The case of David Lewisbey

Perhaps the most biggest whopper President Obama retailed at CNN’s town hall forum on “gun violence” this past Thursday was his support for Second Amendment rights. He obviously detests the Second Amendment and obviously believes Americans should not have the right to own guns. He therefore bashes the foremost organizational advocate of Second Amendment rights in the United States at every opportunity.

John Lott has testified to Obama’s opposition to gun ownership as expressed to him personally by Obama at the University of Chicago Law School. And so on.

Obama bashed the NRA for declining to appear at the forum staged by CNN. The NRA protests that it would have been restricted to one prescreened question. They would in any event have reasonably shied away from serving as a foil for Obama at such an event. Aaron Goldstein adds a few appropriately cynical notes on point.

Obama disparages his political opponents on this point as advocates of a conspiracy theory because they don’t take his protestations at face value. This from the guy who promised if you like your health insurance you can keep it and if you like your doctor you can keep him. Oh, yeah, and Obamacare would lower health insurance premiums on average by $2500. You would have to be a fool to take anything he says at face value. He will say anything to advance the causes he believes in, and he believes in the restriction of Second Amendment rights.

In response to unusually critical questions Obama hems and haws and makes it up as he goes along. The transcript of the CNN forum is here.

At one point Obama blamed Indiana’s less restrictive laws for Chicago’s epidemic of murder. “The problem is, is that about 30 percent, 40 percent of those guns are coming from Indiana across the border, where there are much laxer laws,” Obama said. “Folks will go to a gun show and purchase a whole bunch of firearms, put them in a van, drive up into [the execrable Father] Mike Pfleger’s neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where his parish is, open up the trunk, and those things are for sale.”

Now with “Mike Pfleger” the clock strikes thirteen. What is this Marxist clown doing here? You might say that Obama’s citation of his old Chicago buddy is another clue to his true Second Amendment views. But I digress.

Some of us think the problem is Chicago’s gangbangers. Why aren’t those Indiana guns creating the mayhem in Indiana? Is it something in the water in Chicago?

But where did the the mysterious van from Indiana come from? Make that a van with a trunk.

Putting the van and the trunk to one side, Obama may have been referring to the case of David “Big Dave” Lewisbey. USA Today seems to think Obama was talking about the Lewisbey case.

Lewisbey bought large quantities of firearms at Indiana gun shows and sold them with a confederate on the streets of Chicago. In September 2013 Lewisbey was convicted of dealing firearms without a federal license, two counts of illegally transporting firearms across state lines, and two counts interstate travel to sell guns without a license. In 2014 he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. The FBI press release adds that Lewisbey “had no criminal record that disqualified him from buying firearms.”

I may be missing something. So far as I can tell, however, the case of David Lewisbey appears to be another sidebar illustrating the irrelevance of Obama’s proposals to their purported object.

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