The story about Los Angeles mayoral candidate Congresswoman Karen Bass has been covered here at Bearing Arms already by my colleague Tom, but a revisit is fairly justified given the ripeness of this topic. Judge Jeanine and the Five on Fox discussed the situation recently and concluded something that many were thinking, at least I was thinking. Something’s off. Judge Jeanine Pirro points out some interesting details.

“Let me tell you something. She’s got two guns that are registered for which she has no permits, okay? Only two guns are stolen, but they’re “safely and securely in a Brinks lock box.” How did the guy who allegedly is Hispanic that they’re referring to – they didn’t tell us how they got a description since no one was at home. Maybe they had a ring thing, or I don’t know. But how does a criminal not take cash?

There’s no identification number, no fingerprints? Not take jewelry, not take anything other than a box that you hope two guns are in? There isn’t a glass cover on a Brinks locks box. She has some issues, okay? As it relates to the gun, she only has it registered, she doesn’t have a permit. She’s had it for 40 years and never bothered to get a permit. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll tell you what, all my antennas are up here. Something is totally off. No criminal goes in and doesn’t take cash.”

Pirro’s skepticism needs to be noted and embraced. With all kinds of antics that have occurred in the past with different types of “events”, the details of this robbery don’t make sense. I’m not saying or insinuating that something fishy is going on, but a rather sturdy examination (which probably won’t happen in Los Angeles) of the details needs to happen.

During the exchange fellow pundit to Pirro, Greg Gutfeld, also pointed out both the absurdity, but also noted the lack of coverage by “journalists”.

“Number one. You break into a house, you take a safe and you only steal guns. That’s a lot of effort, meaning you knew what you were doing. You knew that there was something that you wanted specifically to get. And that’s and that’s what happened. If only there were like journalists who would like care about this kind of story based purely on its hypocrisy. Journalists really used to like the hypocrisy story, like if it was a pastor of a church that had an affair with a church member or maybe a conservative moralist busted for drugs. But here you got a gun control advocate who loses her guns. The gun control, loses the gun.”

To Gutfield’s point, Tom did cover this and did point out the hypocrisy, gently here:

Look, Bass has a right to keep and bear arms, same as the rest of us. However, she’s now the victim of a crime that is also how the lion’s share of firearms end up in criminal hands. One might hope Bass has learned a valuable lesson and might start focusing her efforts on the very people who have made her a victim.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.

The panel wouldn’t have been complete without the 5th host, or liberal host, Harold Ford Jr. weighing in with some lightly veiled anti-gun rhetoric. Ford’s comment was in support of so-called “smart guns”. While Ford did not outright use the term “smart gun”, his sentiment was received loud and clear by me.

“[I]f we have technology to shut down people’s water and heat and air conditioning, these companies do, we ought to have the same kind of technology to make sure no one can use those guns, but for the person that owns the gun, if your guns are stolen. I mean something good ought to come out of this I hope all the facts come out. I take people at their word. I imagine the Congresswoman has not done anything here. No one is, I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that…”

Out of the entire exchange and story, this was Ford’s takeaway? A sales pitch for “smart guns”? Ford did ever-so-smoothly slip that bit of rhetoric in, and honestly it went either unnoticed or unacknowledged by the other panelists. No one popped up and said that the idea was malarkey. 

The non-addressing of Ford’s comment, we don’t know if it was just an oversight or not. I’d like to hope that the “conservative” wing of the show would have picked up on the detail, but they did not utter a peep on it. I would also like to think the conservative pundits would point out how ridiculous and unconstitutional the notion of a so-called “smart gun” would be. The talking point could have been since Bass is of the anti-gun cloth, that’d be an option for her, but we all know that the anti-freedom caucus wants to mandate “smart guns” for all. If these panelists outright ignored the comment for some political reason, then shame on them.

The mystery of Bass’s missing firearms will hopefully be just a blip on the radar, with the absurdity of it being pointed out by her campaign and party before it becomes some further call to restrict rights. Does this have the stench of a publicity stunt? Maybe. Were her firearms actually stolen? Who knows. Regardless, the Five point out both the hypocrisy that Tom noted, the fishiness of the story, and of course the pinko got to slide in his anti-gun rhetoric.