Supermax cell--a great place to write letters Gary Bornman, a bank robber currently locked up in the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, has written a thank-you note to the NRA for opposing universal background checks for gun buyers across the US, saying in it that it wouldn't be possible to resume his efforts in the field of bank-robbing when he is released if gun control advocates have their way.
He thus sets himself off from other criminals, who can usually be described as ungrateful sociopaths, by being a grateful sociopath. Mr. Bornman acknowledges that in any other nation, his chosen career of liberating cash at gunpoint from bank teller drawers would be severely curtailed by gun regulation, as he is not the type of bank robber who merely passes a note to the cashier stating that he has a gun, even though he is obviously literate enough to write one. No, Mr. Bornman needs to pack an actual chiller when he sets off on a fresh, dewy morning to add another paragraph to his résumé of robbery. He is a purist.
Critics of Bornman have suspected him of being less than sincerely grateful to the NRA or anybody; they note that he has a habit of writing letters just to draw attention to himself. This is possible. Nobody gets locked up in Supermax just on the weekends, and no matter how spectacular your criminal career has been, I suspect you can feel pretty forgotten there, and the place is said to be harder to escape from than the space-time continuum itself. Still, give him credit for being a criminal that writes well enough to get his letters published, as opposed to being a literacy-challenged criminal who communicates best in the medium of pasted-together ransom notes or cigarette burns Morse-coded onto a bound, squirming victim.
And he certainly has a point. Criminals need their guns. Unlike the regular paranoids whose minds are filled with visions of shadowy, hostile figures who want to kill them, hunkered down all across America with guns on their laps, waiting for zombie apocalypses or a nice home invasion robbery attempt, criminals often have real enemies who want to kill them, people they have ratted on, cheated out of their share of stolen cash or who are pursuing collection actions against them for valuable drugs they may have misplaced. Once a criminal uses a gun to settle a score that gun needs to be disposed of and another acquired, just in case additional enemies show up. If criminals could not trot over to the nearest gun show and buy weapons without background checks, this important, always news-worthy segment of American society would be left completely defenseless.
Criminals provide this "churn" in the gun market that keeps our gun industry a vital, integral part of the American economy. The average law-abiding gun owner, no matter how deeply fearful of an apocalyptic future and wealthy he is, has limited room for weapons and ammo in his underground bunker. Pretty soon he is fretting "If I get another six crates of cop-killing bullets for Father's Day again this year, where will I put them?" Before long, he has to let the word leak out that he's just as soon have a box of candy or a hat with fishing lures stuck all around the band as future gifts, and the gun industry has lost a valuable customer.
Not so with criminals. For them, a nice gun is as single use as a roadside flare or a condom. And when that law-abiding gun owner passes away without ever seeing the moon dripping with the blood of Doomsday, or even firing a shot at anything more menacing than an empty bottle, his heirs are confronted with the problem of what to do with his personal armory. Possibly they are more concerned with cash in hand than zombies in the bushes, and say to themselves "Let's sell all this stuff at a gun show!"
Gary Bornman will be waiting for them.
He thus sets himself off from other criminals, who can usually be described as ungrateful sociopaths, by being a grateful sociopath. Mr. Bornman acknowledges that in any other nation, his chosen career of liberating cash at gunpoint from bank teller drawers would be severely curtailed by gun regulation, as he is not the type of bank robber who merely passes a note to the cashier stating that he has a gun, even though he is obviously literate enough to write one. No, Mr. Bornman needs to pack an actual chiller when he sets off on a fresh, dewy morning to add another paragraph to his résumé of robbery. He is a purist.
Critics of Bornman have suspected him of being less than sincerely grateful to the NRA or anybody; they note that he has a habit of writing letters just to draw attention to himself. This is possible. Nobody gets locked up in Supermax just on the weekends, and no matter how spectacular your criminal career has been, I suspect you can feel pretty forgotten there, and the place is said to be harder to escape from than the space-time continuum itself. Still, give him credit for being a criminal that writes well enough to get his letters published, as opposed to being a literacy-challenged criminal who communicates best in the medium of pasted-together ransom notes or cigarette burns Morse-coded onto a bound, squirming victim.
And he certainly has a point. Criminals need their guns. Unlike the regular paranoids whose minds are filled with visions of shadowy, hostile figures who want to kill them, hunkered down all across America with guns on their laps, waiting for zombie apocalypses or a nice home invasion robbery attempt, criminals often have real enemies who want to kill them, people they have ratted on, cheated out of their share of stolen cash or who are pursuing collection actions against them for valuable drugs they may have misplaced. Once a criminal uses a gun to settle a score that gun needs to be disposed of and another acquired, just in case additional enemies show up. If criminals could not trot over to the nearest gun show and buy weapons without background checks, this important, always news-worthy segment of American society would be left completely defenseless.
Criminals provide this "churn" in the gun market that keeps our gun industry a vital, integral part of the American economy. The average law-abiding gun owner, no matter how deeply fearful of an apocalyptic future and wealthy he is, has limited room for weapons and ammo in his underground bunker. Pretty soon he is fretting "If I get another six crates of cop-killing bullets for Father's Day again this year, where will I put them?" Before long, he has to let the word leak out that he's just as soon have a box of candy or a hat with fishing lures stuck all around the band as future gifts, and the gun industry has lost a valuable customer.
Not so with criminals. For them, a nice gun is as single use as a roadside flare or a condom. And when that law-abiding gun owner passes away without ever seeing the moon dripping with the blood of Doomsday, or even firing a shot at anything more menacing than an empty bottle, his heirs are confronted with the problem of what to do with his personal armory. Possibly they are more concerned with cash in hand than zombies in the bushes, and say to themselves "Let's sell all this stuff at a gun show!"
Gary Bornman will be waiting for them.
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