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DGU

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

Two local defensive gun use stories that I want to note (without much comment) for reasons:

1. Uber Eats driver gets into a standoff. Noteworthy because the Statesman is highly specific about the guns:

Palomino then pointed a black, semi-automatic Glock handgun at the man, the court documents say.
The delivery man pulled out a Sig Sauer P238 handgun and pointed it at Palomino.

2. Running gun battle in South Austin Sunday night.

The incident happened in and outside of the Mustang Pawn Shop near the Stassney Lane intersection. A witness says that shortly before 7:00 p.m. several men, armed with assault rifles got the drop on an employee. Once inside they smashed a jewelry display and grabbed what they could. When they ran out, the store owner reportedly gave chase with a shotgun.
A shootout followed, which apparently smashed a window at a business across the street. The violent confrontation was justified according to a neighbor, who didn’t want to give his name but knows the store owner.

The store owner apparently disabled one vehicle the robbers were using, but they managed to get away in a second vehicle.

Some of those who spoke to FOX7 said they sought cover by falling to the floor. Others said they are frustrated by the growing crime problem.
“It’s an overflow of gang wars and little thugs that are running around that have access to all the guns, and how they do it is, they just kick the door in and take them,” said the neighbor.
The solution, according to the resident, is simple but potentially deadly.
“Start shooting back, all the people around here, are pretty much armed.”

Posted in Austin, Cops, Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#60 in a series)

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

Dennis Tyler, the mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI yesterday.

Tyler is charged with theft of government funds, according to a federal criminal indictment that was unsealed Monday. He is accused of accepting a $5,000 cash payment after allegedly steering “lucrative” excavation work to a local contractor.

…

With his arrest, Tyler joins at least six other Muncie city officials or business leaders taken into custody in connection to a corruption probe launched in 2016 by federal authorities related to bid-rigging, fraud, money laundering and other organized crime.
He is also the fourth person to be arrested in connection to the investigation so far this year.

The linked article goes on to detail the long sordid history of the Muncie corruption scandal, and is worth reading.

Hat tip on this to Lawrence, who also did the legwork so I didn’t have to. Yes, Mayor Tyler (a Democrat) is also a member of Crooked Mayors Against Legal Gun Owners!

Is anybody keeping a count of crooked mayors against guns?

Posted in Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Today’s bulletin from the Department of WTF?!

Friday, November 15th, 2019

Lucky Miller was the police chief of Mannford, Oklahoma (which is somewhere near Tulsa).

I say “was” because Chief Miller was killed while attending a law enforcement conference in Florida.

The department’s detective is charged with killing him.

On Sunday around 9:50 p.m., the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office responded to complaints at the Hilton Pensacola Beach hotel, where deputies found Chief Miller unresponsive on the floor, and Mr. Nealey lying a short distance away, mumbling, according to a police report.
Sgt. Melony Peterson, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, said in an interview that the cause of death had not been determined and that an autopsy was being performed. She said the two men had been drinking before the fatal encounter.

Apparently, this wasn’t a shooting:

A hotel worker went to check on the situation and knocked on the door several times, but “only heard a grunting noise.” The worker entered the room and found Mr. Nealey sitting on top of Chief Miller, who was lying on the floor, according to report. The worker yelled at Mr. Nealey to get up, and then pulled him off the chief.
By the time the police arrived, Chief Miller was dead. His face was beaten and his right eye was completely swollen, but there were no other apparent injuries, according to the police report.

In other news, which I didn’t get a chance to note yesterday: the former DA of Suffolk County, NY, is on trial. One of his deputies is also being tried. I’ve written about this before: guy stole a bag of “cigars, sex toys, and pornographic DVDs” out of the police chief’s car, police chief arrested him, handcuffed him to the floor of an interrogation room, and assaulted him, and the DA and his deputy are charged with helping to cover up the chief’s actions.

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 14, 2019.

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

Ronald Lafferty died earlier this week. He died of natural causes, as opposed to being executed by a firing squad.

I think it’s more likely than usual that this name will ring some bells with folks. Mr. Lafferty was a religious fanatic: he was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for “increasingly extreme religious views” (yes, he did believe in polygamy) and founded a new sect, School of the Prophets. He and his brothers (who were also members of the sect) claimed that they received messages from God.

