Bloomberg's getting his, in spades

A federal judge in Atlanta has ruled that a gun shop in Georgia can indeed sue New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg personally, as well as other city officials, for making false and defamatory statements about it at a public press conference.

The store, Adventure Outdoors Inc., had been targeted along with other shops in an illegal "sting" operation dreamed up by Bloomberg, as well as "the mayor’s corporate counsel, Michael A. Cardozo; New York Police Chief Raymond Kelly; and the city’s criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt". These fellows hired private investigators to make "straw purchases" in states other than New York, in an attempt to prove that guns from these shops were ending up on the streets of New York City as a direct result of the shop owners' having full knowledge of and allowing such illegal transactions to happen.

The only difficulty is, their little project wasn't an official law enforcement investigation, nor did they bother to clear their scheme with the BAFTE, which is in charge of investigating interstate gun crimes. Bloomie's PIs were just as guilty of committing a crime by making those purchases as the people that they were supposedly imitating. Lying on an official federal firearms purchase form is a felony. If you or I had done what the PIs did, we'd be sitting in a federal prison right now. Have they been charged? Of course not.

In the article, the reporter writes that the judge noted that "the court finds it more than a bit ironic that defendants would attempt to deny that they were involved in planning to send private investigators into various gun establishments in the state of Georgia. A significant portion of the factual support for the New York lawsuit is garnered from the results of these ‘sting’ operations. The court is fairly confident in concluding that the New York defendants are not disavowing any association with those operations in their lawsuit in the Eastern District of New York". Furthermore, the judge stated that "the New York defendants are not being sued simply because they have executive positions in the government of the city of New York, but rather because they are alleged to be the actual persons who directed the activities of the private investigators in Georgia (emphasis mine)."

That is, Bloomie can't crow publicly about how how his little operation got such good results, and then turn around and deny any knowledge of the stunt once the poop started flying. It seems to me that the judge is unamused with how the mayor was sure quick to grab all of the credit when he thought he had performed a neat little trick, and how he's now heading for the nearest rock to hide under once he sees the consequences coming to smack him upside the head.

Gun shops are in charge of checking to make sure that the purchaser of a firearm is legally able to do so. Once they establish that, they have no control over what happens to that firearm once someone takes possession of it, just as a hardware store can't tell someone to not resell fertilizer, or a grocer isn't able to prevent a person from giving away the coffee they purchased. They simply have no way to track what happens to a given firearm once it leaves their premises. If a store is indeed illegally providing guns to felons, they should be shut down and prosecuted fully, but by the proper law enforcement agencies, not by some rogue mayor in another state who decides to make up laws and authority as he goes.

This is going to get real interesting.