There are very strict gun export laws in this country. You simply can't do it without express permission from the federal government. Hell, gun trainers can't even teach outside of the country without that permission, so it's pretty strict.
And yet, American guns end up on foreign shores way too often for anyone's comfort.
The truth is that criminals are criminals. They don't care about the laws, only the money they can gain by breaking them. So, they concoct schemes to do things they're not supposed to do.
And one man just got 30 months in prison for doing just that.
A man was sentenced to 30 months in prison and a $20,000 fine in connection with smuggling guns into Haiti, D.C. officials said.
Jean Wiltene Eugene, 57, of Key West, Florida, was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty in April to one count of smuggling, said U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro in a statement.
Eugene illegally brought more than two guns from the U.S. to Haiti. He did not first get the required license from the Bureau of Industry and Security, said Pirro.
The guns were then hidden in vehicles that were exported to Haiti. He even signed a document saying there weren't any in there.
And yet, there were.
What happened to all the honest, law-abiding criminals? I tell ya, this world is going to pot.
On a more serious note, though, what we see here is just one of a million ways a gun can be trafficked out of the country. Or, outside of the continental United States, even.
Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands all have guns that turn up that came from the mainland. These aren't driven across state lines, after all. If they are, I'm impressed, and now that trip to Hawaii is a lot more likely to happen for me and the wife once I learn how they did it.
That's because, as I've pointed out more times than I can count, criminals don't obey laws. They'll do whatever they can to arm themselves or others so long as there's a profit in it. Even trying to get them to engage in a logical evaluation of the risk versus reward is impossible because most people just don't think that way.
More laws, as some are likely to demand, won't change that. Nothing will change that unless you can convince them to make that evaluation.
Since that's unlikely to happen, we'd best get used to it.
And the kicker is that while guns are flowing out of the United States to some degree or another, they could just as easily flow into the US. Should anti-gunners get their fondest desire and a gun ban be put in place, this pipeline will simply flip into reverse, and all those guns are likely to come back into criminal hands.
Kind of like how the War on Drugs didn't do crap to stop drugs from coming into the country.
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