The New York Daily News is reporting that Arizona gun dealers are still selling semiautomatic weapons to buyers without a background check. We suppose the Tucson massacre that wounded Gabrielle Giffords didn't mean anything to the dealers who sold guns last week to buyers who said they couldn't pass background checks.
How were they discovered? The sales were captured on undercover video by private detectives working for Mayor Bloomberg's crusade against illegal guns. The detectives went to the "Crossroads of the West" gun show in Phoenix on Jan. 23 to expose the deadly loopholes in America's gun background-check system. The investigators bought Sig Sauer and Smith & Wesson 9-mm. semiautomatics with high-capacity magazines, even after telling the gun dealers they "probably couldn't pass" a background check.
Gun shows are exempt from background checks, but vendors can't legally sell to anyone they think is prohibited from buying them. Detectives also bought without any background check the same kind of Glock 9-mm semiautomatic with a 33-round extended magazine that Jared Lee Loughner used in his Jan. 8 Tucson rampage.
This travesty shows not only how easy it is to get handguns and semiautomatic weapons in this country but also how easy it is for guns to fall into the hands of the wrong people. We won't even ask why Mayor Bloomberg is exposing this horrible practice, instead of police and investigators in Arizona. The mayor is expected to show the videos at a City Hall news conference on Monday morning. Since common sense, consciousness and the recent murder and maiming of fellow citizens isn't enough to motivate gun dealers to follow the rules, then maybe being put on blast will?
Read more at the New York Daily News.
In other news: Video: Maryland Bank-Robbery Suspect Slips on Ice During Botched Escape.