Yet another legal gun that disappears.
WAREHAM, Mass. (AP) — A Plymouth police officer’s gun has gone missing after he inadvertently left it in a courthouse bathroom.
Yup, we must remember that all illegal guns start their lives as happy legal guns before:
Chief Michael Botieri says Capt. John Rogers Jr. put the gun down in the bathroom of Wareham District Court at about 3 p.m. Monday, then left without it. When he went back for it minutes later, it was gone.
At least he immediately notified court officials.
Court officers and local police, with the help of a weapon-sniffing dog, did a sweep of the courthouse and passed everyone inside through a metal detector without success.
The Patriot Ledger reports that court officers collected the names of everyone on the court list of appearances and also searched the parking lot, the bushes and underneath vehicles without finding the weapon.
So yet another legal gun has been "laundered" into an illegal gun. This one is just a single one, but without registration many thousands (millions?) of firearms are "laundered" into illegal guns every year. Sure there will be accidental losses like this one in MA, but the majority of the laundered guns are just resold by unscrupulous dealers or stolen (some for real, others are reported stolen but were just sold to these dealers and then reported stolen). Until we register every new firearm sold/transferred out there we will not even begin to stem the flow of legal firearms into the illegal kind.
I want to make it clear that I am not advocating making firearms illegal or confiscating any of them from responsible owners. I am advocating for sensible regulations that do not violate the Second Amendment in any way, specifically:
1. Licensing, with the accompanying training on safety/safe storage.
2. Registration of all firearms manufactured from now on and of any transferred/sold between private owners/dealers.
3. Full criminal back-ground checks on every sale/transfer (including private sales, gun shows or unlicensed dealers)
4. For good measure, we should also limit clips/magazines from now on to somewhere between 7 and 10 rounds.
In the end this is about people, specifically children. Nobody wants to take the guns away, all that we want is a system that provides accountability so that we start reducing the senseless carnage in our Country.
I guess 1 person getting shot every 5 minutes is not enough for our Congress-critters to grow a spine and do something (don't worry as the death rate is "only" one every 15-20 minutes); what will it take before we can get them to renounce the NRA that owns/controls them so that they pass sensible regulations that bring accountability for manufacturers/dealers/owners - a person getting shot every 2 minutes (or over 1/4 million people getting shot every year instead of the 100k plus we have now)?