Two Tickets To The Gun Show

Mike Bloomberg is in an election that is surprisingly tough (in single digits) despite spending around $75 million dollars, and despite his faults he's always been a strong supporter of gun control. So I'm not surprised he launched this investigation into gun show practices and released some damning hidden-camera video.

Even though private unlicensed sellers are not required to run background checks using the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check system, it is a federal felony for them to sell guns to people they have reason to believe are prohibited purchasers (such as felons or the mentally ill). In purchases attempted on 30 private sellers, the undercover investigator showed interest in buying a gun by asking about stopping power or by dry-firing the weapon. After agreeing on a price, the undercover would indicate that he probably couldn’t pass a background check. At that point, the seller is required by law to refuse the sale – but only 11 out of 30 sellers did so. Investigators found private dealers who failed these integrity tests at every show, including two sellers who failed at multiple shows. In total, 19 of the 30 private sellers approached failed the integrity test.

The 11 sellers who terminated the sale confirmed that private sellers know the law. As one seller in Columbus, Ohio, explained “I mean even as a private citizen, I’m kind of allowed a certain latitude, but once you say that [you can’t pass the background check], I’m kind of obligated not to….I think that’s what the rules are.”

The investigation also revealed that some private sellers are in fact apparently “engaged in the business” of selling firearms without a federal license, in violation of the law. For example, one seller sold to investigators at three different gun shows and acknowledged selling 348 assault rifles in less than one year.

There are more videos at Gun Show Undercover. The gun show loophole seriously needs to be closed, and this investigation could provide that. The ATF Bureau reports that 30% of all illegal guns are coming in through these gun shows.

Media Matters wonders if this undercover investigation will tickle the fancy of outlets like Andrew Breitbart and Fox News, who have shown such an affinity for this kind of operation in the past.

And Digby writes:

There's lots of anger and frustration out there right now. The zeitgeist is as angry and negative as I've ever seen it. Economic stress almost always leads to a rise in crime. The conservatives' only answer to this problem is to allow business to exploit their customers even more than they already have and create an ever more authoritarian police capacity to "keep people in line." The real answer is to find ways to ease the economic stress and get some of these deadly weapons out of the hands of criminals. You can probably guess which way this is likely to go.

But still, there is a need to shine a light on this out of control gun industry. I'm not a gun control absolutist, but the kind of activity that's exposed in these undercover videos is far more unacceptable than somebody giving tax advice to phony pimps. This is a deadly business that's killing innocent people.

One can only hope that this legitimate undercover investigation will get the kind of attention the ACORN videos did. It's a matter of life and death.

Indeed.

Criminal Enterprise

ACORN has now decided to sue the two filmmakers who ran undercover sting operations at their satellite offices, for violating Maryland law by obtaining documentary footage without consent.

The group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.

The two employees seen in the video were fired after it was posted online. The lawsuit says the employees, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams, suffered "extreme emotional distress."

The multimillion-dollar lawsuit seeks damages from James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the pimp and prostitute in the videos, and from conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart, who posted the videos on his Web site.

When ABC News took hidden-camera video of Food Lion workers bleaching rotten meat for resale, they sued - and won in court, to boot. The law is pretty clear on all this.

Mind you, this is the second Breitbart operation in as many weeks where he has posted illegally obtained material on his website. This nascent NEA mini-scandal uses audio from a conference call whose taping seems to violate state law.

There's also the matter of the worker in one surreptitiously taped ACORN video calling the police and reporting the couple for human trafficking. For his effort, he got fired by ACORN based on what he said in the video, regardless of the fact that he did the right thing and reported the fake pimp and prostitute to the police.

James O'Keefe, the supposedly "independent" filmmaker responsible for the ACORN sting, may be getting all kinds of cash from the conservative movement, but he'll need a lot of it, with all the state laws he appears to be breaking.

Greatest Story In The History Of Stories

Give Andrew Breitbart credit for writing about his own self-immolation, but this is just a perfect example of the paranoid style of modern conservatism. I can't do better than Sadly, No on this one, but I'm thinking of filming the live-action short for screening at the Liberty Film Festival. Click the link and delight in the tale of a man so consumed by looking out for perceived slights that he ends up flipping off a demonstration against child soldiers in Uganda.

It's the perfect wingnut story.