“Mr. Cummins is an almost child-like individual who was excited about guns and the gun culture and never considered the consequences of placing instruments of destruction into the stream of commerce until he was facing the certainty of prison time, the loss of his life savings and the loss of his businesses.” Robert Allen Cummins’ attorney, quoted in Lane County man gets prison for purchase of guns found in Mexico [via oregonlive.com]
Do the crime and do the time. If the article is straight forward then this guy is a criminal.
He didn’t break any law that the government has the constitutional authority to pass.
Or, he didn’t do anything that Eric Holder didn’t do.
Some animals…
Are you suggesting that our Federal government has no authority to regulate international commerce?
‘Cuz I’m pretty sure that’s in there. Often referred to as the “commerce clause.”
Not when it comes to 2nd amendment articles, no.
Hey Mr. Curtis in IL,
Commerce clause says “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” Congress regulates our government’s commerce with foreign governments
While the commerce clause has been the most abused part of our Constitution in history, SCOTUS has consistently held that our government can regulate any commerce crossing our international borders (between governments, businesses or individuals) and has, in fact, done so from the very beginning. Import duties (taxing goods sold by individuals, to individuals) were our government’s primary source of revenue in the early years.
@Curtis
Correct. Customs duties were the government’s number one source of income until the federal income tax was created.
A sale within Oregon? I think not.
@Big Bill shove it up your EXPLETIVE DELETED.
The Embargo Act of 1807 did not prohibit importing English goods. Hmmm maybe the founders (who were mostly still alive and voting in legislature at the time) knew that blocking imports would open a can of constitutional worms.
What the US exports is up for debate, but given how you seem to want to extend US constitutional rights to everyone everywhere regardless of country or origin, let’s pretend that Trump or the government can do anything it wants whenever it wants.
If that’s the case, it’s time for steel, and you are a 90 lb pussy who talks a big game. Heft a fucking A bag and carry it for 10 miles pussy, then we’ll have a constitutional debate, and only the men who aren’t asleep with speak and if we’re lucky the US will endure another 100 years.
Dear Uncle Pickle: “@Big Bill shove it up your EXPLETIVE DELETED. ”
I do believe you have me confused with Curtis in IL.
I’m fairly certain that gun running falls outside the purview of 2A. Mexican criminals aren’t protected by the US Bill of Rights. And by “aiding and abetting” our enemies, Cummins is lucky they don’t slap a treason charge on him.
Pretty sure that Mexico’s enemies are not America’s enemies. The Cartels are Mexico’s problem. Build the wall and let them fix their own shit.
Doesn’t matter if they’re friend or foe, they’re not US citizens and the 2nd Amendment argument here is silly.
They guy they’re throwing in the slammer is most certainly an American citizen.
NO NO NO! Don’t give them that one for free.
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” 9th Amendment, US Constitution
We have explicit wording in the US constitution that says the government is not to use enumerated or implied powers to deprive people of enumerated or implied liberties or rights.
Thought experiment: Would banning imports from England have been a 2nd amendment violation when the English-made Brown Bess was the most common arm used? Of Course!
We can debate what the United States can regulate as exports, and we can debate what we should import, but as soon as those decisions have the effect of limiting the liberties in the Bill of Rights, any enumerated powers in the constitution quickly lose meaning because if the government exercises them the 9th amendment is being shredded.
Uncle_Pickle:
I have never seen the 9th amendment used in an attempt to legalize gun running to criminals outside of the US before.
Thanks for that.
However, I don’t think even the Mexican government will agree with you on this one., much less the founding fathers.
He trafficked in firearms across state lines without a license. He exported products across international borders without a license. The Constitution certainly does provide Congress with authority to regulate interstate and international commerce.
He didn’t oay taxes on this income. (I know, the article didn’t specify that, but you know damn well he didn’t pay.) The Constitution provides for income taxing authority, too.
I can go on, but if you’re starting from the premise that anyone is by default free to do whatever the hell they want, despite the fact that this country and its Constitution predates them and they obligated to abide by the law, then it probably wouldn’t matter. All I’m going to get is a big fat “So what?!”