Mr. Lafferty said one of those messages told him that his ex-wife, who had left him and taken their six children to Florida, had been the bride of Satan in a previous life.
In another message, he said, he was told that four people caused his excommunication and divorce, including his brother Allen’s wife, Brenda, and their 15-month-old daughter, Erica, “who he believed would grow up to be just as despicable as her mother,” according to court documents.
God told him to kill all four of them, Mr. Lafferty said. So on July 24, 1984 — a state holiday that commemorates the arrival of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley — Mr. Lafferty and a group of followers, including his brother Daniel, went to Brenda’s house in American Fork, Utah.

Mr. Lafferty and his brother Daniel killed Brenda and the baby. They abandoned their plan to kill the other two on the list. Ronald and Daniel were arrested in Nevada about a month later. Daniel is serving a life sentence.

Mr. Lafferty’s mental competence to stand trial quickly became an issue in the case and would be the focus of his subsequent appeal efforts.
He was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in 1985. But in 1991, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit vacated Mr. Lafferty’s convictions and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong legal standard had been used to determine his mental competence.
Prosecutors again charged Mr. Lafferty with the killings, but a competency hearing in November 1992 found him to be mentally unfit to stand trial owing to mental illness. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital until a new competency hearing was held in February 1994 and he was found competent to stand trial.
In April 1996, he was again convicted of the killings, and again sentenced to death.

The reason I say this will ring some bells is that the Lafferty murders were at the center of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, a book which I’ve read and liked. (And, no, it did not strike me as being “anti-religion”. Anti-“religious fanatics killing women and babies”, maybe, but not anti-religion.)

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 8, 2019.

Friday, November 8th, 2019

Louis Eppolito is burning in Hell.

Some of you probably remember that name, either because you’re true crime buffs or else you’re regular readers of this blog.

For those who don’t recall the name, Eppolito was one of the “Mafia Cops“: two NYPD officers who made deals with the Mob to provide confidential information and even whack guys.

Nineteen eighty-five was also the year Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa began their relationship with Mr. Casso’s circle. A career criminal with ties to Mr. Casso hired them that year to kill a Long Island jeweler to keep him from testifying in an F.B.I. inquiry.
The detectives used a confidential police database to find the jeweler’s home address, the type of car he drove and his license plate number. They pulled him over and asked him to come to the precinct station house.
Instead, they took him to a building in Brooklyn, where Mr. Caracappa and another man killed him. Mr. Eppolito acted as a lookout.
It was the first of the eight killings they would participate in over the next several years on Mr. Casso’s orders. They received $4,000 a month and up to $65,000 for individual murders, prosecutors said.
The other victims included a Brooklyn man gunned down mistakenly because he had the same name as a rival of Mr. Casso’s; a Luchese gangster; two Gambino soldiers; and two F.B.I. informers.

Stephen Caracappa, Mr. Eppolito’s partner in crime, died in 2017: somehow I missed hearing about this.

The good book on this case is The Good Rat by the late great Jimmy Breslin. I’m not recommending or endorsing it, but Eppolito’s Mafia Cop is still widely available: you can even purchase a Kindle edition. (Yeah, that is an affiliate link: it’s not like Eppolito is going to benefit from sales now, and I’m pretty sure anything he earned while alive went towards compensating the families of his victims.)

Posted in Books, Cops, Law, NYPD, Obits | 1 Comment »

William Gibson, call your office, please.

Monday, November 4th, 2019

The street finds its own uses for things.

The paper of record would like for you to know that “drones are increasingly being used by criminals across the country“.

Their first example is a guy who was using drones to drop IEDs on his ex-girlfriend’s property.

He has been indicted on charges related to making explosives and possessing firearms, but the only charge concerning his delivery method has been unlawful operation of an unregistered drone.

And they all moved away from him on the Group W bench.

Other examples are more in line with what you’d expect: drug smuggling and voyeurism. Buried in the article is a decent point: the question of who has jurisdiction over drones in flight and what can be done about them is kind of up in the air.

Where have we heard something like this before?

