In all honesty, this particular news report was of a sufficiently non-event quality to me that I did not even bat an eye reading across its headline yesterday… but then my mother asked me about it, and I started realizing just how much pants-wetting hysterics there had been online about it, and I figured it might be a good excuse to put up another post today.
In short, one of the firearms used at the Pentagon shooting, and another firearm used at another shooting in Las Vegas, once passed through the hands of the Memphis police department. The only reasonable response to that kind of news is, “Yeah, and…?” but, unfortunately, “reasonable” seems to be describing fewer and fewer American citizens.
Basically, the pistol used at the Pentagon attack was seized by the Memphis PD in 2005, and then traded to a firearm dealer in exchange for another gun that was “better for police work” (i.e. was another copy of another firearm the police department already had parts, magazines, and ammunition for). From there, it bounced out of Tennessee, around dealers in both Georgia and Pennsylvania, until it finally found its way into the hands of a private individual at a gun show in Las Vegas, who then sold the pistol to the man who would end up using it to shoot up the Pentagon.
Of course, this man was in possession of a letter from the California government telling him that due to his psychiatric problems, he was prohibited from purchasing firearms, and if I am not mistaken, purchasing handguns out of state, even in person-to-person transactions, is not legal either.
So, yes, the firearm the shooter illegally purchased after it had legally changed hands many, many times beforehand did, at one point in time, spend some time in the evidence locker at the Memphis PD. So what? Police departments sell of all manner of unclaimed or confiscated evidence and materials in order to raise funds for their operations – automobiles, firearms, whatever. What sense would it make to destroy a perfectly-fine piece of equipment that could bring in hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to already-under-funded police agencies? Would the people objecting to this practice be willing to fork over their own personal funds to buy the police departments the equipment they would have purchased with the proceeds from those sales? Something tells me to doubt it.
As the above-linked article says,
Rich Wyatt, a former police chief in Alma, Colo., who now operates a gun store — and who has bought weapons from police agencies — defended the practice of police selling guns.
“Maybe if they put the money they made selling the guns into training those officers better, they’d be better off,” said Wyatt. “Nobody ever, ever questions selling a car that was used in a crime. I am sad that officers were shot, but I don’t care where the guns came from. To say we need to chase guns is not the issue, we need to chase people.”
And as one of its commenters, The Dude (who might be abiding) wrote:
This isn’t the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Inanimate objects used to commit crimes don’t somehow become imbued with evil powers or curses. Selling guns to raise funds is no different than selling the swag from a drug raid at auction. Destroying these objects, which are legal to possess, is irrational in a time of tight budgets.
Now, if the Memphis police department had actually directly sold the firearms to the shooters – both prohibited persons – then we would have a scandal worthy of a news report (and a full inquest, and a few firings, and so forth). But that is not what happened. Rather than darn-near-literally burn money, the police department decided to lawfully sell legally-ownable property to a legal recipient of that property, who then repeated the process with someone else, and so forth, until some idiot decided to sell a firearm to someone without even checking ID – blaming this incident on the Memphis PD is about as rational as blaming a drunk driving fatality, committed with a car they once impounded, on them.
But wait a second… if one were to listen to and believe the anti-rights advocates of America, one would know that the Tiahrt Amendment would never have allowed this kind of tracing for the firearm, so obviously this news report is a complete and utter fabrication. And, from the other side of the sarcasm spectrum, remind me again how we do not have a firearm registry in this country?
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