No, you’re getting a “any part of those powers that infringe on the 2nd amendment are null and void”.
I didn’t see this in the article. Nowhere did it say he left the state to sell guns. Seems mexico came to him, got the guns, and then went back to mexico. (Maybe we need a wall?)
I didn’t see this in the article. Nowhere did it say he left the country to sell guns. The guns were discovered in Mexico, and they traced them back to him. This doesn’t mean he packed his stuff and drove to mexico.
Are you kidding? Scraping the bottom of the barrel for these arguments.
The only problem I see here is the moral one. Did he knowingly sell guns to cartel members who would be shooting at innocents? Likely yes. If he did not, then I would completely be on his side.
Really, material support to narco-terrorists?
If he was selling to the autodefensas he’d have my sympathy and support, but the cartels?
The asshole’s lucky he wasn’t droned.
The law makes people criminals, and the law and morality doesn’t always coincide.
I think it is wrong for him to sell to cartel members or people he would suspect as cartel members. He referred to himself as the “middle man” which makes me think he was aware of this. That said, I have some “complaints” about what transpired and misinformation provided by news outlets and liberals:
Knowingly selling guns to cartel members is not american “gun culture.” Blatant misinformation.
I totally agree with Cummins that I “don’t” want the government to know about my firearms purchases. Totally agree! And why? Because gun owners are not the government’s friend and the government is not the gun owner’s friend. As we all know, social liberal extremists pass laws seeking to punish gun owners, and the government contains liberals.
Telling someone you are the “middle man?” Cummins seems to have a big mouth – just thought I’d throw this out there.
Here it is. The reason why we don’t want people to know we have firearms. Government sanctioned theft.
Cummins hired a crappy liberal attorney who cared nothing for his client’s business and is openly biased against gun ownership and private gun sales ( as stated by the phrase: “placing instruments of destruction into the stream of commerce” – i.e. selling guns). More proof Cummins is an idiot.
The guy is smart enough to be able to run two businesses on top of his little side business with the guns, but we’re supposed to believe the guy is the mental equivalent of a child? *roflmao* Go ahead, pull the other one!
Dude is lucky all he got was 40 months and 3 years probation.
No, you see, it was the gunz that turned this “child like'” man into an evil gun running criminal. If it wasn’t for gunz(feelz), this man would be running a unicorn farm, collecting their Skittles manure and the world would be peaceful and loving place, a utopia on earth.
Sigh, so many gunz, not enough gun laws!
Worse, it’s the ‘gun culture’ to blame. It’s really our fault he sold .50BMGs to the Mexican drug cartel. If we’d just give up our civil right to self defense these things wouldn’t happen any more. What were we thinking, blaming the guy who actually did the crime?
The GCA of 1968 is unconstitutional. The idea of a “prohibited person” is an absurd ex-post-facto punishment. Quite frankly, anybody too dangerous to own a gun is too dangerous to be allowed to keep breathing.
As a CA resident I’ve heard vague rumors of this “constitutional” thing of which you speak. Never actually seen it or a “civil right” in the wild.
My friend, you can visit the national archives in DC- the Capitol- and actually view the original Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Magna Carta, and Bill of Rights. Ironically, this City’s inhabitants are taxed without Congressional representation- which is part of what the first War was fought over. In a greater irony, this same city- in which the Founding Documents are held even!- is restricted from exercising basic rights found in the documents they guard and maintain! Keep te faith Brutha! You ain’t alone!
Actually, DC does have a Representative (although non-voting) in Eleanor Holmes Norton.
DC was intended as the seat of the federal government, and was never intended to be a state or territory of the US. It was purposefully made that way so it could not unduly pressure either house politically.
It was never the intent of Congress to make DC the permanent home of many people, but rather as a place where the various department of the federal gov’t could meet, thus no representation was felt necessary, and indeed inadvisable.
