Milk Carton Tom's Pals

Tom Barrett, often bleating for more Federal money to solve local (!) problems, joined a group of Mayors who are "against illegal guns."

The group was organized in April by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and includes 109 cities in 44 states, among them Los Angeles, Denver, Little Rock, Miami, Atlanta, St. Louis, Omaha, Dallas, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

Proposed actions? Glad you asked.

In Trenton, police set up checkpoints to search cars for illegal guns. Of 375 guns confiscated last year, Palmer says, half came from Pennsylvania, where laws are less restrictive than in New Jersey.

Maybe the 4th Amendment does not apply in New Jersey, eh?

New York City sued 15 gun dealers in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia in May for allowing straw purchases. Private investigators hired by the city posed as gun buyers and wore hidden cameras.

Of course, NYC also was forced to pay settlements to a couple of those dealers because the "private investigators" acted illegally. Somehow that fact didn't make it into the article.

The mayors' immediate goal is to defeat proposed federal legislation that would permanently prohibit disclosure of gun-tracing data by the ATF. Once available to cities and police departments, the national database has been restricted by Congress every year since 2003. The data had been used by police departments to figure out where crime guns come from. The House of Representatives has passed the bill; its prospects in the Senate are uncertain.

As we have pointed out, the Mayors' interpretation of the law is flat-out wrong. What they REALLY want is a neat printout of the names and addresses of ALL gun-owners who purchased through a Federally-licensed dealer.

That means legitimate gun owners will be the targets. By definition, "straw" buyers don't have the guns they purchased.

HT: Of Arms and the Law