens.
Ironically, the gun Martinez used is a MAC-10, one of those "scary looking" guns that producers of TV crime shows love - and gun control fanatics hate. But most legitimate gun owners don't own them anyway. Because they are junk - inaccurate, clumsy, and notoriously unreliable. Something that was illustrated clearly when Martinez's gun jammed after just three shots.
Unfortunately, facts and common sense are never going to persuade the virulently anti-gun politicians like Mayor Bloomberg - for them politics will always trump reality.