Straw man buy by Boston Globe

So if there's no "criminal intent" they won't charge you? They say he didn't keep the gun. What did he do w/ it? Did he sell it through an FFL dealer or is it stored somewhere in the Globe's office building?

Notice what's missing? hint:

http://www.saysuncle.com/archives/2007/07/19/whats_missing_from_this_story/

Attacking leftie reporters is fun, but that isn't the important thing to take away from this. This is proof that instead of new gun laws, the existing ones need to be enforced more vigorously.

We need a new law that makes it illegal to break the law. That would put a stop to this nonsense...since everyone obviously obeys the law and all that...

One law for thee, but not for me...so sayeth the reporter...

"I don’t see a criminal intent there. I just see someone facilitating a news story,"

B.S.

So if I'm doing a story on how easy it is to steal a car, and I sneak into a car lot at night, break into the car, break the steering lock and drive it away, no felony? Oh, I'll bring it back the next day.

Then we can do a story about speeding and we'll drive at 90 mph on the highway. When we get pulled over, we can just tell the officer we're preparing a news story about speeding.

Slippery slope argument - allowing journalists to violate the law in the name of "facilitating a news story"??

Speaking as a Massachusetts gun owner, I think a New Hampshire jail would be an excellent place for John Rosenthal to spend the next several years.

But there was intent to violate the law. Hence the news story. That's what made it a news story. That the reporter was able to break the law in obtaining a firearm. And what possible difference could it make that the reporter gave back the firearm? We have do-overs now?

Ignorance may account for [CBS reporter David] Martin's incomplete reporting on these issues. But he went beyond ignorance when he claimed that it took him less than two hours to find a gunsmith willing to convert a "semi-automatic assault weapon" into a machine guna job that supposedly took just nine min utes. Viewers saw only about 15 seconds of the alleged conversion, not enough for even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to determine if it had actually been carried out, though the BATF did send a letter of reprimand to CBS. In a letter to a complaining viewer, CBS claimed that the conversion had been completed but that the gun had then been immediately converted back to semi -automatic. If the gun was not fired, how did Martin know that it had in fact been converted into a machine gun? Since Martin was shown firing an automatic rifle immediately after the brief conversion footage, viewers were led to believe that they were seeing the results of the conversionunless they knew enough to recognize that the allegedly converted gun was not an M-16 like the one that was fired.

So we have only CBS's claim as evidence that a conversion was carried out at all, let alone in nine minutes. If it was carried out, CBS violated federal law and received no more than a written reprimand for doing so. If it was not carried out, CBS lied to its viewers.

And here's Bailey's response:

http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/07/20/the_atf__me/