“It’s not like a car — it’s not necessary to register at sale,” Mr. Holland Michel said, adding, “A criminal will not register a drone.”

Posted in Explosives, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#59 in a series)

Wednesday, October 9th, 2019

Hempstead, Texas, is perhaps best described as a suburb of Houston. (Technically, it is in Waller Caunty, while Houston is Harris County. Apple Maps says it is roughly an hour’s drive from Houston to Hempstead.)

Hempstead isn’t a big city: just under 6,000 people. Mike the Musicologist, who tipped me off to this, tells me that Mayor Michael Wolfe has been in that post for 15 years.

Now, being mayor of any decent sized city is probably a full time job, and being mayor of a 6,000 person city probably doesn’t pay very well. This is significant for reasons I’ll get into shortly.

Back a few months ago, the Texas Rangers started looking into “financial irregularities” discovered “during an audit of the city budget”. They turned up something interesting. You see, folks in Hempstead had until the 20th of each month to pay their utility bills, or else they’d get cut off. One of the city employees was responsible for generating a list of folks who hadn’t paid up. But that employee would then take the list over to the mayor, who’d mark off certain accounts on the list as being exempt from utility cutoffs.

Among those names: the mayor. And his daughter. Apparently, they were over $20,000 behind in their utility payments. Mayor Wolfe’s personal account was over $10,000 behind.

Okay, so this is sleazy. The good citizens of Hempstead who were paying their bills had to absorb the delinquency of the mayor and his daughter. No question about it, this is bad behavior. But is it a crime?

Yes!

The Mayor of Hempstead has been arrested on a state jail felony charge of abuse of official capacity, the Waller County District Attorney’s Office says.

…

According to an affidavit, Shayne is believed to have “intentionally or knowingly misused government property, services, personnel, or any other thing of value belonging to the government that has come into the public servant’s custody or possession by virtue of the public servant’s office or employment”.
The document cites Texas Penal Code 39.02(a), Abuse of Official Capacity.

Texas Penal Code 39.02(a), Abuse of Official Capacity, for your reference and because I don’t trust nested links.

I kind of like “Abuse of Official Capacity”. It has a ring to it, though it doesn’t quite stir the soul in the same way “barratry” or “misprision” does.

And, once again, someone throws away their life and becomes a convicted felon over a relatively small amount of money. Seriously, dude, pay the darn bill. (Yes, yes, presumption of innocence, but according to the report, he’s pretty much confessed to the crime already, and is using the ‘nobody would have known about it if it wasn’t for those meddling auditors” defense.)

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#58 in a series)

Thursday, October 3rd, 2019

By way of Lawrence:

Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to defrauding a local youth basketball program of more than $87,000 instead using the money to purchase luxury clothing, expensive meals, and personal trips.

The Press is kind of obnoxious,but local. More from nj.com:

Gilliam, 49, defrauded a basketball club of more than $87,000, prosecutors said, spending that money on luxury designer clothing, expensive meals, and personal trips to various locations. More than $41,000 was recovered when his house was raided in December 2018.

Mayor Gilliam pled out to one count of wire fraud, and has agreed to pay restitution.

{Harry] Rimm [the mayor’s defense attorney – DB] said Gilliam has already started paying back the money, making a voluntary payment Thursday in connection with his plea.
“To date, and in advance of sentencing, Mr. Gilliam has paid back almost half of the restitution amount that the parties have agreed is owed,” said the attorney.

Now I’m wondering: does that “almost half the restitution amount” include the “recovered” $41,000?

Guess the party watch: paragraph nine of the NJ.com story. Criminal Mayors Against Law-Abiding Gun Owners Watch: status of Mayor Gilliam unknown. I need to dig deeper into that.

But:

Even before the FBI raid on his house, Gilliam found himself in an unwelcome spotlight. The mayor was accused of simple assault and harassment stemming from a 2:30 a.m. brawl outside the Golden Nugget Casino’s Haven nightclub last year.
He was cleared of criminal charges in March by a municipal court judge in nearby North Wildwood, where the case had been transferred to avoid a conflict of interest.

Gilliam, who was released on $100,000 unsecured bond, could face 20 years in prison when he is sentenced on Jan. 7.

