South America has a turbulent history. In my younger years, it was the home of constant fighting between communist and anti-communist forces, all with a little dose of CIA shenanigans thrown in just to keep things spicy.

Then you've got a country like Colombia, which was so synonymous with cocaine that the nation was worked into slang terms used to describe the drug.

A lot has changed since then, but then again, not as much as we might believe.

After all, a presidential hopeful was almost assassinated recently, as the current president claims there's a plot against him as well. And the would-be assassin? He had a gun that was traced back to an American gun store, which some seem to be having a field day with.

There's just an issue that we should talk about for a moment.

The gun used by a teenager in an attempt to assassinate a presidential hopeful in Colombia was picked at a gun shop in Arizona, officials revealed Monday - as Colombia's current president claimed that both he and the candidate were targets of a conspiracy. 

An official who spoke to the Colombian outlet El Tiempo on condition of anonymity said that suspect Juan Sebastían Rodríguez Casallas, 15, shot Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay with a 9mm Glock that was purchased on August 6, 2020 at a gun shop outside Phoenix.

The official said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) confirmed that the weapon had been purchased at AJI Sporting Goods in Apache Junction.

In addition, the law enforcement agent told the outlet that the ATF was able to identify the buyer as [buyer's name redacted].

...

AJI Sporting Goods owner Jeff Serdy told the Daily Mail on Monday that he had not been contacted by officials from Colombia or the US.

He explained that his shop brokered the gun's transfer from a dealer to his store, as buyers cannot purchase directly from a dealer and then have firearms delivered to their homes.

Serdy said his shop received a $30 processing fee for the transfer, but did not sell the gun to [name redacted]. He only picked it up there.

'For the record all state and federal laws were very strictly followed during this transaction,' he said, adding that a background check was conducted. 

There's a reason I redacted the buyer's name, and that's because there's no evidence that he did anything wrong--assuming, of course, that the name is accurate.

The gun was originally transferred in 2020, when the would-be assassin was 10 years old. There's no way he was the original buyer in the case of a straw purchase, and I haven't heard of many straw buys where they ordered a gun that had to be shipped to them. They'd much rather pick up a gun and leave so as to avoid more opportunity for something to go sideways.

Five years later, this gun is used in a crime in another country.

While some might like to blame lax gun laws for this, the truth is that it's far more probable that this gun was lawfully purchased, used for a time, then stolen and shipped south.

The Daily Mail makes a thing of how many guns recovered have US origin compared to a country like Italy, but it's not difficult to imagine why that's true. Shipping guns south from the United States just requires a car. You're not having to get it through security checkpoints like putting it on a plan or risk customs finding it during an inspection like you would if you shipped it in.

But back to this case, the five-year gap here is important, and it's not getting enough attention. This is called "time to crime." It's an indicator as to whether the gun store in question did anything wrong.

In 2022, the average time to crime was 6.34 years, which is a little longer than this one, but not by a whole heck of a lot. That long of a time to crime means that these aren't bought and immediately used for criminal activity.

AJI Sporting Goods doesn't seem to have done anything wrong, nor did the purchaser, from what we can tell right now. Gun control outfits don't wait for the facts to be known before spewing their B.S. Media outlets, even tabloids like the Daily Fail, should be better.