“Due to the proliferation of ghost guns, which are privately made, unregistered, and untraceable, the City of Los Angeles has seen a citywide rise in gun violence, which has been plaguing our communities,” LAPD Online claimed in a November press release. “The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has seen an increase of over 130% in ghost gun recoveries from 2020 to present day.”
They’re playing fast and loose with facts, which, unfortunately, is not surprising for an anti-gun department where the chief is beholden to anti-gun politicians for his job. A recovered gun is not the same as a gun that has been used. And one high-yield raid, like the one that LAPD conducted the month before yielding “hundreds of unserialized firearms and gun components” is all it takes to give the percentages a huge bump.
“Their sole reason that they exist in my view is that for persons who are unable to lawfully acquire firearms, this is a means for them to carry a gun – so convicted felons, violent dangerous individuals,” Chief Michael Moore opined in a press conference announcing a “rewards program” encouraging citizen “tips” in exchange for a $500 reward for turning in illegal manufacturers. That’s demonstrably not true and is slanderous to untold numbers (thank goodness!) of peaceable Americans who have lawfully been making do-it-yourself firearms since before the Second Amendment.
“Year-to-date officer-involved shootings in nine separate instances officers have faced individuals armed with ghost guns,” Chief Moore continued. “We go back to 2018, just four short years ago, during the entire year, officer-involved shootings, there was one involving a ghost gun.”
It’s fair to ask if there is anything about serial numbers that make non-“ghost guns” less dangerous. It’s also fair to ask, especially with L.A. District Attorney George Gascón “creating a ‘ticking time bomb’ by releasing murderers back on the streets,” if that might suggest a more effective way for LAPD to allocate its resources and energies.
As long as questions are being asked (just don’t expect an answer), it might be fair for someone raising alarms about unserialized firearms to provide a verifiable number of shootings that have been solved by tracing a criminal’s gun back to the lawful original purchaser and to include what percentage of solved cases that represents. Since Chief Moore is throwing out figures to make his case, let’s see how big of an issue he’s really talking about.
There’s something that seems uniquely un-American about setting up a “snitch line” with monetary rewards. Perhaps that’s to be expected because L.A. defiantly declares itself a “sanctuary city.” It’s curious how eager they are to work with the feds on guns but not on illegal immigration, and that in itself points to another area where self-serving “authorities” are abetting violent crime:
“Almost half of all of the criminals prosecuted in federal courts in 2018 were aliens, charged with crimes ranging from drug trafficking to murder to kidnapping These federal numbers are only a fraction of the crimes committed by criminal aliens.”
There’s one other potential danger to such cash-for-stoolies programs—well, two, actually.
Say there’s a corner-cutting cop who doesn’t have the evidence to get a warrant as the Fourth Amendment requires. Call the snitch line, and the problem is solved.
Now say an underworld supplier wants the cops to help him put a gang rival out of business. Can we assume collecting the $500 is — like with LAPD’s stupid “buyback” events — “no questions asked”? (As an aside, check out the “professionalism” that’s been displayed before at those.)
The horse and pony show press conference is a tacit admission that California gun laws, the ones garnering “A” grades from the prohibition lobby for being the “best” in the land, aren’t working. So the confiscators say they need more. They always will. It will never end until the totalitarian-minded have it all, and then they’ll turn to what they want next from those under their heels.
And, like an impulse control-challenged obsessive unable to resist the urge to show what’s next, Moore makes it clear:
“Later during the press conference, when referring to a static display of high-powered, assault-type rifle ghost guns, Chief Moore went on to add, ‘When you look at the firepower, these are weapons of war. The only reason these weapons exist is to kill people.’”
“The only reason”? Is that why your “Only Ones” deploy with them, Chief?
No, of course, none of the “authorized journalists” admitted to the press conference asked him that:
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
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