Observer’s Portillo Remains Clueless
If journalism ever develops an annual award for meaningless claptrap, the “Charlotte Obfuscator’s” Ely Portillo should at least be a finalist with his latest screed that came one week after his shot at a hatchet job on Family Dollar’s CEO, Howard Levine. In this latest round, Portillo attempting to relate the Hyatt Coin and Gun Shop to crime in Charlotte by using irrelevant BATF gun “tracing” data that clearly does not prove what he tries to claim it does. In his desperation to fabricate a story, Mr. Portillo even stooped to the tasteless point of speciously trying to connect a gun sale made to Hattie Louise James by Hyatt back in 1991 to the murder of two of our CMPD police officers by Demeatrius Montgomery in 2007, fully 16 years later. This was a shabby attempt to add credibility to his incredible anti-gun yarn.
Anyone with half a brain and a lick of common sense would no more see a connection between perfectly legal,
government-approved gun sales by Hyatt to crime in Charlotte, than in trying to somehow connect legal automobile sales to the public by Hendrick Motors to DWI’s, automobile accidents, or getaway vehicle use!
Portillo tries to bolster his “revelations” by referring to a bogus “study” by the Washington Post, which in turn, relies on spin generated by an attorney for the notoriously anti-gun organization, the “Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence!” Unfortunately, the “Brady Bunch” has been using BATF tracing data for years even in light of the fact that the BATFE and the Congressional Research Service have repeatedly said that it should not be used to reach broad conclusions about criminal activity with guns. As they pointed out, a trace is not a scientific process by which a gun is linked to a crime scene. Its primary use by the BATF has been to return stolen guns to their rightful owners, and never to generate crime statistics.
If Portillo really did his research instead of regurgitating “Brady Bunch” pseudo-science, he would know that tracing statistics should not be confused with those that state and local law enforcement agencies compile on the kinds of weapons that have been used to commit crimes. According to the CRS, “data from the tracing system may not be appropriate for drawing inferences such as which makes or models of firearms are used for illicit purposes.”
Still, that has not stopped the “Brady Bunch” from continuing to misuse the tracing data anyway, nor from intellectually dishonest writers from relying on their vapid spin to generate articles and collect money for writing them, nor from publications like the Observer that evidently does not require accuracy from their reporters from printing them if they have the “proper” political slant the paper wants.
If there is any conclusions that can be drawn, it is rather that Charlotte’s ineffectual revolving door “criminal justice
system” is the real problem. The real problem here in this county has been a prosecution system control of DA Peter Gilchrist, who all-too-easily plea-bargains criminal predators back out on the streets, and a court system with judges who make it an easy matter for criminals to return to the street with the trivial bails they set. It only stands to reason that with the same criminals free to rob and commit burglary and shed their violence again and again, more otherwise legal guns are going to wind up in their hands, in the same way that TV’s, jewelry, and other valuables wind up in their possession as well.
These crimes that Portillo refers to are committed by the criminals that the system allows to prey on us and not by
the guns that the Hyatt gun shop legally sells to law-abiding citizens.
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