Most of the groups and members of groups who hate or fear firearms are clueless about them. They’ve never fired one, carried one, or paid a moment’s attention to the detrimental side effects that follow the laws they advocate. Oh, and sometimes – if you are these idiots – you break the laws you demanded.
Blissfully unaware of state law, a gun control advocacy operation called New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence visited the homes of some people who wanted to get rid of a firearm and trade it for a gift card. Then, right there on site, they used an angle grinder to cut the gun’s receiver in half.
Once that was done, they took the two pieces to a local high school. The parts were then given to young gun control activists, who used the bits of wood and metal to build anti-gun “works of art.”
If you are playing along at home, you have likely discerned the criminality for yourselves. New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence advocated for a law prohibiting the private transfer of firearms. The number of violations is equal to the number of firearms they took possession of from private owners regardless of what they planned to do with them. Here’s the second.
Worse, the group’s destruction of receivers don’t comply with ATF guidelines for rendering them permanently inoperable. So, when they took these guns (which were still legally guns) onto school grounds and transferred them to minors, they broke all kinds of laws — laws NMPGV itself supports — including state and federal felonies.
As a result, the local Sheriff has announced that he is investigating them. Strangely, NMPGV doesn’t think that’s fair at all.
The bit about the Sheriff’s investigations is (IMO) hilarious. One of the motivations for groups like NMPGV is Sheriffs who refuse to enforce laws that violate the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. This bit of lawlessness followed the local city cancelling a gun-buyback program. NMPGV, ignoring their own advocacy, violated the private transfer prohibition, which includes not having completed a background check.
“Reviewing the law I do not see where they are exempt from having to undergo a background check and are required to like anyone else,” San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari wrote in a Facebook post. “A sale is taking place (gift cards $100 and up), it is advertised as a purchase and called a ‘buy back.’ ” He went on to explain that the law prohibits all transfers, and that the gift cards were definitely “consideration” under state law, triggering the prohibition.
A decision on how to proceed is pending input from New Mexico’s Democrat Attorney General. If the AG gives them a pass, they have established that you don’t need to follow the law to transfer firearms, which will be the rule until someone they want to prosecute does it. Again, without any consideration of the reality that the Second Amendment doesn’t give them the right to enforce any of this, even against the goofy anti-gun group.
The only real “crime is the fraud perpetrated by New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence. Nothing they are doing does that, and certainly not cutting a few rifles in half.
