Connecticut woman sentenced for straw buys

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

The state of Connecticut has a lot of gun control on the books. Much of it was passed in the wake of Sandy Hook, but that’s neither here nor there. Today, they’re one of the more gun-controlled states in the nation.

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Among the many laws they have is a permit to purchase law. If you want to buy a gun, you have to get a permit in order to do so.

Many have argued this prevents things like straw buys.

It seems no one told this Connecticut woman that.

A Bristol woman was sentenced to a year in prison Wednesday for illegally purchasing firearms for individuals she knew were felons, according to federal prosecutors.

Prosecutors, citing court documents and statements made in court, said the case stemmed from a court-authorized search of Tyrone Brown’s residence on Stevens Street in New Haven, during which they seized a loaded 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

“The investigation revealed that the firearm was registered to a family member of Boucher, and that [Leah] Boucher had purchased 10 other firearms at various gun stores in Connecticut between 2018 and 2021,” federal prosecutors said in a statement. Boucher admitted to investigators that she had purchased firearms for others, and no longer had any of the 10 firearms that were registered to her, the statement said,

So gun registration didn’t accomplish much here either? I’m absolutely shocked.

Both of these are laws that people claim over and over again are necessary, and that we should enact at the federal level so as to prevent criminals from getting guns.

The problem is, as we can see, it doesn’t really do anything like that.

For the record, neither did the state’s universal background check law, either.

Why would it, though?

Look, I get why people want laws like these. I see exactly what they’re hoping to accomplish with all these regulations. In theory, they should work just fine.

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The problem is “in theory” and “in reality” are two completely different things. People like me told them it wouldn’t work as advertised. We told them that such laws only inhibit the law-abiding, they do nothing to dissuade the criminals.

We were ignored.

Meanwhile, criminals looked at how to get around those laws or even, as in this case, simply pretended they didn’t exist in the first place. Boucher bought at least 10 firearms for other people. She still has none of them, despite them being registered to her.

Absolutely nothing in the law actually prevented her from doing it.

So now nearly a dozen criminals got guns despite the very laws meant to prevent that, and how do anti-gunners respond? They want it on a national stage so the failures can be magnified throughout the nation.

Yeah, sorry, I’m not interested.

This is especially true in light of the abuses we’ve seen recently from the ATF. I can’t imagine that gun registration would somehow make the ATF less authoritative or less prone to these abuses. If anything, it’ll make it more so, and that’s really not what we need right now.

 

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