How an engineer and a crack dealer teamed up to sell scores of unlicensed guns

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Officers'Wife said:
OK, let me see if I have this straight. This is a guy with a security clearance having background checks done for the purchase of a firearm over 400 times in a short amount of time yet nobody noticed?
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Either nobody's paying much attention to the NICS system, and it's not coded to flag suspicious activity like that...
Or... it was noticed, and for whatever reason, was allowed to continue --- whether for politics or 'investigative purposes' or whatever.
 
Texas10mm said:
Also from the article.

But together, according to court documents, Leonard J. Laraway and Bobby Perkins, Jr. created a pipeline of illegal guns running from suburban Virginia to cities across the mid-Atlantic region.
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Riiiiight... and since most of them ended up in DC, you should exclude that transactions happened in DC when the guy admitted he traveled to sell the guns....?
 
It took 400 guns for them to catch up with the straw purchaser? They only caught him because he bought 300 guns in a year? Why wasn't he caught after the first 10 guns were used in a crime? If they knew he purchased 300 guns in a year... isn't that defacto gun registration?

Is this why all the hand gun prices on the local board are at or above retail prices even though it costs me $50 to do a private party gun transfer legally?

Only 18 months? ...really?
 
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@Officers'Wife: post # 25 My son bought himself and me (as a father's day gift) matching rifles for military rifle match shooting. He was informed that his purchase would be flagged and any similar purchases with a months time would result in delayed approval. I suspect that was due to TN/VA cross border gun trafficking. Reading the DoJ OIG report on Operation Fast and Furious, it is actually common for FFLs to report suspected buyers-for-resale to ATF for further attention or even knock-and-talks after a series of suspicious purchases. So yes, I am really surprised that Laraway could do hundreds of buys with no red flags. In OFF one Uriel Patino was allowed to buy 723 guns AFTER a dealer flagged him to ATF as a suspected unlicensed dealer; the dealer told the OIG that once a straw purchaser/unlicensed dealer was identfied, the dealer would usually not see him/her again unless the dealer was called to testify at trial. We all ought to know why guns were allowed to walk in OFF.

back to my original post:
Leonard J. Laraway was buying guns for the purpose of resale at a profit to augment his income: illegally dealing in firearms without a license.
Parsing the title from the link, the story was about Laraway and Perkins: Unlicensed Gun Dealing, Washington DC Investigation.
Some creative copywriter came up with: "How an engineer and a crack dealer teamed up to sell scores of unlicensed guns"
The dealers were unlicensed.

"In an interview with CNN, Laraway's lawyer, Edwin Brooks, said Laraway began selling guns because he wasn't making enough money to support his upper middle-class lifestyle. 'Just like everybody else,' Brooks said, 'there's a lot of indebtedness: loans, credit cards. It was basically a financial thing.'"

Forced into selling guns without a license to support your upper middle-class lifestyle. No boo-hoo from me bub. I live within my income and do without rather than engaging in immoral activity like buying guns to resale at a profit to people who can't buy guns legally themselves. "Just like everyone else" NOT.
 
6.8KT said:
Either nobody's paying much attention to the NICS system, and it's not coded to flag suspicious activity like that..
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NICS is not an "active" background system. It's just a list, populated by information supplied by the Feds and the various States (to lesser and great degrees).
It's just a lookup list.

Dealer calls in to NICS, "John Smith, of Somewhere, East Virginia." Clerk searches NICS for "John Smith." And get however many are there, then the search is narrowed by East Virginia, then, by town of Somewhere.
 
He might have done better with a "I thought I was an ATF agent, following orders of my supervisor." defense, guess that one was already taken. Looks like the government REALLY DOES hate competition...
 
This is the kind of thing I could imagine where some politically-connected higher-up allowed this to continue after it was spotted, because then it allows for...
"See, the current system doesn't work. We need to overhaul the background check system and make it more stringent, more closely-monitored."
 
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