So you’re suggesting it was a place that the founders never anticipated as having enough food to feed a host of rats and roaches.
hmm…that gives me an idea…
You just need to renounce your US citizenship to get access to all those rights in CA.
I agree, mostly. This whole “prohibited person” business is a means to create a perpetual underclass that has limited or almost no civil rights, while still being useful to the ruling elite. After all, someone’s got to dig the ditches, etcetera. I think the part about “if they’re too dangerous to own a gun, they’re too dangerous to let them keep breathing” sets you down a path that leads to very dark places. Who decides who’s too dangerous, and who decides who dies and who lives?
That’s the entire point, though. Make so many non-violent offenses prohibiting crimes, coupled with selective and capricious enforcement and prosecution that virtually no one is allowed to own guns.
Ayn Rand nailed it so many years ago:
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
Anybody who is “too dangerous to own a gun” is too dangerous, period, full stop.
The problem is to determine who is too dangerous and when. The only valid criteria is their public declaration of the fact as in the statement, “I’m going to kill you!” either verbally or by utilizing a dangerous weapon of any sort, from claw hammer to car to truck to firearm or anything in between. At that point, and at that point only, the Constitution, under the Second Amendment protection of the RKBA, allows THE PEOPLE the right to use arms (“…arms, shall not be infringed.” to defend themselves.
There is no Constitutional authority for the people or the government to intervene prior to the bad act.
That argument would include small children.
You’re spinning out of control, dude. First thing to do when you find yourself in a hole, is to stop digging.
Yeah… How many straw men people stuff is not an indicator of me being in a hole, it’s an indicator of the counter arguments being made by idiots.
And?
Kids with guns may, or may not, be the concern of their parents. But not of any legitimate government. Nothing takes a village, no matter what Hillary may profit from saying.
Note to self…
The .gov really dislikes competition.
that was my take away as well.
On a side note, that was always my suspicion as to origin of the Establishment Clause. It wasn’t to protect the People from the evils of state-sponsored religion. It was protect the new federal governmnet from the competition that organized religions posed.
After all, if the Framers were oh so concerned about religion dominating the people, as opposed to religion dominating the federal government, then they would have imposed that clause on the states, too. Instead, they elected not to. Indeed, some states even had state-sponsored religions.
Was this one of those Fast and Furious sales where a feeble feebie whispers in your ear “go ahead, we want you to sell to that person.”
G-men are awful fond of seeking out mental midgets to coax, coerce and bribe in doing things they shouldn’t just so they can then arrest that person and announce to the world “see, we’re important! If it weren’t for us you’d all be dead!”
“An undercover Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent later contacted Cummins. According to the court record, Cummins told the agent that he was buying thousands of dollars in weapons, that he was making money as a middle man, and that he generally supported people who do “not want the government to know about their firearm purchases,” according to the court record.
Investigators later learned Cummins paid $38,100 in cash to a federally licensed dealer to buy the .50 caliber rifles and six .308 caliber rifles. He made the purchases with co-defendant Erik Flores Elortegui, who had direct links to Mexico and was involved in grinding off the serial numbers to smuggle the guns south of the border, according to the court record. The investigation revealed other purchases dating back to 2013, worth tens of thousands of dollars.”
This guy went to the Leland Yee school of stupidity. He’s wasn’t in the gun culture, he was in the criminal culture.
With attorneys like that, who needs enemas?
Even people with good legal representation may get constipated.
Sometimes Phillips just isn’t enough.
Unless Mr. Cummins sold firearms to someone he knew was going to use them to attack people, he did not commit an actual crime. Did he violate laws in that process? Probably. Was that a crime though? No.
Car salesman never have to go to prison for selling a car to an attacker who uses that car to run-over someone. Neither should a firearm salesman go to prison for selling a firearm to an attacker who uses that firearm to shoot someone.
If he was making straw purchases, knew the guns were crossing the border, and knew that his partner was defacing the serial numbers, at the very least he’d be facing a conspiracy charge.
