Discovery Channel has a new series this season called Extreme Smuggling.
I caught one of the episodes about the subs drug runners are using and it wasn't too bad. Better than watching reruns of Pawn Stars on the History channel for the umpteenth time.
Last night's episode dealt with trafficking in illegal arms.
It was - ridiculous.
They started out with a bunch of hype about guns being smuggled out of the US and into Mexico. Then they hyped about the "special modifications" smugglers make to vehicles.
Then they showed how a vehicle was modified.
Get this -..
A guy modified the dash board so it folded down via an electric motor. Inside the folded down dash, he stuck a semi auto pistol. Then he modified the center console so a section of it raised up, again via an electric motor, and held another semi auto pistol. (keeping track? That's two semi autos)
Then, the final modification. The back seat had a motorized gizmo added to it so it pivoted up at the flip of a switch. Underneath the, the foam rummer of the seat had been hollowed out to accept a pistol grip shotgun (gun number - three).
That was it. Two semi autos and a pump shot gun.
Some smuggler huh?
Next clip was about an ex-felon making a drug and guns sale to an undercover ATF agent. The guy and 7 of his buddys were going to knock over another drug dealer and steal guns and drugs to sell to the ATF.
It was an ATF sting though and instead of another drug dealer, the guys ran into a SWAT team.
The ATF commentator said very proudly, that 20 guns were "taken off the street", by the sting.
Hmmm - 8 guys in total were busted and it netted 20 guns...
I quit watching after the New York straw buyer clip.
That was the dumbest of the three I watched.
A fat guy, that was an ex-felon, had his girlfriend buy 5 guns in a Souther state and he drive them to New York and sold them to an ATF undercover.
One was a .357mag. They guy made a huge deal out of trying to impress the undercover agent that it shot both .357mag and .38spl - as if that was something that had been invented last week.
The ATF believed he had more guns he was going to sell to someone else, so, they decided to "move in before he could spread more illegal guns in the street" (that part was said with great theatric emphasis...).
Fat guy got 13 months for selling the guns and his girlfriend got 6 months for the straw purchase.
That covered about 20 min of an hour long show.
I turned it off at that point though since it was so ridiculous.
If you decide to catch it - be warned - it's stupid - really really stupid...
It's not even stupid in a funny kind of way you can laugh at for being stupid...