So-called buybacks sure seem like a great way for a criminal to dump a gun they don't want connected to them. After all, they're all "no questions asked," and there's no effort made to connect them to illegal acts in most cases. It beats dumping it in the river, too, because you get something for it, even if it's just a gift card for groceries.
But one notable case exists where someone got a gun from a buyback in the Chicago area. That gun was then used in at least three shootings before it was recovered. That sparked a lawsuit because, well, the city of Chicago kind of wiffed it.
Now, it seems that officers did almost nothing to look into what happened that fateful day.
When a valuable Glock handgun was stolen from inside a South Side police station, the Chicago Police Department did little to investigate, not even interviewing most of the officers who were there.
That was even after the gun had been used in a series of shootings and then was found near a teenage boy who was caught trying to break in to a car, according to police records obtained by the Illinois Answers Project and Chicago Sun-Times.
And it also was after a police supervisor told investigators he thought he knew what happened — that another cop had taken it.
Instead, investigators closed the case without figuring out who stole the gun, which had been turned in to the police and was supposed to have been destroyed.
After reporters asked how a gun could have been stolen from a police station full of cops, the department said it was reopening its investigation.
But, even then, investigators didn’t interview a single additional officer who was there when the weapon was swiped from the Gresham District station in December 2023.
And the police department fought to keep all of this secret, refusing to release records of the case that reporters sought under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act — doing so only after the publisher of the Illinois Answers Project took the city to court.
In the end, no one was charged or disciplined.
Was no one disciplined?
Yeah, actually. They tried to discipline one guy, but, well, that didn't happen.
The only officer initially disciplined in the case was a sergeant, Robert Brown, who approved the gun inventories. He was handed a one-day suspension. But that disciplinary action was reduced on appeal to a “violation noted” due to his “stellar” 23-year-history with the department. Brown won’t comment.
I'm sure he won't.
First, it was just a slap on the wrist, but even that was reduced to a note in his file that probably won't impact much of anything. At 23 years, he's not likely to be moving up in the department so much as biding his time to move out toward retirement, so this isn't a thing. It just means he didn't lose a day of pay, most likely.
What bothers me here isn't so much that a gun was stolen from a "buyback" event, nor that it was used in three shootings, but that in one of the most anti-gun cities in the country, no one bothered to do much in the way of digging to figure out what happened. While they're trying to do everything they can to restrict lawful gun ownership throughout Illinois, they basically just shrugged off a gun being stolen out of a room full of cops.
It's really getting more and more difficult not to figure this is all intentional and that they want more armed bad guys because it makes it easier to sell gun control that will only apply to the rest of us.
The only thing stopping me is that I don't think they'd be able to stop bragging about if that's what they were doing.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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