Every nation is going to have a few other nations that aren't on their Christmas card list. Switzerland probably has some countries it really doesn't like, for crying out loud, and it's known for its neutrality.
For the United States, well, we have a few. North Korea is right up near the top.
They're not really a threat to us, mind you. They can't even feed their people most of the time, including their troops, so I'm not overly worried about them actually doing something to the United States.
However, that doesn't mean they're our friends.
Which brings me to guns for a moment, because we damn sure aren't going to send them any weapons. While they're not a threat to us, they are to South Korea which, despite its current unpleasantness, is still an ally. We don't want American guns and ammo going to our allies enemies.
Luckily, the West Coast is where most of that kind of thing would ship out of if it were headed for North Korea, and all of those states have strict gun control laws.
What? What's that? They work as well as I'd expect? Well, what do you know?
A man living in Southern California has been accused of shipping guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition and other military items to North Korea in shipping containers.
Shenghua Wen, a 41-year-old Chinese national illegally living in Ontario, California, was arrested Tuesday morning and charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), according to a U.S. Department of Justice release.
Violating the IEEPA includes breaking the law by doing business with a sanctioned country or individual despite the restrictions. According to the Legal Information Institute, it can consist of transferring funds, making payments or conducting trade with a designated entity, potentially leading to severe civil and criminal penalties.
...
According to an affidavit filed Nov. 26, Wen obtained the guns, ammunition and export-controlled technology to ship them to North Korea, which is a violation of federal law and U.S. sanctions against that nation, according to the Justice Department.
The shipping containers full of guns and ammunition were allegedly shipped from Long Beach through Hong Kong to North Korea by Wen and his unidentified co-conspirators, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
Law enforcement searched Wen's home on Aug. 14 and seized two devices — a chemical threat identification device and a hand-held broadband receiver that detects eavesdropping devices — that he intended to send to North Korea for military use, according to the Justice Department.
So, the short version is that he's allegedly not a very nice man who seems interested in sending things to people who the United States figures aren't very nice.
But this is an illegal immigrant living in California, the state with the most strict gun control laws in the nation, and he was apparently able to obtain enough guns and ammunition to fill shipping containers. Not a shipping container, which would still be a lot, but multiple. They used the plural here, after all.
How?
I mean, if gun control laws work--and we're assured that they do--then how could an illegal immigrant get shipping containers worth of guns and ammunition?
Especially since California controls ammo, too.
What happened is that this is a guy who committed illegal acts as a matter of course. It sounds like he was a Chinese intelligence agent or something that was shipping guns to a Chinese ally--China's only ally, for the record. For someone like that, laws are irrelevant.
We don't seem to know how he got the weapons, only that they were "military-grade," which is a term used so often about things the military wouldn't actually use that I don't know if they were shipping semi-automatic rifles or M240s.
Regardless, there are a lot of laws designed to stop this sort of thing. Literally none of them prevented this and I'm pretty sure that they didn't catch the very first shipment.
Whoops.
