Former Marine Convicted For Attempted Gun Smuggling

The Marine Corps has a lot of noble past members. While I’ll tease Marines incessantly–that means a lot, for you Marines–I really do have a lot of respect for them. My own maternal grandfather was a Marine, after all.

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However, no group of people exists that can’t be tainted by the actions of another. My own Navy Hospital Corps isn’t immune and neither is anyone else. Everyone gets someone who tries to do something stupid, dangerous, evil, or some combination of the three.

For the Corps, this time around, they got this guy.

A former Marine sergeant has been found guilty of trying to smuggle guns into his native Haiti to train the Haitian Army so they could engage in a foreign armed conflict.

Jacques Duroseau was a Marine sergeant living in Onslow County when federal prosecutors say he got onto an American Airlines flight at the New Bern airport with eight guns, some of which were bought in Jacksonville.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office says the firearms included a Ruger model Precision Rifle 300WIN MAG and a Spike’s Tactical model ST15, as well as a large amount of ammunition, riflescopes, and body armor.

Duroseau pretended to be a military officer on official business.

He was not successful.

While in a perfect world, Duroseau’s actions–except pretending to be an officer on government business, anyway–would have been fine, we don’t live in a perfect world. We’re stuck with this one, and such an act violates both American law and Haitian law. Arms can’t be imported into the country without special permission from the government. Permission Duroseau didn’t have. Further, only specific arms can be imported even with that permission.

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Many of the guns Duroseau tried to take to Haiti were not permissible.

Honestly, I can’t help but think the dumbest part of this is who sloppy he was in trying to smuggle them into the country. I mean, it’s not like Haiti has super-secure borders that can only be accessible at certain points. It can’t be all that difficult to smuggle things into or out of the country if you want to, but probably not on a commercial airliner with Lord only knows how many other people on board.

It’s the stupidity of this that boggles my mind. It boggled it when I first read about this last year and it’s still boggling it.

I mean, I know we tease Marines about being stupid, but they’re not. Well, not all of them are, anyway. Clearly, some aren’t all that bright.

Duroseau broke the law and did it in a very stupid way. At this point, he’s pretty much asking to get the book thrown at him when it comes to sentencing.

While gun laws shouldn’t exist anywhere, they do. If you try to smuggle guns in spite of those, I’m not going to feel much in the way of sympathy if you get caught and get hammered by the courts. There are right ways and wrong ways to challenge laws, and ending up in prison sure as hell ain’t the right way.

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