Indiana Man Stole Guns To Pay Drug Debt

Much of the gun control debate centers around supposedly trying to keep guns out of the “wrong” hands. I put “wrong” in quotation marks because, well, to some of those folks any hands are the wrong hands, but they’ll pretend they just mean criminals anyway.

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Anyway, much of the debate is about keeping guns out of the hands of bad guys supposedly. That’s what proposals like universal background checks are supposed to be all about, keeping guns out of the hands of bad people.

However, one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that bad people have all kinds of ways of getting guns.

A federal grand jury has indicted a Fort Wayne man who investigators say stole a dozen handguns to pay off a drug debt.

Michael Yoder, 36, worked as a supervisor at a local trucking company where firearms were reported missing Sept. 9 from a shipment from Louisiana. He later said he found a case containing guns outside a loading dock, according to charging documents filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Wayne.

But 12 handguns still were missing.

Officials at the company, which is not named in court documents, reportedly reviewed surveillance video and interviewed employees and determined “the theft was perpetrated by an employee of the trucking company.”

“Yoder admitted that he later gave the stolen firearms to an individual in order to pay off a preexisting drug debt owed to the individual,” ATF Special Agent Andew Badowski wrote in court documents.

The ATF arrested Yoder on “knowingly stealing firearms which were moving as, and were a part of, and which had moved in, interstate and foreign commerce. He also is charged with knowingly possessing a firearm that was in and affecting commerce.”

The grand jury indicted him on both charges on Wednesday.

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Now, let’s take a look at what’s alleged here. The gun trade is tightly controlled so as to try and prevent things like this from happening, yet it still did. Yoder, who admitted to using heroin, was still able to take guns out of the shipments and provide them to his dealer for payment. That’s because people have to be involved in the process somewhere along the way, which introduces the chance for someone to do something like this.

Yoder now faces prison time for his actions, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are now guns out on the street because of them and they’re not going to be sold to law-abiding citizens.

Meanwhile, any crime committed with those guns are going to be used to justify still more gun control regardless of the fact that these weapons were stolen in the first place. After all, most guns used in violent crime are stolen, but that never shows up on the nightly news. That doesn’t show up in reports by anti-gun organizations.

Instead, they present all such cases as the same and pretend that people are buying guns lawfully then carrying out unlawful acts with them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Then again, what do they care about the truth?

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