re: #230 Gepetto

your definition is not the federal definition of a straw sale, or purchase.
a straw purchase is purchasing a firearm using an intermediary for the purpose of obfuscating the actual intended possessor from the DROS and background check. The straw is the person physically in the gun shop and buying the firearm (with money provided by the person wishing to stay off the radar). the straw is the person who is filling out the paperwork and background check info.

Your alcohol analogy would be more apt if the minor gave you the money to buy it for him. but, in both instances, the purchase -for another- is illegal. Its an important difference. difficult to prove, to be sure. it comes down to how the money changes hands and intent.

Yep. Like I said, the actual buys are legal. I have no idea if you’re intentionally missing that point or you just want to insist that buying with the intention to give to someone else is illegal— which it is, but, as the ATF guys pointed out, our laws to go after it are relatively toothless.

purchasing with your money and for yourself, then making a personal transfer to someone else at some point in the future is legal, but there is a grey area about recording the sale and having your purchaser provide paperwork and ID info if you are a private citizen. thats one of the places where the loopholes start.

Yes, yes there is. In Arizona, for example, the person has to know that the receiver is an illegal receiver for it to be a crime. They don’t have to do any background check. check it out, it’s fun.

en.wikipedia.org

So, if the straw buyer had just one legal intermediary, it’d technically be a completely legal buy by Arizona law.

A straw sale is a violation of federal law if done by someone with a FFL, but that only applies to dealers, not to private sellers. So once the guns were sold to these guys, they could turn around and sell them as long as the people they were selling to were legal residents of Arizona.

Other states have very similar laws; private sellers are largely unregulated.

So, your insistence that all straw sales are illegal is incorrect; under Federal law, it applies only to FFL holders, not to private citizens. Under Arizona law, those private citizens do not half to do a background check on the people they sell to, just to ascertain that they have an Arizona drivers license.

In other words, because of the weak regulatory laws, this is the kind of thing that the ATF might take risks in order to build solid cases against.

And finally: do you have experience in setting up large arms-control policing operations? I don’t think I’m capable of judging their performance here competent or incompetent. Having an agent dead from one of the guns is obviously terrible, but is it really likely that without these particular shipments of guns, those people that agent was fighting wouldn’t have been armed?