Last week, I wrote about an illegal immigrant who tried to claim that his ownership of 170 firearms shouldn't have been illegal on Second Amendment grounds. The judge wasn't moved by his argument.
However, let's be real, there are questions about those guns in the first place, and we need to understand just what happened here.
Now, when I talked about it previously, I didn't get into any of that, and I'll explain that here in a bit.
Let's start with looking at what our friends over at The Truth About Guns had to say on the topic. Mark Chesnut writes:
Serrano-Restrepo had told the judge that his firearms, which included a .50-caliber Barrett multiple AR-15s— was “for self-defense” and part of “his collection,” according to court documents. And had he been a lawful citizen, those would have been very good points. The ruling that illegal immigrants don’t have a Second Amendment right to bear arms isn’t the first such, as the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that illegals don’t have 2A rights.
While that question appears to be answered—at least for now—the bigger question is how Serrano-Restrepo passed so many federal background checks. Each time he filled out the 4473, he answered that he was a U.S. citizen when he wasn’t.
ATF agents recently began investigating Serrano-Restrepo after he completed a purchase of at least 22 firearms. When they searched his home, they found 170 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
While the media might make that sound like an “arsenal,” TTAG readers know it more as a “nice gun collection”—something to strive for, not to fear. Still, the fact that someone in the country illegally could pass the background check just by lying about his citizenship is concerning, especially since citizens are delayed daily over small errors without the FBI system.
Now, when I talked about this, the reports I was seeing didn't seem to include why he came to the attention of law enforcement in the first place. As such, I didn't speculate on him lying on federal paperwork. After all, this happened in Ohio, where face-to-face transfers are still legal, so I figured he could easily bypass the need for a background check.
Plus, frankly, that wasn't what I wanted to focus on.
But now that Mark brought it up, he makes a really good point. He underwent the background check and just lied on the paperwork. Somehow, I doubt he's going to get a pardon like someone else who did basically the same thing. His daddy isn't president at the moment, after all.
Yet the overall point is that he got a clean background check returned from NICS when he's not even here legally. How did that happen? How could it happen?
Honestly, I'm at a loss because I can't honestly see how Serrano-Restrepo could provide a valid social security number, which is what I thought was needed for a NICS background check. So just what happened and how could it happen?
It's bad enough that he lied on the paperwork--we all know people who are going to do illegal things never lie on federal paperwork, especially under threat of perjury charges if they do so, now don't we?--but he underwent background checks. A lot of them.
And all while law-abiding citizens are getting jammed up, waiting for their background checks to return, and as other folks want to end the three-day limit on those holdups.
It's absolutely ridiculous that the very system we're told will prevent something like this from happening completely and totally failed to prevent something like this from happening, and not just once. We're talking about 170 firearms, for crying out loud. That wasn't a one-time purchase by any stretch of the imagination.
This happened multiple times over the years,
But I'm sure they'll tell us that if we give them more power, they can suddenly get it right when there's no reason to believe them.
