On the rare occasions Malcolm posts on this topic, invariably he receives posts using four-letter obscene terms for the female pudenda. Nice. Psycho gun-freaks are so loquacious and unstinting in their pursuit of critics.
Then one comes across David S. Fallis in yesterday’s Washington Post. He’ll be getting the treatment, writ much, much larger. He may even need a flak-jacket.
He has researched that one, just one, gunshop, Realco in Forestville, is the source of supply for a third of the weapons used criminally and confiscated by Washington DC police, and which can be sourced by to a Maryland dealer:
Outside a baby shower in Landover three years ago, Erik Kenneth Dixon snapped. As he argued with his sister and her boyfriend in a parking lot, the 25-year-old man whipped out a .45-caliber Glock and shot her in the leg. Then he chased down her boyfriend, firing between cars and at the running man’s feet until he slipped on wet grass. As the prone man held his hands up in futile defense, Dixon executed him, firing seven times.
By law, Dixon was prohibited from owning a gun. He had spent almost three years in prison for shooting at a man. But three months before the baby-shower killing, he gave his girlfriend $335 and took her to an old brick house on a commercial strip just beyond the District line in Forestville, home to a gun shop called Realco.
“He knew which one he wanted and picked it out,” the woman would later tell police.
Dixon’s Glock was one of 86 guns sold by Realco that have been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop, including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies.
Fallis tells a blood-curdling, nerve-shattering, teeth-grindlingly awful story. It is cold, clear, factual and wholly convincing. And it is magnificent journalism.
Many will read it: the story is tenth of the ten on today’s WaPo “Most viewed articles list”. All civilised folk will nod in approval. No action will ensue.
And then there’s this:
The Post compiled its own databases of more than 35,000 gun traces by mining unpublicized state databases and local police evidence logs.
The Post investigation found that a small percentage of gun stores sells most of the weapons recovered by police in crimes – re-confirming the major finding of studies that came out before federal gun-tracing data were removed from public view by an act of Congress in 2003.
“Removed from public view”? Why?
Other complicit parties, in the matter of District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S, are Justice Scalia, who wrote the majority decision, along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas (the silent groper), and Samuel A. Alito Jr. of the US Supreme Court.
