A city in Colorado has ordered its gun shops and other stores selling firearms to “secure their firearms” after closing in an effort to prevent, or at least curb, what a newspaper called “brazen smash-and-grab burglaries.
According to the Denver Post, officials in Littleton, a Denver suburb, passed the ordinance last week. There has been a string of “aggressive burglaries of businesses that sell firearms” and it hasn’t just happened in Littleton. The newspaper said this is a problem in “numerous towns and cities in the state.”
What this “problem” amounts to appears to be an occasional commercial burglary rather than an epidemic of thefts. The stories tell about a 20-gun theft from a Littleton gun store in October 2018, a 14-gun ripoff in Lakewood two months later, plus a report involving a teen stealing firearms from a relative.
But the issue brings into focus a problem gun control proponents don’t care to address: Stolen guns change hands without background checks, while anti-gunners try to penalize the victims by demanding that gun owners or retailers lock their firearms more securely.
For example, the newspaper quoted Allison Anderman, senior counsel for the anti-gun Giffords lobbying group, who contended, “Gun dealers who are responsible for large numbers of firearms being stolen and entering the criminal market should bear some of the cost of fixing this problem.”
According to the Denver Post, “Over the last four years, burglars have targeted gun shops 10 times in Littleton, a suburb of nearly 50,000 south of Denver. They made off with 144 firearms in that time.”
That’s potentially 144 guns changing hands without a single background check, unless some are recovered from the thieves.
Yet gun control proponents on Capitol Hill and in the state legislatures repeatedly promote background checks as a cornerstone of “gun reform,” which translates to “gun control.”
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee’s H.R. 127 would not only mandate background checks for every firearm transfer, but also require psychological examinations for prospective gun buyers and registration of every gun owned in America. It also mandates gun owner licensing.
Jackson Lee’s measure is so extreme, according to gun rights activists, that it will almost certainly be challenged in the unlikely event it becomes law. So far, the bill does not seem to have a single co-sponsor.
But such legislation ignores a basic hard fact, say critics. Criminals will not obey it, same as they don’t obey any other gun control laws. It won’t stop a single crime, they say, nor keep guns out of the wrong hands.
Essentially, it’s the same problem with the Littleton ordinance. Determined thieves will find ways to get their hands on firearms, whether taken from homes or commercial gun shops.
