CEDAR RAPIDS — Four members of a Cedar Rapids family conspired to hide caches of guns and ammunition bound for Beirut among boxes of goods collected in a company’s clothing drive for Syria and Lebanon, authorities said Tuesday.
Federal officials said they intercepted two shipments that had originated in Cedar Rapids, seizing more than 152 guns and ammunition.
It was not disclosed who the weapons were intended for in Lebanon.
A federal complaint examined by The Gazette paints a picture of a conspiracy that came to light last year when an unnamed firearms dealer in Eastern Iowa became suspicious of large purchases of handguns, rifles and ammunition and tipped off authorities.
When you treat people like decent human beings instead of suspects or coerce them into “helping” because you want to be in front of the news cameras or are looking for political brownie points, you get results.
That’s one of the things that made me mad about the SB941 fight here in Oregon. That silly statistic that gets thrown around about ‘80% of Americans support Background Checks’ has a tiny nugget of truth, which is that very very few of us WANT to sell guns to felons or abusers. The only options, though, that we wind up with are status quo or ridiculous laws that make normal activities into stupid felonies. If we could come up with a simple, straightforward, non-intrusive, and above all else SIMPLE system to pull a yes/no background check on someone before we sold a gun, then I’m pretty sure we would use it. Heck, I would actually PREFER to use it. Give us space to do things voluntarily, and we WILL. OBLIGATE us to do things under threat of felony prosecution and we are going to object most strenuously.
Amen.
And the supporters of SB941 actually pulled out the “40% of gun sales are done without a background check” line.
Y’know, the same one Obama used to call for post-Sandy-Hook UBCs, and that was rated “Three Pinocchios” by the Washington Post fact checker.
This has been in the news a bunch here, they never have said who they were smuggling the guns too.
A gun dealer thinking something was wrong might have kept guns out of ISIS’s hands.