And the criminals who cause the most real damage -- the gangbangers and drug dealers who make the fear of guns real -- don't show up here at all.Straw purchasers come instead, parlaying their own lack of felony convictions into an explosive inventory they'll sell on the street. There's always at least one degree of separation between them and the felons they arm.
And this:
"Our biggest problem is straw purchases," says Doug Dawson, group supervisor for the St. Louis office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Thanks to the National Rifle Association lobby, individual gun owners can sell from their collections without doing any criminal background check. Thanks to loopholes and glitches in data retrieval, dealers can sell to someone if they don't hear back from the FBI within three days. Thanks to basic human greed, some dealers still sell knowingly to straw purchasers.
Jumped right out at me. Maybe it's just me, but this article reads like a commercial for "Americans for Gun Safety" and the push to "close the gun show loophole." Yes, it's "even-handed" and more thorough than many of the articles I've seen, but for all the attention to detail here, the author forgot to mention that less than 2% of guns used in crimes come from gun shows or flea markets.
For me or those like me to actually like the article, it would end up reading like an article from a Robert K. Brown magazine.