Practically the definition of chutzpah:
Amid a raging national debate on guns, a bust in New York City highlights a problem for police in crime-plagued urban areas. While officers can control illegal gun sales in their cities, they have been at a loss to stop the flow of firearms from places with looser laws.
Huh? There’s no “raging national debate” on guns. A handful of states have unconstitutionally limited firearms access and will not stop complaining that the other forty-plus states won’t follow suit.
Eight people from three states have been arrested and charged with buying guns legally in Atlanta and Pittsburgh and bringing them to New York, sometimes aboard low-cost Chinatown buses. “I sell guns,” alleged trafficking ringleader Michael Bassier was caught saying on a wiretap, according to prosecutors. “I’ve got two Mac 10s on me, an SK assault rifle and four handguns and I’m walking through New York.”
Bassier, 31, of Canarsie, Brooklyn, boasted how he could take advantage of less strict gun laws outside of New York and then sell the weapons at a premium in the city. “I’m selling them the right way and the wrong way,” Bassier allegedly said on one recorded conversation with a woman believed to be his girlfriend. “When I’m out of state, like in Atlanta and Georgia and all that, it’s all legal. In New York, it’s completely illegal.”
This is what is known as taking advantage of a black market. The same thing has been happening with cigarettes for decades — bootleggers buy them in, say, North Carolina, where the taxes on coffin nails are low and sell them at a profit in New York state, where the taxes are quite high. Economics 101.
It has been a source of frustration for law enforcement officials.
For law enforcement officials who don’t understand the meaning of “shall not be infringed,” perhaps. Hey, according to the Left, once the Supreme Court “rules” on something it automatically becomes the law of the land, but anti-2A zealots in New York and elsewhere stubbornly refuse to implement the Supes’ Heller and McDonald decisions:
McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that determined whether the Second Amendment applies to the individual states. The Court held that the right of an individual to “keep and bear arms” protected by the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and applies to the states. The decision cleared up the uncertainty left in the wake of District of Columbia v. Heller as to the scope of gun rights in regard to the states.
Tell that to New York state and, even worse, New York City, which has a blatantly unlawful Sullivan Law on the books and simply thumbs its nose at the Supreme Court and the rest of the country while demanding that everybody else follow their lead.
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