Guns aren't stupid, People with Guns Are.

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On Monday, President Biden announced a new regulation that the Justice Department hopes will reduce the number of unmarked firearms. It targets kits in which incomplete metal frames and receivers (the part of a weapon that holds the firing mechanism) are sold online, requiring only a few drill holes to become complete weapons. Now, those incomplete devices will be classified as firearms and be regulated.

Or, as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson would have you believe: Now the Biden administration is going to disarm its political opponents.

It is certainly true that the barrier between incomplete and complete firearms can be hazy. One might assume that kits facilitating the creation of untraceable firearms will evolve to get around the new definitions applying to “frames” and “receivers.” Given the availability of 3D printers and instructions for creating simple pistols, the boundary blurs further. Law enforcement is in an evolving war with those hoping to produce untraceable weapons.

While hobbyists do buy DIY kits to make their own weapons, these weapons are being found at crime scenes. Last week, New York police recovered an untraceable firearm as part of an investigation that killed a student outside a high school in the Bronx.

At this point, the number of untraceable weapons recovered at crime scenes is still small. In 2020, hundreds of thousands of firearms were recovered at crime scenes nationwide. The number of suspected privately made firearms was far smaller.

But, as the Justice Department notes, that small number has been growing quickly. In 2016, fewer than 2,000 such firearms were recovered, a number equal to about a half-percent of the total number of recovered firearms. In 2020, more than 10,000 such weapons were recovered, about one in every 40 firearms recovered nationally. In 2021, the number of privately made firearms that were recovered nearly doubled.

Enter Carlson, who immediately framed this in a way that suggested Biden was trying to punish Republicans.

“The same administration that is letting gun felons walk has decided that Trump voters who have guns that they work on because they have physical skills must be suppressed and disarmed. This is purely political,” Carlson said on his show Monday night. “If you wanted to lower the murder rate, you wouldn’t even bother to make up the phrase ‘ghost gun.’ You just bust people who use guns in the commission of crimes. That’s the last thing you’re going to do because those are Democratic voters.”

To some extent, this riff is a mark of how indifferent Carlson has grown to building out a sensible argument. It’s just pure appeals to his perceived, pro-Donald-Trump audience: They are making these weapons themselves because they are fine craftsmen. They aren’t criminals; criminals are definitionally Democrats. He didn’t wink when he said this, but he didn’t need to.

What’s interesting is that “just bust people who use guns in the commission of crimes” line. It’s Carlson suggesting both that police aren’t doing their jobs but also being lazy or … something. It’s also boggling as a claim. How are you going to “bust people” if you recover the untraceable weapon they used to commit that crime? What magic power does Carlson think police have here? It’s like him coming to a murder scene, wiping away any fingerprints and telling the police that they should stop worrying about the lack of fingerprints and just catch the bad guys. (As he wiped away the fingerprints, imagine that he explained that only Trump voters left fingerprints, because of their having real jobs that got their hands dirty, like hosting TV shows farming and servicing cars.)

Carlson being Carlson, he then turned up the temperature.

“Just to be clear, there’s no such thing as a ‘ghost gun,’ ” he said, inexplicably. “That’s a made-up phrase, and anyone you see on television or in print repeating that phrase is a propagandist working on behalf of the forces of repression. … This is an effort to disarm people who don’t vote for the Democrats, period.”

This is indefensible fearmongering — but it’s Tucker Carlson, so you didn’t need me to point that out. For him, the entire story of the Biden administration has been that the Democratic president wants to disempower and punish his political opponents. It began in the hours after Biden gave his inaugural address and has carried over ever since. Now, a straightforward effort not to restrict gun ownership but to prevent criminals from escaping justice is framed as an effort to leave Trump supporters unarmed.

The old conservative line used to be that strict gun laws would simply mean that only criminals had guns. Now, it seems, the line is that efforts to track criminals through the guns they used is actually about leaving God-fearing Republicans susceptible to crime or government oppression.

It may not make sense, but it keeps people watching TV.

Another mass shooting, this time on the subway in NYC.

How Texas’s gun laws allow Mexican cartels to arm themselves to the teeth

Governor Greg Abbott wants to make the border safe for his state but loose gun laws allow cartels to drive to any Texas gun shop and legally stockpile guns, Mexican officials say

Saying he wants to make the US-Mexico border as safe as possible for his state, Texas’s governor Greg Abbott last month signed an order designating Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations” and urged the Joe Biden White House to do the same.

