They had many opportunities to arrest the airport guy, since they were spying on him for months and he works at an airport, but they chose to kick in his door and kill him over a few thousand dollars in sales at gun shows. Meanwhile, black guys can post pictures of their Chinese Glock switches on Instagram and don't even know it's a crime.
I was reading about this case in another forum. Apparently they had plenty of evidence that he had sold guns without a license, but that crime only carries a maximum 5-year prison sentence no matter how many guns you sold.
So instead of getting an arrest warrant for the crime they could probably prove he did, they got a search warrant for all his electronics in the hope that they could find evidence he was making straw purchases- i.e, he knew the eventual recipient of the gun was not legally able to purchase it themselves when he acquired it. Each of those would be a separate count and has a heavier prison sentence, so they were really fishing for evidence so they could threaten him with decades in prison instead of just 5 years.
They had many opportunities to arrest the airport guy, since they were spying on him for months and he works at an airport, but they chose to kick in his door and kill him over a few thousand dollars in sales at gun shows. Meanwhile, black guys can post pictures of their Chinese Glock switches on Instagram and don't even know it's a crime.
I was reading about this case in another forum. Apparently they had plenty of evidence that he had sold guns without a license, but that crime only carries a maximum 5-year prison sentence no matter how many guns you sold.
So instead of getting an arrest warrant for the crime they could probably prove he did, they got a search warrant for all his electronics in the hope that they could find evidence he was making straw purchases- i.e, he knew the eventual recipient of the gun was not legally able to purchase it themselves when he acquired it. Each of those would be a separate count and has a heavier prison sentence, so they were really fishing for evidence so they could threaten him with decades in prison instead of just 5 years.
They just wanted to kill a guy. The specific pretext didn't really matter.
You think they wanted him dead as deterrent or just did not shoot enough puppies that day?
Not to mention how the ATF can just change their mind on a whim and suddenly you're a federal criminal retroactively.
The Feds saw what was happening with Swatting, and they thought "hey, this would be a pretty neat thing to do to those politically inconvenient to us"