The Los Angeles County Police Department has been involved in a major gun-running scandal and gun control activists are now foaming at the mouth looking for even more gun control in the state. What’s unfortunate for these gun control activists is one simple fact, gun control caused this scandal.
Crime doesn’t pay, these LAPD officers involved in the gun-running scheme are now learning that after they spent years teaching others that lesson. LAPD officers were buying law enforcement-only handguns in the state of California, where every handgun needs to be approved by the government before it can be bought by civilians, and then reselling them to civilians under the table.
From Yahoo News:Â
Before it all came crashing down, Archi Duenas’ gun-stealing scheme was relatively simple, county prosecutors wrote in a memo. He just couldn’t go on vacation.
Duenas, manager of the gun store at the Los Angeles Police Academy, had been reprimanded over the years for tardiness and sloppy record keeping, but he never took time off, according to the memo. As the store’s closing supervisor, he was there each night to lock up — and hand count the inventory.
…
The resulting investigation quickly led to Duenas’ arrest. But it also uncovered a larger scandal inside the LAPD: The clientele for Duenas’ stolen weapons included cops.
LAPD and L.A. County District Attorney records and interviews by The Times show that what started out as a probe into Duenas has spiraled in the last year and a half, spurring a cascade of allegations of criminal activity, misconduct and corruption on the part of officers and commanders.
This is effectively straw purchasing. Straw purchasing is the act of buying guns for people who otherwise can not get them, generally, this is seen as people buying guns for criminals who intend to use them for crime but this purchasing of handguns meant exclusively for the police in the state of California is also straw purchasing as those ultimately getting the guns were not meant to have them.
The California law that dictated what handguns can be sold to the general public is a travesty, but that doesn’t mean you get to break the law. If this law didn’t exist, there would never have been a reason for these straw purchases to have been made and no crime would have ever been committed as those who wanted the handguns would have simply bought them. It is not as if the police were selling these guns to criminals, they were selling them to friends and family who just wanted to get their hands on some recent handguns.
What makes this scandal so much worse is that Archi Duenas, the gun store employee who stole guns in order to resell them, is going to walk. The ultra-progressive prosecutors of Los Angeles are going to give him a sweet-heart deal and he is going to get probation instead of jail time.
The effect of this scandal will likely be more gun control in the state of California, advocates will move on some sort of governing board to oversee the operations of gun stores and new regulations will be put in place that will make running a store like this even harder.
The ideal solution that any reasonable person can come too, is to simply abolish the handgun approval law California has. That is nothing but a pipe dream though, the ultra-liberal state will just tighten the gun laws even more and create even more incentive for illegal activity.
