A CBS News report posted last week claims to do a deep dive into the trend of guns sold by police agencies ending up in the hands of criminals. And according to the report, called “Four takeaways from our investigation into police agencies selling their guns,” somehow that is law enforcement agencies’ fault.
“About nine times a day over two decades, a gun used in a crime has been traced back to its original owner: a law enforcement agency,” the reports states. “A joint investigation by CBS News, The Trace and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has found at least 52,000 such incidents and identified more than 140 police agencies that sell or trade in their guns, allowing dealers to then resell them.”
Just so you don’t have to read the whole thing, the gist of the report is that police selling their old firearms or confiscated firearms, typically to cut cost when purchasing new guns, is somehow a very bad thing. But in the report, authors John Kelly and Chris Hacker didn’t include one very important fact—all of the guns were sold to proven law-abiding Americas since they had to pass a federal background check in order to purchase them!
The report is a synopsis of a larger, previously posted report called, “Police departments sell their used guns. Thousands end up at crime scenes.” In that report, the author nearly got to the truth about how the guns wind up in criminals’ hands, but also left out the most important part.
“Once sold by a department, weapons enter a secondary market where they can be resold to members of the public or other dealers,” the report stated. “By the time they turn up at crime scenes, the guns may have been stolen, traded or resold multiple times with little documentation. They sometimes still have the departments’ name stamped on the side.”
Again, there was no mention in the larger report that the guns from police departments had been sold to licensed firearms dealers, who must do a federal background check before transferring the gun to a buyer. Consequently, all the guns were originally sold to lawful citizens as determined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
What can we conclude from this “investigative report” by CBS? Just what the headline says. If CBS doesn’t want these guns sold, it stands to reason they don’t want any guns sold. After all, former police guns are no different than any other firearms sold legally in the country. It’s not like a violent felon can just walk in and purchase one of the guns without committing a federal felony that will land him in prison for a decade.
In a day when gun-ban advocates and their media enablers constantly call for so-called “universal” background checks, it’s ironic that CBS focused in this report on guns that were sold to buyers who passed those very same background checks. If anything, the report proves that criminals can get guns, despite the background check law. And that’s a good reason lawful citizens should be able to buy guns, too.
In the end, CBS is simply doing to police departments what it and other so-called “mainstream” media outlets constantly do to firearms manufacturers—blame them for violent crime instead of blaming the criminals who choose to use guns to kill others. Incidentally, that’s a felony, too.
