A hot pink gun? Really? Man, the brothers on Chicago's South Side have to be laughing their butts off.
The hot pink .22 cal. rifle is hardly the stuff of “Scarface.” But it’s enough of a gun to land Carlos Carmona-Gonzalez in federal prison.
A convicted felon and reputed gang leader known as “Downer,” Carmona was caught with the single-shot Keystone Sporting Arms last June after offering to sell guns to a police informant.
Federal prosecutors say the 23-year-old man has been enmeshed in Southwest Washington gang violence for the past seven years. In a contention he denies, prosecutors describe him as a leader in a gang set operating in Vancouver.
The 23 year-old's already got nine felony convictions, so what's he doing still out on the streets? Isn't there some point at which you just toss him into a cell and conveniently lose the key? Whatever happened to the idea of punishment for idiots like him - or is it just that the jails are so larded up with pot-smokers that they've got no room for actual menaces to society?
Prosecutors describe Carmona as a leader in the South Side Locos 13 street gang set operating in Vancouver. The set is a small part of the Surenos gang family, a loose affiliation of street gangs born out of Southern California.
Okay, if he's Locos, place him in lockdown in a mental facility for, say, 30 years. Of course, I'd prefer the China solution: one bullet; charge his family. Why waste resources?
Oh, but see, this time he's really changed: he's "a father of two" (great role model) and he was an abused child and he's "prepared to leave the gang life". That latter should be easy enough: we know it as "three strikes and you're out".