But we all know he’s probably not going to get that, right?

And as far as I can tell, he hasn’t resigned as mayor. Yet.

In a statement following the plea, defense attorney Harry Rimm said the charge to which he pleaded guilty related only to his conduct as a private citizen, and not conduct in his official capacity as mayor.
“He is not charged with taking any public or taxpayer funds,” the attorney said, adding that the mayor “is accepting responsibility for his actions and is genuinely remorseful.”

Edited to add: he’s out now.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2019.

Monday, September 23rd, 2019

Christopher Rouse, Pulitzer prize winning contemporary composer. I confess that I don’t know very much about his work, but he was a favorite of several close friends of mine.

(Edited to add: NYT obit.)

Davo Karnicar, a man who skied down Everest. He wasn’t “The Man Who Skied Down Everest” in the documentary (that was Yūichirō Miura, who is still alive at 86), but he skied non-stop from the summit to base camp – a 12,000 foot descent in four hours and 40 minutes. (Mr. Miura only descended 4,000 feet.)

His brother Andrej lost eight toes to frostbite during their descent on Annapurna in 1995. A year later, Davo lost two fingers to frostbite during a storm that killed eight climbers — a disaster detailed by Jon Krakauer in his book “Into Thin Air.”
And in 1997, Karnicar’s brother Luka and four other members of his rescue team died when a safety line connected to a helicopter broke during a training exercise.

…

In 2009, his fellow climber Franc Oderlap, who had accompanied Karnicar to Everest in 2000, was killed by falling ice while they were testing equipment on Manaslu, in the Nepali Himalayans. Karnicar was uninjured. In 2017, Karnicar climbed as far as base camp at K2 but abandoned his quest when he hurt his back.

According to the NYT obit, Mr. Karnicar was killed in a tree cutting accident at his home.

John L. Keenan, chief of detectives with the NYPD. He was most famous for leading the manhunt for the “Son of Sam”. There’s also an interesting historical side note:

…he took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge while in a Counter Intelligence Corps unit of the Fourth Infantry Division. He fought alongside J.D. Salinger, who was writing what became “The Catcher in the Rye” during lulls in combat and became a lifelong friend.

…

When Chief Keenan was honored at a retirement party at Antun’s restaurant in Queens in the summer of 1978, Mr. Salinger came down from his home in rural New Hampshire, where he zealously guarded his privacy, to join in the tribute.
Departing from the focus on police work, which had attracted some 300 officers to the party, Mr. Salinger told the crowd that Chief Keenan had been “a great comfort,” especially in a foxhole.

Posted in Cops, Law, Music, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

More hoplobibilophilia.

Monday, September 2nd, 2019

Half-Price Books is having a 20% off sale over the long holiday weekend.

I haven’t found a lot of good stuff at the past few sales, but that didn’t stop me from going. And I think I see a break in the drought. I found some non-firearms related stuff:

I wouldn’t be posting, though, if I hadn’t gotten lucky and found some gun books. Which I will put after the jump…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Law | Comments Closed

Thanos, call your office, please.

Friday, August 30th, 2019

Actual HouChron headline (on their homepage):

Drug ring had enough fentanyl to kill half of Texas

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: August 28, 2019.

Wednesday, August 28th, 2019

Tweet of the day:

Michael Drejka was convicted of manslaughter. (Previously.) You can call me lazy, but I’m going to point to Andrew Branca again, who is an actual lawyer and knows something about use of force and the law:

This case is an excellent example of how tiny changes in the fact pattern could lead to drastically different legal outcomes. If McGlockton had made any apparent movement consistent with re-engaging Drejka, Drejka’s perception of an imminent attack would likely have been unquestionably reasonable. Even a mere shift of McGlockton’s body weight toward, rather than away from, Drejka might have been sufficient. Such evidence was not in the case, however.
Also extremely unhelpful to Drejka was his post-event interrogation by police, to which he voluntarily consented, without legal counsel present. In that interrogation a happily compliant Drejka, believing he’s just helping the police understand why his shooting of McGlockton was no problem, hardly an inconvenience, as the internet meme puts it, agrees to conduct a re-enactment of the shooting.

