Right now, a lot of the Second Amendment news out there revolves around the Biden administration’s focus on straw buys. The administration has said they’re cracking down on these kinds of gun sales.

However, after a news story earlier today, I’m left wondering just how many people even understand what a straw buy actually is.

After all, it seems the police chief in Pasadena doesn’t.

Violent crime is down in the city this year, according to Pasadena police Chief John Perez, but the alarming number of guns seized to-date by officers has caught the attention of local leaders, who asked to see a more detailed report on the matter.

…

“Many of these guns are what you would consider registered to somebody. The track record of these guns are very interesting because of straw purchases, which means people sell them to one another without any legal process,” Perez said.

Uh, no. That’s not what the term “straw purchase” means. Those may be illegal gun sales in states with universal background checks, but they’re not straw buys.

A straw purchase is when someone buys a firearm for another who generally cannot purchase a gun for themselves. This is an act that’s illegal in all 50 states and all U.S. territories.

Buying and selling of firearms without undergoing a background check is something else entirely, and you’d think a police chief in a city of over 140,000 people would understand this.

If he doesn’t, then just who in the hell does?

It’s especially frustrating because he follows up with this:

“So, there are many times that the weapons are in fact missing from people’s homes, and when we contact them, they didn’t know they were stolen or they were unreported in burglaries,” Perez said. “It runs the gamut in different categories.”

If they’re stolen guns, then they can’t be the result of a straw buy. He clearly seems to grasp that many of these guns are stolen firearms. That’s an important point that we need to see discussed more, especially by law enforcement.

But it doesn’t help if a police chief of a decent size city muddies the issue by simply not understanding what we’re talking about here.

Of course, this makes me wonder how much of this push by the Biden administration is because they don’t understand what a straw buy is or not. Granted, this is President Joe Biden we’re talking about here. I’m not sure he knows what day of the week it is, much less what a straw buy is or isn’t.

Still, that might explain the push to combat something that accounts for only a small number of firearms used in criminal acts.

After all, there’s not much else that explains this odd focus on straw purchases all of a sudden.

Of course, the question then becomes just how many police chiefs in the country also aren’t aware of what a straw buy is. Maybe that’s why there are so few prosecutions for these things?

If I didn’t have enough reasons to weep for our nation’s future, this would be enough.