“A suburban Portland pastor who won an AR-15 rifle in a raffle and then said he gave it to a gun-owning friend for safekeeping will not be prosecuted for transferring the weapon without conducting a background check,” bendbulletin.com reports. “Officials were investigating whether Rev. Jeremy Lucas [above] may have violated a recent state law that makes transferring a gun without a background check illegal, even if the arrangement is between private parties and no money changes hands.”
The Po-Po and Co. decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. Apparently, the fact that Rev. Lucas told The Washington Post that he’d transferred the gun illegally — after spending $3k of church funds to buy enough raffle tickets to win the gun and, thus, to keep the AR-15 “off the streets” — couldn’t be verified by the authorities.
But investigators uncovered no evidence that Lucas, 45, actually transferred the gun and never determined the name of the gun-owning friend, Clackamas County District Attorney John Foote said in a letter to the Oregon State Police. . . .
Lucas didn’t speak with investigators, state police said in a statement.
“Without the transferee in this case, I don’t think we could ever have a prosecutable case,” Foote wrote . . .
Comments Lucas made to the newspaper about the transfer of the gun were “insufficient to prove that it happened,” Foote wrote.
That’s one hell of a non-investigation, if you ask me. Or anyone else with half a brain. Equally obvious, Washington state prosecutors don’t want to enforce their new “universal background check” law against a gun control advocate for fear that it would highlight the stupidity of the law. Which they’ve now done anyway. And then some.