The shooting at the Washington DC Naval Yard by Aaron Alexis has once again brought up the issues of background checks as a deterrent to criminals and the mentally ill getting their hands on firearms. There is a huge loophole in the NICS-National Instant Criminal Background Check System-that gun control advocates and gun rights activists will probably agree there is a desperate need to fix. The devil will be in the details, but the debate is urgent and needs to begin.
Title 28 CFR § 25.4 (CFR=Code of Federal Regulations)
Record source categories.
It is anticipated that most records in the NICS Index will be obtained from Federal agencies. It is also anticipated that a limited number of authorized state and local law enforcement agencies will voluntarily contribute records to the NICS Index. Information in the NCIC and III systems that will be searched during a background check has been or will be contributed voluntarily by Federal, state, local, and international criminal justice agencies. [Emphasis added]
So let’s consider the case of how you get overseas criminal records on convicted felons from nations that don’t consider their records to be public and keep them very close to the vest in dealing with the United States government? It’s not like every nation in the world is completely truthful with us.
So called Communist countries were very skillful in exporting their criminals and mental cases to the United States during the Cold War. Some instances were rapid and dramatic like the Marielito Boatlift when Cuba cleaned out its prisons and mental asylums and sent thousands of its problems to the US to become our problems, as dramatically portrayed in Al Pacino’s Scarface. Under its quota system for so-called Jewish refugees, the old Soviet Union made it a lot easier for criminals and the criminally insane to get into the United States than legitimate dissidents and gradually cleaned out many of its most despicable and heinous desperadoes and made them our problem.
Let’s look at some examples:
Getting out of the old Soviet Union was much easier-encouraged in fact-for criminals and mental cases than for real Jewish dissidents.
“Crazy Klenshteyn” ran a jewelry shop in the Fairfax area having immigrated as a so-called persecuted Jewish dissident from Odessa (now in the Ukraine, then part of the USSR) in the 80s. According to his neighbors, he’d spent years in and out of mental institutions in the old country. When they moved into an apartment in Fairfax he and his wife made life a living hell for their neighbors: he exposed himself to an old woman; his wife tried to toss boiling water at somebody! When I accompanied an attorney to serve eviction papers on them, the wife took the papers and slapped the attorney in the face with them. I displayed my handcuffs as a warning to her that if she didn’t calm down, she’d face arrest and she later told the police that I’d twisted her arm behind her back and handcuffed her (luckily the police detective knew some of my police buddies and also knew the reputation of the Klenshteyn family and agreed the charges were insane). The night before they left the apartment following the judge’s eviction order, they hammered hundreds of nails into the wooden floor of their apartment to destroy it.
What really, really scared the Klenshteyn’s neighbors is that as a jewelry store owner his neighbors reported seeing him with a gun…but if he ever had needed a background check to buy one, do you think that the Soviet authorities would have ever admitted his mental or criminal record? If they had, they’d be admitting to their whole scheme to export a huge part of their criminal problems to the United States back in the 80s.
Israel has been exporting many of its problems to the United States, whether by design or inadvertently, leading to the presence in the United States of serious cells of the Jerusalem Network of the Israeli Mafia. One of the enforcers of the Jerusalem Network-let’s call him “Mr. DBB”-has a Nevada Concealed Weapons Permit and sports a handgun with him while he carries out unlicensed (and inherently illegal) “collections” for mobsters throughout Las Vegas. According to reliable sources, Mr. DBB did time in an Israeli prison along with his co-defendant Gabriel Ben Harosh-another notorious Jerusalem Network degenerate-for crimes involving violence and extortion. On one such Clark County, Nevada “collection” he came with Brett Gordon Pekrul…another real piece of work (like, check out his criminal record):