“Really, seriously, just shut the f–k up.”

Interesting post from Stephen Wolfram’s blog that sits at a couple of intersections: rare book geekery, computer science (the rare book belonged to Turing), and detective work.

Actual headline from the Austin American-Statesman:

Industry experts give high marks to Statesman site plan

The article goes on to state that, according to industry experts, all of the Statesman reporters are intelligent, attractive, and all of their bodily functions smell like apple cinnamon Glade plug-ins.

Perhaps slightly more interesting: this column about the Texas State Cemetery, tied to Cedric Benson’s burial there. While the writing is slightly grating, it does answer some questions I had about who gets in and how.

Posted in Books, Geek, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 26, 2019.

Monday, August 26th, 2019

Gerard O’Neill, investigative reporter for the Boston Globe.

Mr. O’Neill, who spent 35 years at The Globe, was one of three original reporters on the paper’s Spotlight Team, the full-time investigative strike force that was modeled after the Insight Team of The Sunday Times of London.
Two years after its founding in 1970, Spotlight — with the 29-year-old Mr. O’Neill on the team — won a Pulitzer Prize for its first major investigation, which uncovered rampant corruption in Somerville, a Boston suburb.
Later, as chief of the unit, Mr. O’Neill would help report, write and edit investigations that swept numerous awards, landed multiple Massachusetts officials in jail and led to reforms.

One of his (and the team’s) major accomplishments was breaking the story that Whitey Bulger was a FBI informant, and that the FBI had been letting him get away with major crimes (including murder) in return for informing.

Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Lehr would go on to write three books together, including two about Mr. Bulger: “Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal” (2000), which was made into a 2015 movie starring Johnny Depp as Bulger, and “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss” (2013).

Black Mass, while dated, is one of the two books on Bulger that I recommend (the other being The Brothers Bulger). Black Mass also won the best fact crime Edgar Award in 2001.

I was less enthusiastic about Whitey, which kind of felt like a quickly written update and attempt to cash in on Bulger’s capture.

Posted in Law, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

The (Houston) Chronicle of our times.

Friday, August 23rd, 2019

Two stories from HoustonChronicle.com (not chron.com, which is basically imitation Buzzfeed these days):

Gerald Goines, the Houston Police Department officer at the center of the botched drug raid scandal, has been charged with two counts of felony murder. His partner, Steven Bryant, has been charged with tampering. (Apparently, that’s “tampering with a government record”, though I saw some early reports claim it was “witness tampering”.)

Lawrence has been on the botched drug raid story like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition, so I’m going to direct you over there for coverage and background. If the HouChron is too obnoxious for you (in terms of subscriptions and ad-blockers) here’s coverage from KHOU (with equally obnoxious auto-play video).

Because the murder occurred in the course of another alleged felony – tampering with a government record – Goines was charged with felony murder. Unlike a regular murder charge, felony murder doesn’t require showing that the defendant intended to kill. Instead, prosecutors just have to show that, while committing another felony, the defendant committed an act clearly dangerous to human life – in this case, the execution of a no-knock warrant – and that it resulted in a death.

In other news, the paper would like for you to know that you can buy guns.

Okay, that’s not quite 100% fair. You can buy Bushmaster M4 assault rifles.

Okay, that’s still not quite fair. You can buy Bushmaster M4 assault rifles…from DPS employees who bought them from the agency.

The firearm is one of over 5,200 the department has sold its employees over the past three years, often at a price below the market rate. With few restrictions on the sales, more than 60 officers have taken home at least four guns each, ranging from 9mm pistols to high-powered rifles equipped with accessories worth thousands of dollars.

The paper apparently found two – yes, two – M4 rifles for sale on “online gun forums” “recently”. That’s two out of “over 1,000” sold since September of 2016. DPS has also sold “over 2,000 SIG Sauer P226 pistols”, and a total of 5,254 guns during that time. So it looks like there’s about 2,000 guns not accounted for in this count. Shotguns? “high-powered rifles equipped with accessories worth thousands of dollars”?

