Arms trade

NYC Announces City’s Biggest Gun Bust

254 weapons seized.

New York officials announced the city’s largest gun bust, a sting operation that netted 254 weapons that had been brought into the city by bus. Nineteen people were arrested, including the operator of a Brooklyn music studio where police say some of the deals took place. Smugglers allegedly paid people to buy weapons in North and South Carolina, so they could avoid the one-gun-per-month limit, and then stowed them in their luggage on board the largely unregulated Chinatown buses and bring them to New York, where they could be sold for triple the price. “Today we have charged criminal opportunists who sought to take advantage of the nation’s patchwork of conflicting gun regulation to line their own pockets and promote mayhem in New York City,” said Special Narcotics prosecutor Bridget Brennan.