Gun trafficking may not be the route of all our problems with violent crime, but it’s still an issue. It puts guns in the hands of people who aren’t exactly law-abiding citizens, after all. It’s a crime in and of itself, which means gun control laws aren’t likely to stop it.
I mean, they’re breaking laws in the first place. What are more laws going to do? Make it extra illegal?
But a guy here in my home state was just convicted of breaking all of those laws.
“Oh, but if we had laws that kept him from getting guns in the first place, he couldn’t have trafficked them at all,” someone might say.
Yeah, about that…
A Columbus man who advertised the sale of fully automatic weapons on social media pleaded guilty to firearm trafficking resulting from a Project Safe Neighborhoods investigation.
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Matthew Azor, 19, pleaded guilty to firearms trafficking on Dec.17; Azor faces a maximum 15 years in prison and up to three years of supervised release and a maximum $250,000 fine.
“Matthew Azor illegally sold machine guns and ghost guns on social media, making the deadliest of weapons readily available to dangerous individuals,” said U.S. Attorney Peter D. Leary. “Our office and law enforcement partners continue to prioritize prosecutions against those responsible for gun violence in Columbus and across the Middle District of Georgia.”
Now, so-called ghost guns aren’t illegal in Georgia. Neither are the kits most used to build them.
Machine guns, however, aren’t exactly sitting on gun store shelves.
Yet Azor somehow obtained them–or, more likely, obtained full-auto switches that amount to the same thing in the eyes of the law–and sold them on Facebook of all places.
No one said you had to be smart to traffic guns.
The fact that this guy is clearly a product of Georgia’s public education system actually does more to undermine the gun control narrative in the first place. Azor doesn’t appear to be particularly bright, yet he figured out how to obtain whatever product we’re talking about here as machine guns.
Guns. Plural.
He didn’t just get one, but at least two.
Look, gun control isn’t going to stop anything. It didn’t here and this wasn’t exactly a candidate for Ocean’s 11 or some other crew of master criminals. You’re not going to stop gun trafficking with more laws. You’re not going to do it by making social media sites enact policies that will just be ignored until and unless someone reports it.
You’re not going to stop any of that with rules because the people who are the problem are people who don’t follow rules in the first place.
Why this is so hard for some to comprehend is beyond me. There’s a reason a lot of people on the gun rights side ascribe nefarious motives to the gun control community as a whole. It’s because they can’t believe anyone is stupid enough to actually believe what they’re saying in light of all the examples proving otherwise.
And yet, here we are, with another example showing it won’t work and tomorrow I’ll probably have something new to show you from someone pushing gun control as if it’s actually the answer.
Read the full article here