The Texas Department of Public Safety offers employees several opportunities to buy firearms that have been issued to them, including pistols, rifles and shotguns. While Texas state law allows outgoing police officers to buy a single service weapon, DPS lets its retiring troopers purchase up to three.

So it sounds like you can buy up to three guns on your way out the door. But:

There is no limit on how many of those retired weapons an officer can buy thoughout his or her career.

Does this mean you can buy more after you retire? That’s how I read it: it sounds kind of like how my Dad got an old Ford F100 pickup, by signing up for the waitlist at Brown and Root and paying $800. Except for guns.

Also according to the paper: the SIGs were going to DPS troopers for $350 each, and the Bushies were going for “$401-$601 each”. It’s not clear what the difference is between the $400 and the $600 Bushies, but: Mike and I have spent the past few weekends at gun shows, and you can get a pretty nice Smith and Wesson M&P-15 (not the M&P15-22, but the .223/5.56 one) for under $600 if you shop carefully. Right now, CDNN will sell you a SIG P320 for $350, and they have P226s with a factory optic for “too low to print – call”. (I would, but they’re closed now.) At least one DPS guy who was selling his Bushie (the ad’s been taken down now, according to the paper) was asking $975 for his.

I only note this story because it seems like a giant nothing burger, except for (maybe) the question of whether the state is getting a good deal by letting retired troopers buy these guns, instead of selling them to licensed gun dealers for credit towards replacements. But if CDNN is selling AR pattern rifles to the public for $600, and SIGs for $350, I doubt DPS is going to get anything close to that on a wholesale deal with any vendor.

Posted in Cops, Guns, HCDA, Law, Politics, Texas | Comments Closed

More gun crankery.

Friday, August 23rd, 2019

This morning’s Linkswarm covered that story that’s been going around about the reporter who thought it was easier to buy a gun than to buy cold medicine. (Spoiler: she apparently didn’t realize you have to fill out a Form 4473 and go through a background check to buy a gun. The story is being presented as “she failed the check”, but the way I read it, the check was never done because the address on her driver’s license did not match her home address.)

Here’s a flip side to this story. Some background: a guy was arrested in one of our local parks earlier this week. He was carrying multiple weapons: “a loaded 9 mm handgun with an extra magazine, a collapsible baton, two knives, and an assault-style rifle loaded with a 30-round magazine and fitted with a stand, scope and tactical light.”

Ignore for the moment the question of what “an assault-style rifle” is (I haven’t been able to find any photos of the rifle in question, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out to be a tarted-up 10/22). The gentleman in question was charged with “unlawfully carrying a handgun and a baton and deadly conduct”. He also had an arrest warrant out of Harris County.

More background: Michael Cargill owns a local gun shop, Central Texas Gun Works. Mr. Cargill is a prominent local Second Amendment advocate, who is frequently quoted in the local media when they run gun related stories.

Mr. Cargill sold the gentleman his rifle about a month ago. Now, it doesn’t exactly look good to be selling guns to folks who have open felony arrest warrants for domestic violence. But Mr. Cargill has an explanation for this, and it’s a doozy:

…he sold Broesche the rifle in July after waiting three days for a background check. Cargill said the felony warrant should have prevented Broesche from purchasing the gun but it didn’t come up in the check.

…

Cargill blamed that lapse on courts in Houston, which he said did not notify the National Instant Criminal Check System that Broesche had been charged with a felony. “When you have a warrant for your arrest,” Cargill said, “that triggers a denial for purchasing a firearm.”
Courts, sheriff’s offices and other local law enforcement agencies across the state often fail to notify the background check system of charges or when people are released from jail on bail, Cargill said. He said he frequently sees people’s applications to purchase a gun delayed because of an arrest, but the National Instant Criminal Check System’s database sometimes doesn’t include additional information related to the disposition of the cases, which can determine whether they are eligible to purchase a firearm.

See also.

Nut graph:

Cargill said state leaders need to ensure that current gun laws are being followed, rather than create new ones.

So the courts aren’t reporting information that impacts background checks. Meanwhile, the usual suspects are calling for “red flag laws”, when we can’t even trust the police to get the right person anymore than we can trust the government to list the right people on the no-fly list.

Posted in Guns, Law | Comments Closed

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