Face it, there are a lot of gun laws that are unconstitutional, and many more that have been ruled as constitutional, but we still don’t like them. It’s pretty hard to defend this guy as a law-abiding citizen who just got tripped up on some technicality.
You don’t have to be able to defend this guy.
All you need to do, is stop defending government’s right to harass people for buying and selling baseball cards and marbles in a parking lot, without verifying whether some tax feeder has decided to make doing so a raison d’harass or not. It’s just a bloody gun. Not a human slave, not a nuclear bomb. Just a gun. No different than a shoeleace as far as any legitimate government is concerned.
From the link: “A 57-year-old Lane County man received more than a three-year federal prison sentence after he admitted to illegally purchasing rifles and ammunition in Oregon, including some found later by the Mexican military in 2014.
Robert Allen Cummins pleaded guilty last year to several counts of conspiracy, making false statements during gun purchases and the unlawful dealing in firearms.”
So, to answer your question, yes, he illegally bought the guns as a straw purchaser.
You might read the link.
Big Bill,
Perhaps you missed the incredibly subtle and yet incredibly huge meaning of what I wrote. Did Mr. Cummins commit a crime in the eyes of our Almighty Government? Yes. Did Mr. Cummins commit a crime in the eyes of good people? No (assuming that Mr. Cummins did not purchase firearms for someone who said that they were going to use those firearms to attack people).
The good people of our nation need to stop rubber-stamping everything that government declares is a “crime”. Unless your actions harm someone … and I might even go so far as to include actions that were grossly negligent/careless and could have caused harm … you have not committed a true crime. The sooner that We the People wake up to this, the sooner that we can stop the Almighty Government from “regulating” us into oblivion.
uncommon_sense:
Like I also said, this guy is criminally stupid.
He did not violate the law in an act of “civil disobedience.” He did it because he thought he could get away with it, and he was so stupid that he couldn’t.
Is the law wrong? It can be strongly argued that it is. Is the law the law? It is, without argument.
Criminals manage to get guns without getting caught. This guy is stupid, so he got caught. Pure and simple.
I’m not defending the law, I’m pointing out that this idiot is too stupid to pull off a crime that others pull off all the time.
There are lots of laws that shouldn’t be on the books. But if you’re going to violate them without the intent to make a federal case out of it on principle, then you deserve what you get.
Because you’re stupid.
This guy had absolutely no intent to violate the law based on the idea that it’s a bad law. He violated it because he wanted to make money, knowing it was illegal.
Now, if *YOU* want to violate these laws *on principle*, I will applaud you, and might even contribute to your defense fund.
But that’s not what happened here, and let’s not insult us by trying to make it so,
See ya A-Hole. Enjoy the prison showers.
Jerks like this, put a cloud over all of us.
Amen !!!
Eric Holder has regrets?
He’s had a few.
But then again, too few for the media to mention
Any sane person knows what he did was against the law (if indeed he was really gun running). But, it shouldn’t be a reflection of the gun industry, gun owners or the 2A in general.
The government is by far the largest gun running organization, I seem to remember many stories of cases of weapons being delivered to the Mexican authorities that end up going missing. Not to mention the deliberate fast and furious type programs. And don’t get me started on the floods of weapons delivered to all sorts of dubious middle east groups over the years that have come back to bite us in the *ss!!
We have a man convicted under a law that Congresscritter Dodd Sr. cribbed from Hitler’s own gun laws? Oops, but not seeing the justice here!
Having read the whole article I think our “childlike” dude is lucky he didn’t get 20years. Bueno…
You READ the linked article?
I gotta say, considering some of the replies here, you and I are among the few…
Ah Big Bill Mostly I DON’T read the attached twaddle. But all the “let’s arm Meh-he-co” Cartels ’cause Holder got away with it seems a mite crazy…here is where a FB system comes in handy for commenting.
There are a lot of the email topics I just go right by because they just don’t interest me much.
But, I bet more people see me here on TTAG than on Facebook!
Maybe this child-like individual can grow up in prison.
Thought this was another ATF story.
