Gun Free Zones Arming MO Murderers

The AP missed the lede of a recent story: one of the biggest contributors to an explosion of homicides in Missouri is, indirectly, the state’s network of Victim Disarmament Zones, often misleadingly called Gun-Free Zones (the Zones are only “free” of legally carried gunsl; they don’t alter criminal behavior). Missouri’s robust criminal networks, formal and informal, have put the word out that the parking lot outside a school, court, stadium or other VDZ is an excellent place to go trolling for guns.

Auto burglary, even if a gun is stolen, is not taken seriously by the courts there, or almost anywhere else. Likewise, Felon in Possession charges are unlikely to be brought except against the Great White Defendant; violent felons usually get a bye on this charge from their enablers, prosecutors. The Associated Press’s Jim Salter (link is to US News version, which is illustrated with a picture of — guns in a legal gun shop, which are not the subject of the story):

More than 170,000 Missouri residents hold concealed-carry permits and many bring guns when they venture to high-crime areas like St. Louis. Numerous city-dwellers, too, own firearms. But once they arrive at their destination, they often have to leave their guns behind.

“When they go to a baseball game or an event at the convention center … they can’t take their weapons in with them and they leave them in cars,” Dotson said. “Criminals know there are guns in cars and they break into cars.”

More guns are around overall. Both sales and applications for concealed-carry permits have spiked in the St. Louis region in the past year, after unrest that followed the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown led to safety concerns. Brown, who was black and unarmed, was fatally shot by a white officer last summer, leading to protests, some looting, fires and violence.

This is the usually dishonest Jim Salter from Associated Press, so he doesn’t mention that Brown, while unarmed, attacked the officer, nor that the riots (not “protests, some looting”) were fed by dishonest reporting and fabrications from reporters, like, for instance, the AP’s Jim Salter.

When a grand jury declined to indict the officer in November, violence sparked again.

Fed once again by false media reports by Jim Salter, who even today a year after the incident keeps preserving The Narrative™ of innocent “unarmed black man” murdered by a white (therefore, in AP world, evil, unless you’re one of AP’s almost all-white staff, like the fishbelly-white Jim Salter).

Experts say that, inevitably, with more guns come more gun thefts. Remy Cross, a professor at Webster University in suburban St. Louis, said those who steal guns often sell them to other criminals.

“It’s easy to move them,” he said. “If you have a gun and don’t intend to use it yourself, because of the loopholes in laws around gun shows and resale, it’s relatively easy to get these guns into criminals’ hands.”

“Experts say” = “This reporter’s opinon is…” most of the time, but this time he has found an expert to agree with him. So Prof. Cross thinks St. Louis urban skells that steal guns take them to a gun show to sell them to their own social circle of urban skells? There are some ideas so retarded that an innocent retarded person couldn’t possibly form them: you need the advanced retardation that comes with a PhD.

Police say stolen and illegal guns are at the root of violence across the country.

Which leads us to another inference that Salter, in his adhesion to The Narrative™, will never make: restriction on legitimate owners can’t have a meaningful impact on criminal use, because the only intersection of the two groups is when the second (crims) victimize or try to victimize the first (legitimate, peaceable owners).

In San Francisco, the gun used to kill Kathryn Steinle, who was fatally shot in July as she walked with her father along a scenic pier, was stolen.

Salter here uses the passive voice, which the AP Stylebook these days apparently suggests that reporters use when lying about events. He makes “the gun” the subject of that sentence. And he never mentions the rather key data point that the unsecured gun was stolen from a Federal agent, who remains to this day lawyered up, uncooperative with the investigation, and who has gone (and will go) completely unpunished. But yeah, the gun did it. Preach it, Jim.

Chicago has already seized nearly 4,700 guns – nearly all of them stolen – this year.

That is, nearly none of them bought legally. At a gun show or otherwise.

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said that’s seven times more guns seized than New York City, and three times the number in Los Angeles.

“They’re the engine of violence in Chicago,” Guglielmi said. “These are guns that are on the streets used to fuel the violence in Chicago.”

We submit that leniently-handled Chicago career criminals are the engine of violence in Chicago. Maybe the guns are the transmission, but they would commit no crimes, absent a criminal’s intent. (Even Bubba the Gunsmite knows how to apply Loc-tite to the loose nut behind the trigger. When will Chicongo learn?)

In Jacksonville, Florida, gun thefts from cars are so common that police have launched a social media campaign to persuade people to keep their weapons at home.

Yeah, ’cause criminals never steal guns in residential burglaries — which is what they would do if this idjit campaign was 100% successful and everybody left their guns at home. What, do they assume criminals do not react to incentives unlike every other known life form?

“It’s a big issue,” Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Melissa Bujeda said. “Criminals are just going car-hopping, looking for unlocked doors and people who are leaving their guns in their cars.”

There is no updated national data on gun thefts, but a U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that 1.4 million firearms were stolen across the country from 2005 through 2010. It also found that the vast majority – at least 80 percent – were never recovered.

This is a case where an ATF master list of stolen guns could be a national benefit, but it would only work if ATF were a trusted broker; instead, ATF leadership is content to have their bureau be known as a politically partisan and untrustworthy (even to its own most courageous agents!) organization.

Suspects who authorities say were wielding stolen guns were shot by St. Louis-area police in two recent high-profile cases, worsening racial tensions that have simmered since Brown’s death. Both of the 18-year-olds shot this month by police also were black.

And, of course, the media has been all over the cops shot blacks version of the narrative, and has soft-pedaled the a couple black career criminals pointed or fired stolen guns at cops version, which is at least equally true (and a hell of a lot more complete).

During a protest in Ferguson on Aug. 9 marking the one-year anniversary of Brown’s death, Tyrone Harris Jr. shot at undercover officers using a semi-automatic 9 mm gun that was stolen last year from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, police said. Officers fired back, striking Harris several times. He was critically wounded.

Last week in north St. Louis, Mansur Ball-Bey ran out of a home during a raid and was fatally shot after pointing a gun at officers, Dotson said, though the attorney for Ball-Bey’s family claims that he was unarmed. Investigations by an internal police unit and the city’s Circuit Attorney’s office continue. Dotson said Ball-Bey’s handgun had been stolen in Rolla, Missouri, about 100 miles southwest of St. Louis.

via Guns stolen from vehicles increasingly used in violent crime.

Gee, who are we gonna believe, the cops holding the dead skell’s stolen gun, or the ambulance chaser hired by the family to get some money out of their expired former member’s kamikaze assault?

And on a final tactical note, does the predictable snuffing out of these sub-geniuses have a knock-on effect of raising criminal mean IQ? We mean, most people are aware banzai charges didn’t even work for the Japanese, and they executed them with considerable numbers and unmatched verve. Guys like Tyrone Harris Jr. and Mansur Ball-Bey must have been the other kind of retarded from PhD retarded.