From Danny Freeman of NBC Philadelphia: A Philadelphia Deputy has been arrested by the feds for illegally selling guns on the street.

17 thoughts on “From Danny Freeman of NBC Philadelphia: A Philadelphia Deputy has been arrested by the feds for illegally selling guns on the street.”

1. So is now a good time to defund the police? Require universal background checks?

   I mean if a cop selling guns that get used in a school shooting isn’t THE sign of a totally broken system I don’t know what is.Report

   1. Well, maybe we could do what Canada did and ban the sale of handguns entirely.Report

      1. If cops are going to sell guns to school shooters I say maybe we ought to.Report

         1. We have a principal-agent problem that would need to be addressed first.

            Without addressing it, we’re going to find ourselves in a place where law enforcement cannot be relied upon to enforce the law heavily in this part of town but be part of the problem in that part of it.

            We saw this with the War On Drugs, the idea that we wouldn’t see it in the War On Guns strikes me as wishful thinking at best.Report

            1. I think it’s beyond an us problem unless us means all of humanity. We’re an opportunistic and enterprising species, and where there is demand for something those with access will find a way to profit without regard for the harm. I know there’s no such thing as illegal guns in Europe but IIRC there was a big scandal a few years ago where allegedly decommissioned military weapons were being diverted, refurbished, and sold on the black market. Some of them ended up being used in terrorist attacks all over the continent.Report

            2. And your alternative is?Report

               1. This stuff fell apart by inches.

                  We’re going to have to put it back together by inches.

                  There is no quick fix. There is no silver bullet.

                  But Oscar had a lovely little essay on a new police paradigm a few years back…Report

                  1. This didn’t “fall apart by inches.” Cops selling guns because they think they can is a structural problem of modern policing. Qualified immunity is a structural problem of modern law. Crushing poverty in inner cities is a structural problem of a modern economy. School shootings are a structural problem of a gun soaked culture.

                     There may be no magical silver bullet. But structural flaws in modern systems aren’t going to yield to incrementalism.Report

                  2. The whole “deputies selling guns used in school shootings” has not been going on for a while.

                     This is, like, a new milestone. A grim one, if you will.

                     But if you want to address a principal-agent problem, you’re going to have to start digging. The roots go deep and if you want a quick fix, you’re going to have to do better than “re-elect the people in power”.Report

                  3. Cops selling stuff stolen from the evidence room — drugs, guns, or whatever — is nothing new. It’s a familiar plot point on cop shows and in movies.Report

                  4. These guns weren’t in the evidence room yet.

                     They were given him by the shooters to sell.

                     The story mentions how the guns were used on September 27th and sold on October 13th.

                     Edit: Pardon me. I don’t know that they were given him by the shooters. The story goes on to say that there is an investigation as to how he got the guns.

                     So yeah, I was wrong. Looks like stolen from evidence.Report

         2. To clarify, he sold guns that had been used in a school shooting earlier (stolen from evidence, I guess?) to an undercover agent. The shooting was on September 27th, and he sold the guns on October 13th.Report

            1. That doesn’t actually make it better.Report

               1. Getting the facts right makes the thread better.Report

   2. As every good leftist knows, poverty is the root cause of crime. If sheriff’s deputies are forced to sell guns illegally to make ends meet, clearly the department doesn’t have enough funding to pay them properly.Report

      1. Or maybe we address everyone else’s poverty, which mitigates crime thus significantly reducing the need for and number of law enforcement officers?Report

2. And it just gets better:

   “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lodged an immigration detainer on Canadian national David DePape with San Francisco County Jail, Nov. 1, following his Oct. 28 arrest,” the department said.

   https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/david-depape-paul-pelosi-attack/index.htmlReport

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