My good friend Robert Stacy McCain has a new post, Biden’s Gun Control Policy Won’t Work, about the President’s attempt to close the so-called ‘gun show loophole,’ which is, as Mr McCain pointed out, “a propaganda phrase invented by the anti-gun fanatics who want to prevent law-abiding citizens from defending themselves.”

But the part which interested me most was further down:

Anthony Wade was 34 when he died March 29 in Sparks, Nevada, after shooting a cop who pulled him over for a traffic violation. Police on Friday released video of the incident, during which Wade fled after shooting the cop, crashed his car, ran on foot, broke into two different homes where he attempted to hide out, and ambushed police when they came after him. Anthony Wade was a convicted felon who, as such, was prohibited from owning firearms. He’d been a criminal his whole life:

Wade’s criminal history started when he was a juvenile, according to court documents.

Those records are sealed, but were referenced when Wade pleaded guilty in 2009 to burglarizing a house when he was 18. The 16- to 72-month prison sentence was waived as long as Wade kept out of trouble.

But five months later, Wade was found drinking in a downtown Reno motel room with other underage kids. He was arrested under the alias Jamal Jerome Smith. During the arrest, he assaulted a police officer.

Wade pleaded guilty and his probation was revoked. He was sent to the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City to serve out the original burglary sentence of up to 72 months plus six months for the assault.

Jamal Jerome Smith again shows up in arrest and court documents in 2020 for a 2015 armed robbery at a Sparks nightclub. That case was eventually dropped, with prosecutors citing a lack of admissible evidence.

There may be other cases where Wade was a suspect and a criminal record that spans other states, according to Kendall Holcomb, public information officer for the District Attorney’s Office. . . .

Debra Wade said she knows the investigation will show her son was at fault for firing first. But she saw in her son a man trying to get his life back together so he could have a better relationship with his three children.

He was living with her and collecting disability.

“Collecting disability”? What disability did he have? But never mind that. Instead, we need to ask, where did Anthony Wade get that gun? Did he save up his disability checks to make that purchase? Did he buy it through the “gun show loophole”? Or is it more likely that Anthony Wade, the convicted burglar, stole that gun during a burglary?

You won’t see this story on CNN. They’re not going to ask questions that undermine the narrative about “Gun Violence Prevention.”

At this point, we’ll probably never know how the late Mr Wade obtained his firearm. But my question is: if, as his mournful mother said, he’d rather be dead than go back to prison, why did he keep doing things which, if he was caught, would send him back to prison? The question Mr McCain asked, “What disability did he have?” could be answered as just plain stupidity, but whatever the official reason is, Mr Wade had to know that possession of a firearm was one of the things that could send him back to prison. So, why carry a gun?

His loving mother “saw in her son a man trying to get his life back together so he could have a better relationship with his three children.” That’s the kind of thing we hear frequently about men criminals who do something stupid which sends them early to their eternal rewards; they were just about to turn the corner on getting their lives straightened out, but,alas!, Mr Wade hadn’t quite managed to turn that corner. The saddest part is that he had passed his genes on to three innocent children. One might hope that the mother (mothers?) of his three children were more intelligent than Mr Wade, but the fact that they copulated with a career criminal in the first place makes that seem unlikely.

Prison is supposed to teach two very important lessons to criminals:

1. Prison is a horrible place, and they should never want to go back there; and
2. The way to stay out of prison is to not do the things that get a person sent back to prison.

Mr Wade was apparently just smart enough to learn lesson number one, but lesson number two was beyond his ability to learn.