Tennessee Gentleman
New member
No, because there is no way to prove that the weapon was straw purchase. Just because a weapon was used to commit a crime does not mean that the original owner was a criminal. The only thing a trace does is tell the agent who the original purchaser was. Since there are many other ways for a firearm to leave the possession of the original purchaser, there is no way to secure a conviction.
Not talking about a conviction based on the trace just a discovery of who is bringing in the guns. If tracing indicates that a large number of guns used in crimes are being bought by the same people legally over and over then it would show where the train starts. Surveillance and investigation after that would get the conviction.
Have you ever looked at what gets smuggled across from Mexico? They have multiple mile tunnels with light rail moving drugs and anything else profitable in some cases.
So, are most of these guns coming from Mexico? Overseas is where I think criminals would get guns illegally if we banned them here.
There was a gun store in Columbus that got into trouble a few years ago. They are one of the bigger stores in Columbus so I imagine they are in that 1% volume, but they were selling like 5% of the guns in NY street crime. These guns were only being bought by a few dozen people. They were more than able to get those people for the straw buys, and the Gun shop had to have an ATFE guy look over all their sales or something (I think he was in store a lot).
This sounds like good LE so I guess the BATFE is doing something to curb illegal gun trafficking. Why don't we respond to antigunners with those statistics?