Solicitor General for the Department of Justice, Elizabeth Prelogar said before the Supreme Court last week in her statement for the government in the Garland v. VanDerStok oral arguments:
Those untraceable guns are attractive to people who can’t lawfully purchase them or who plan to use them in crimes. As a result, our nation has seen an explosion in crimes committed with ghost guns.
The average mouth breathing criminal is not the type to have tools, talent or the inclination to drill, tap or finish a frame or receiver, mount barrels, stocks and firing control groups…they could, I suppose, but why bother when they can steal a functional firearm or simply purchase one on the black market. Theft of firearms from even the Police is a real thing, from an article by The Trace, “The Trace examined records from more than 100 law enforcement agencies and found that they had collectively reported the loss or theft of at least 1,781 guns between 2008 and 2017. The vast majority were department-issued handguns, but the count also included hundreds of rifles and shotguns, as well as four fully automatic submachine guns. The firearms were stolen out of glove boxes and closets, left in airports and on the roofs of cars, and in one case, forgotten in a high school bathroom. Some were later involved in crimes ranging from aggravated assault to homicide.” Physician, heal thyself.
Possibly, she would better serve her employers (the People) by figuring a way to do criminal control instead of the heavy-handed, usual suspect strategy of putting more chains on the innocent to show the guilty she means business. It is obvious that her department and the other 3 letter agencies seek simply to keep a monopoly on violence when it comes to the average worker bee, but not so much when it comes to the arming of miscreants, foreign or domestic.
The recent proliferation of looters in storm-ravaged East Tennessee once again proves the point that Law Enforcement is always an after-effect entity. Tennesseans reeled at the capture of numerous illegal immigrants caught thieving from victims of Helene, but the police were not there when the act was occurring (they never are) proving once again that each of us is, in fact, our own first responder.
The Founders of this state wrote down a promise to the inhabitants who put their lives on the line in the late 1700s-early 1800s to never let government be so tyrannical that the free men of this state would be disallowed the right to bear arms for their common defense. Today however, the legislature of Tennessee mandates that the individual must stand down and allow a thief to walk off with a person’s property in their presence. This line of reasoning would have prevented the call for volunteers to go with Colonel Jackson into Alabama to punish the Red Stick Creeks for their pillage of the People and to remove them from being able to perform further raids.
How far we have fallen from the text and history of our Founding.