All you so called “people of the gun” who blame this guy and not our tyrannical government are some simple brainwashed morons. All you “enjoy the showers” jerks should remember that what goes around comes around. Some day the gub’ment will be the one taking you to the shower, if we are not careful. We should be figuring out how to send this guy a subscription to Guns and Ammo while he’s locked up instead of shitting on him like he’s a crack dealer or a BLM activist.
He knowingly broke the law. Not only that, but he did it in a very obvious way.
The laws about guns are, IMHO, largely unconstitutional, but they are still the law.
This wasn’t even an act of “civil disobedience.”
Criminals manage to get guns on the ‘down-low’ all the time.
This guy is criminally stupid.
What are you, Ed? Some sort of crazy Constitutionalist or something?
Ok, well here’s your Constitution:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3:
The Congress shall have power… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,…
This is not about the right to keep and bear arms. The problem is not that he bought and sold some guns. What he did was lie and conspire to violate federal laws relating to international commerce. He is the civilian version of Eric Holder. His sentence was light.
Ed’s a Troll. I don’t want to contemplate the alternative.
Suck my balls cuntmaster…go bang a nail with your hi-point. If Eric Holder can do it, why can’t this guy? I’d like to put my troll boot in your mouth.
Troll, definitely.
I would agree that Mr. Cummins and Eric Holder deserve the same treatment. They should be cellmates.
Guns & Ammo would be a prohibited publication where he’s going. But on the brightside, there’s no tobacco products and he’ll probably have email. If you’re interested in his accommodations just go to the USBOP website to find his address and hotel review.
Obviously not:
“A 57-year-old Lane County man received more than a three-year federal prison sentence after he admitted to illegally purchasing rifles and ammunition in Oregon, including some found later by the Mexican military in 2014.
Robert Allen Cummins pleaded guilty last year to several counts of conspiracy, making false statements during gun purchases and the unlawful dealing in firearms.”
F&F was in AZ, not Oregon.
That man had a great lawyer!
He knowingly was a straw buyer for someone he knew was removing serial numbers and exporting the defaced guns to Mexican criminals
The only reason he got caught is because a few of the Barrett’s did NOT have the serial number removed
No fine, no tax charges and a short sentence
His lawyer is trying to get the seized $400,000 back
He could have gotten decades just for not paying the income tax on the profits much less the ITAR violations.
It just goes to show once again, if you want something done right, do it yourself!
Even if it is a crime
It really does not take a “great lawyer” to do a plea after discovery is provided showing a recorded undercover hand to hand deal.
His counsel will hope to receive a portion of any recovered assets. The article didn’t mention a disposition as to forfeiture and substitute assets.
Is that the gun guy from Breaking Bad?
1. Maybe the Mexican government should consider securing its border with the United States.
2. The asinine drug laws in the US are the reason for the existence of the drug cartels in Mexico. They are simply radical capitalists, seeking to fill a vast demand with their supply. The inherent violence is a byproduct of the enormous profits, again tied to the US laws.
3. Buying guns to supply to civilians in Mexico is, once again, a radical capitalist response to asinine, immoral laws. Dammed few people in Mexico are actually disarmed by those laws, except when the restrictions raise the price of a firearm beyond their reach.
When we say that the government should enforce existing gun laws instead of enacting new ones, this is one of the existing ones that should be enforced.
We’re not talking about some guy sawing off a shotgun here.
“….high-powered assault rifles….”
Lost me with this sentence.
Robert Allen Cummins: “I sincerely regret that I got caught.”
The refrain of nearly every convicted felon, that along with “I really love my family and I just want to be with my children.”
never considered the consequences of placing instruments of destruction into the stream of commerce
“I think I’d like my criminal defense counsel to have a little more fire in the belly than that,” the attorney thought to himself as his eyes started glazing over.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
TLDR:
All the kings horses and all the kings postings above won’t keep Humpty out of prison.
But feel free to go represent him in court…We have some might fine arm chair lawyers here.
Keep us posted on how you do…
What? You’re not going? Hmmmm…