Throughout America, as you read this, there is some highschool kid who wants to buy beer and who will likely reach out to some stranger outside of a store about buying it for them. Most of the time, this goes off without a hitch because, well, it’s beer and it’s also not like a lot of us didn’t drink while underage, right? However, what happens when someone tries that with a felony?
After all, carrying out a straw buy is a felony in and of itself, as is trying to get someone to carry out a straw buy.
For a couple of morons in Indiana, though, they found out that not only is it nothing like beer, you should probably avoid asking strangers to commit felonies for you.
Two men picked the wrong guy in their plan to coerce a stranger into buying them a gun at Bloomington’s Rural King store.
According to a Bloomington Police Department detective’s report, he was on duty wearing plain clothes and parked in an undercover pickup truck when two men tapped on the driver’s side window about 6 p.m. May 13.
They claimed to be too young to legally buy a handgun and showed the undercover detective about $400, asking him to buy them a weapon from the store’s gun department.
The probable cause affidavit the detective filed in the case said he was asked several times “if I would purchase a handgun with money provided by them, and then ’gift’ them the firearm after purchasing it.”
After explaining he was a BPD officer who also works for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one of the men ran off. The other, an 18-year-old, was told “to leave the parking lot and not solicit other individuals,” the affidavit said.
The detective recognized one of the men as an 18-year-old he knew wasn’t allowed to possess a gun because of pending charges of vehicle theft, theft, unauthorized entry into two vehicles and criminal mischief filed in April.
How stupid do you have to be to just walk up to some random person sitting in a truck and ask them to go and buy you a gun because you’re too young to buy it yourself?
The fact that it was an undercover cop just makes this more hilarious.
However, there’s something else we need to understand about straw buys, and that’s how those who carry them out are usually a whole lot smarter than this. They approach someone they know and know well. They ask them to buy the gun for them, but often will instruct them how to act so that they don’t signal anything to the clerks. They might have learned this the hard way, but they know better than these twerps did.
Or, they’re buying them explicitly for resale later on, and there’s literally nothing to signal that they’re carrying out a straw buy, even if they’re buying them a lot. Contrary to what some might believe, some people buy a lot of guns because they always wanted them and finally can afford them, so buying a bunch isn’t necessarily a red flag for anyone.
I honestly don’t think of the latter as straw buys, personally, though I know plenty disagree with me. The truth is, though, they’re even harder to catch, especially because these traffickers aren’t knocking on a cop’s truck window and asking him to buy them a gun as if it were just a case of beer.
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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