This very biased piece is a smear of all gun owners. The topic, as far as I can tell, is that underneath every law abiding gun owner, is a crack head just waiting to sell guns to criminals:
When Trenton crack dealer Sean Hagins spotted the Pennsylvania tags and NRA sticker on a customer’s pickup, he saw opportunity. Hagins had been dealing drugs for years, was an ex-felon with a history of psychiatric problems; he could not buy guns himself. The customer, David Downs, had a nasty crack habit and had been laid off from a Bensalem belt factory.
Yep, those shady NRA members and their criminal ways! Not content to smear gun owners, they also smear honest dealers:
Guns & Things owner Mary Ann Dobdrenz winced when a reporter told her the DC-9 ended up in the hands of an accused killer.
In an interview at her shop, which she runs out of her home, Dobdrenz said it was often impossible to separate the straw buyers from the gun enthusiasts.
“You just can’t tell from looking at a person,” she said.
Downs, 47, has a solid middle-class background. He graduated from Delhaas High School in Bucks County and owned a three-bedroom house in nearby Levittown. He even had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Eventually, Dobdrenz said, she grew worried about Downs. She passed a list of his gun purchases to a local police officer, who promised to give it to the FBI. She never heard whether federal investigators saw her list.
Dobdrenz said she did ask Downs why he needed so many guns. She never got a good answer.
“He was a real talker,” Dobdrenz said. “There was always a different story.”
So here we have a gun shop that fully cooperated with authorities, went well above the legal requirement in trying to ascertain the nature of this guy’s interest in all the guns he was buying, and they still get their name published in the Inquirer in a piece that’s decidedly not painting them in a friendly light. This hits close to home for me, since “Guns & Things” is within walking distance, about 1/2 a mile from my house.
But is this article really a case of the need for stricter gun laws? Downs was caught, and confessed to authorities. He’s going to jail where he belongs, along with all this other gun trafficking friends. The law worked in this case, and you’ll get no argument from most gun owners that these men belong in prison. But straw purchasing is a fundamental problem. The only way to put any dent in it is to outlaw all gun sales, or close the majority of the state’s gun shops, which service the shooting community in the areas they are located. This is not a solution that is acceptable to gun owners in Pennsylvania, which is why we will not agree to further restrictions on our right to bear arms.
What the article doesn’t tell you is, for the most part, there are no longer many legal avenues to purchase a firearms in New Jersey. There are few gun shops left in existence, having been driven out of business by all the burdensome regulations on gun ownership there. Guns in New Jersey may not be illegal, but it’s fast approaching the point where they might as well be. Gun owners in Pennsylvania will not permit our rights to suffer the same fate. We will not sacrifice the health of our sport and our ability to protect ourselves and our families on the false promises that gun control actually reduces violence.