But the same border that Abbott insists he wants to make safer is actually being destabilized by Texas’s lax gun laws, which the governor defends and which the Mexican cartels exploit to arm themselves – legally – to the teeth, according to officials left to grapple with the situation.

Despite Mexico’s well-documented high levels of violence, legally purchasing guns there is actually quite difficult. The nation of nearly 130 million people has a single store that can legally sell guns.

On a military base in Mexico City, that store was selling fewer than 40 guns a day in recent years, and it’s prohibited from even advertising its wares.

But the infamously violent cartels that Abbott and other Republicans blame violence along the border on have found another route to stockpile weapons: the United States.

Mexican foreign affairs ministry legal adviser Alejandro Celorio Alcántara estimates that a half-million guns annually are purchased legally in the US and then brought into Mexico illegally. About 70% of guns seized in Mexico from 2014 to 2018 and submitted for tracing had originally come from the US, according to officials with the American bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives (ATF).

It’s a situation that bewilders leaders of Mexican communities who have collectively grieved more than 150,000 killings – mostly at gunpoint – since 2006.

Chief among them is Carlos Peña Ortiz, the mayor of Reynosa, a Mexican town along the US border which sits just 11 miles away from a Texas gun store where residents and visitors can legally buy guns.

“We are having a problem with high-caliber military weapons,” Peña Ortiz said recently. “We know that most, if not all, of these high-caliber weapons are coming from the United States and a significant amount are likely coming from Texas. The financial incentive to smuggle weapons into Mexico is high and purchasing them in Texas and driving a few miles is too easy.”

As Peña Ortiz has seen, there are many rifles styled after AK-47s that can be purchased relatively cheaply in the US for between $500 and $1,000, then taken to Mexico and resold at three or four times that value.

The easy access to a legal inventory in Texas and then lucrative prices on the secondary market has flooded some Mexican border towns – including remarkably violent ones – with guns.

One of the Mexican federal government’s responses to that flow of weapons has been to sue US gun dealers and manufacturers. A US federal judge dismissed one of those lawsuits targeting manufacturers, but then the Mexican government immediately filed one targeting dealers, though the ones named in that case – at least so far – are based in Arizona.

Though such suits have either failed or remain unresolved, the US has acknowledged the likelihood that guns purchased in border communities may end up in Mexico, and it has imposed a rule requiring “multiple sales” in border states to be reported to the ATF, ostensibly to track and rein in trafficking of powerful guns into Mexico.

But the effect of those rules is limited by the loose gun laws championed prominently by states like Texas, Peña and other Mexican officials argue.

Texas, at least currently, does not require a license of any kind to own a high-caliber rifle in its state limits. Anyone complying with federal requirements can legally purchase a high-caliber rifle in Texas upon turning 18.

Many in the public called on government officials to limit access to such guns after young men used high-powered rifles to carry out deadly mass shootings at a school in Uvalde, Texas, and a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, earlier this year.

In June, New York passed a law requiring people purchasing semi-automatic rifles to first obtain a license, and it would be a felony for vendors to sell to anyone – even privately – who is not licensed.

After a deadly mass shooting at a retail store in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, Abbott’s staff apparently considered a similar measure.

But nothing ever materialized, and Abbott’s allies in Texas’s Republican-controlled measure have only loosened gun restrictions, including by legalizing the public carrying of handguns by Texans without training, a license or a background check.

It’s made it easier than ever to drive to any Texas gun shop and legally stockpile guns, whether or not the customers belong to a Mexican cartel.

And that region continues struggling with gun violence, unimpeded either by Abbott’s $4bn border security mission Operation Lone Star and his designation of Mexican carteliers as terrorists.

NC county announces curfew as nearly 40,000 customers remain
without power after two substations damaged by gunfire

[ snip ]

The power outage is being investigated as a “criminal occurrence” after crews found signs
of potential vandalism at several locations, CNN previously reported.

Fields said multiple rounds were fired at the two substations. “It was targeted, it wasn’t
random,” he said.

No suspects have been identified in connection with the incident. Fields would not say if
the criminal activity was domestic terrorism.

“The person, or persons, who did this knew exactly what they were doing,” Fields said.
“We don’t have a clue why Moore County.”

Governor Greg Abbott wants to make the border safe for his state but loose gun laws allow cartels to drive to any Texas gun shop and legally stockpile guns, Mexican officials say

all the murders perpetrated by the NRA

the child killing NRA.