So we are again left with the question: how did the killer get this gun? It would seem as though he broke a stack of laws, without much of a struggle. It almost makes you wonder if California is barking up the wrong tree. They pass all these laws, starting with attempts to deal with a mass murder involving a mentally ill person in 1989, and they do not work. Short of house-to-house searches for guns, how are they going to be successful at enforcing these laws? Perhaps most importantly, if someone is mentally ill and intends to murder people (a capital crime), what sort of penalty is going to actually deter such a person from breaking gun-control laws?
Gun-control advocates, at least the more rational ones, will usually admit that these laws only work at the margins, by making guns harder for criminals and the mentally ill to get. I can buy that argument; all laws work only at the margins, and that is all that they have to do to justify their existence. I can also agree that when there is a large stockpile of illegal goods in circulation, it can take a while before laws aimed at those goods will remove them from the illegal marketplace. Still, when I see that laws that are decades old failed to disarm a 24 year old who could not possibly have legally acquired this weapon, I find myself wondering in what century California’s gun-control laws are going to be effective.
Because, you know, criminals don’t obey the law. By definition. And as he says, it’s not really a gun problem.
Rather than an offense against art, a properly structured sale would represent a public-spirited update of how the art came to Detroit and other U.S. cities in the first place: as a way of providing liquidity to Europeans in need of cash. “The second world war has opened up an opportunity such as may never come again,” the DIA’s director wrote unabashedly in 1948. “Great private collections which have been held intact for a hundred years or more are being broken up.” Detroit is like an aristocratic estate forced to adjust to changing times. It can’t marry an heiress, but it might find some lucratively appreciative new homes for some of its heirlooms.
This is the just consequence of terrible voters’ decision and awful city management.
Congressman Issa should call in Ms. Cutter and recall Mr. Shulman to testify under oath about these meetings. I, for one, would like to watch them squirm as they commit perjury.
Yes. Particularly since, no matter how much they attempt to synchronize their lies beforehand, they won’t know just how much independent information Issa has.
