Gun trafficking is one of those things that anti-Second Amendment politicians talk about an awful lot. They’re often focused on guns coming from other states into their states, blaming the lax gun laws in those other states for their own issues.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is a prime example of this type of official, but she’s far from the only example.
To hear them tell it, if other states had stricter gun control laws, there simply wouldn’t be any gun trafficking. Kind of like how none of that ever happens in Europe.
Europol announced on October 6 that following a complex investigation in which it supported the Dutch National Police (Politie), the Czech National Organized Crime Agency (Národní centrála proti organizovanému zločinu) and the Slovak National Crime Agency (Národná kriminálna agentúra), six members of a gun trafficking gang have been arrested.
Two members of the criminal gang were arrested in Slovakia on September 13, followed by the arrest on October 5 of four other members in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. All these suspects were considered as High-Value Targets by Europol.
The criminal syndicate under investigation specialized in the conversion of so-called Flobert guns into lethal live-firing ones. They are believed to have supplied over 1,500 firearms to criminal groups in the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
Nah, this couldn’t have happened. I have it on good authority from the anti-gun crowd that if you tightly control firearms, criminals simply won’t be able to get any guns at all. Converting Flobert guns into lethal firearms is simply unpossible.
And yet, here we are.
Why?
Because criminals want guns. They want them and they’ll pay for them. If there’s money to be had, someone will figure out a way to get that money. That includes turning something relatively benign into a lethal firearm. It also includes producing firearms from scratch if need be.
Then those guns were transported across national borders to be sold to various criminal elements throughout Europe.
And the anti-Second Amendment crowd really thinks we can somehow stop the flow of guns across state borders? Sure. Good luck with that one, Sparky.
Keep in mind that even the most gun-friendly European nation has gun control laws well in excess of what most Americans would ever tolerate. Despite that, criminals still found ways to provide guns to other criminals. National borders didn’t stop them. The proliferation of gun control and no Second Amendment analog to restrain governments did absolutely nothing to stop them.
And yet you think requiring universal background checks in Indiana will suddenly make all of Chicago’s problems go away?
Dream. The hell. On.
No, seriously, you’re dreaming if you actually believe that will work. It won’t. It never will.
Criminals are in the business of breaking laws. Creating more laws to try and restrain them doesn’t slow them down. It does, however, stop people from being able to defend themselves with firearms. That’s something you generally don’t see in Europe.
That’s not a good thing for the United States, though.
Over and over again, people want to blame the lax gun laws in one place for their own problems, never acknowledging that if those lax gun laws were the problem, the point of origin would be just as bad as the place complaining. From Chicago to Mexico, officials blame gun trafficking for an issue that usually is more of their own making.
Why would they? If they did that, they’d have to admit they sucked at their jobs. I’d like to think the voters in most places are smart enough not to vote for someone who admits they suck at what they were elected to do.
Then again, we also tend to see a lot of corruption in these same places, so who knows?
