Authorities raid two San José massage parlors; arrest two on pimping charges

wonder why Ken has so much problems and the rest of us simply follow the rules and have none – think about that Ken

Maybe they have been reading your rants here and just want to mess with you (I would)

Great comeback, Bob, especially including the editorial “we.” Next time you encounter a problem with a bureaucracy, just remember it’s your own fault because your attitude was sensed.

Wow, Frank, don’t know about Panama, but if you don’t already have permanent residency in CR (a step beyond both rentista and pensionado) you can’t legally own (or therefore import) a gun to CR. Also, while personally bringing a gun into CR is doable legally if you have the permit (which again you can’t have without permanent residency), it’s a real hassle, especially if it’s a gun you already own rather than one you buy via a gun shop already set up to handle the paperwork.

Regarding bringing in illegally, you’re obviously on your own. My total sense from border crossings is that it would be a slam dunk. You could almost wear one on your belt and nobody would notice. However, don’t they have gun-sniffing dogs nowadays? And if you got caught, you might not like the consequences. I think this is one of those odds issues in which the likelihood of getting caught is low, but the penalties for getting caught are high.

Also, as far as street guns are concerned, you have to develop relationships of trust with street people first. I would imagine that Rochard has no such relationships, since he believes black market guns are more expensive than retail guns (they aren’t) but you have to be trusted by the guys who know the guys before they’ll risk selling a gun (unless I suppose you want to grossly overpay). So buying illegally usually takes some time and relationship cultivation. Ideally, of course, you’d cultivate the relationship anyway, and buying a gun is thus incidental.

As an aside, the best guys to have relationships with are either Nicas or Ticos from Limón. I don’t mean to disparage Nicas, but they are used to hustling to do “biznis” and with some it doesn’t hurt to have Sandinista credentials. You have to show you’re a “Nica lover” before they’ll trust you. The Ticos from Limón, well, many are used to the gun trade.

Also, I suppose, selection is more limited for street guns. It depends upon what the friend of a friend has or comes across. They don’t have display windows or receive shipments of the latest models.

Anyway, I don’t know your situation, but if guns are a main concern and you aren’t already a permanent resident or citizen of CR, you might want to look at Panama. You won’t be able to buy one legally in CR for many years, it takes almost as long to cultivate relationships with street guys to buy one illegally, and toting them across the border illegally could turn into a real nightmare if caught. The penalties are stiff, and you might go directly to jail.

Sorry to come on so strong, but I am quite irritated with the process and become more irritated when I’m faulted for mistakes made by others.

But to another point, since I keep neurotically detailed records of my spending, I can tell you that my cost to date for a gun permit, excluding the gun itself, is $249. This cost does include $75 for a lawyer, although some portion of that fee was earmarked to pay required government fees. Minus the lawyer and associated fees, my cost is $174. Included in this are three short cab fares, since there were three destinations I couldn’t reach easily on foot or by bus, but except for these the $174 is made up of required fees and bus fares.

I believe you are mistaken about the upfront test fees being only $80, at least if you include psychological exam. The mistake may arise from your likely making a deposit into a bank account prior to the tests and then only paying the $80 more on the testing date, but I assure you that these fees are higher. The other fees like for stamps and photos are incidental, but they add up.

Also, while they are incorrect, some people believe that they need to take a firearms course before taking the tests. Other people frankly need to take the course. Anyone who takes the course will obviously have higher fees.

Not long ago La Nación ran a story giving the breakdown of the fees, and reached a total more than I paid. This is no real surprise to me, since I’m a cheapskate and cut costs everywhere I can. According to La Nación, though, the typical applicant pays more than I paid.

Be this all as it may, I can’t imagine a brothel employee getting a gun permit for less than the $174 I paid (prior to paying the fees associated with the gun purchase), and I suspect my cost is more representative, since she would likely take buses and an occasional taxi too. This is surely a week’s earnings for most of them, maybe more, and I can’t imagine many of them being able to afford it.

But this is before she buys the gun (and pays the legal fees associated with that). You probably know better than I, but when I looked in gun shops I didn’t see anything for sale for under around $300, and everything under around $400 was dangerous junk. If memory serves, I believe La Nación estimated the cost of a low end but decent gun at around $450, and based upon my nosing around, that looks about right.

The practical issue here is whether a brothel employee will pay around $600 – $700 for a legal gun or $150 – $300 for an illegal one (probably sold to her on informal payments). I think we both know the answer to that: She’ll buy the cheaper illegal gun.

The policy issue is that by making the cost of a legal gun this expensive, CR is actually encouraging the black market in illegal guns (some obtained by robbing police stations). Smart policy, at least if we favor gun regulation (which I do) would be to lower the costs and hassles of obtaining a gun legally in order to encourage compliance by people like brothel employees. I don’t know what this policy should be exactly, but as a rule of thumb I would suggest making a gun permit about the same price and hassle as a driver’s license.

A related policy issue is gun shop prices. Since street guns are considerably less expensive than gun shop prices, we can infer that the market prices for legal guns are inflated by some government policies. Plainly these policies should be changed. IMO, CR should also stop melting down perfectly good guns in ceremonial displays of so-called pacifism. This just restricts supply and thus both drives up prices and increases the black market gun trade. I also wonder what CR is doing with the 14,000 revolvers it is retiring from the police force. If these were sold on the legal domestic market, gun prices would drop, the government would make money, and people like our brothel employee would have legal access to a perfectly decent gun.

The moral issue has to do with pricing the poor and even the middle class out of gun ownership. If citizen gun ownership is considered at all desirable, which I think it is (at least to a point), the poor and the middle class shouldn’t be thwarted from legal gun ownership by arbitrarily high prices. Indeed, if self-defense justifies gun ownership, these folks are more apt to need a gun than most others. No, I don’t recommend subsidizing gun ownership for the poor and middle class, but I strongly favor limiting arbitrary financial barriers.

On the surface, I suspect what is going on in CR is that a lot of people wrongly believe that citizen gun ownership increases gun violence, and therefore want to limit it wherever they can by ratcheting up the costs and requirements. However, without raising the tired debates (and since readers here seem to be gun owners) the reading I have done shows this policy strategy to be founded on more myth than fact. There isn’t much of a relationship between gun ownership and gun violence one way or another.

But while this is the surface rationale, I suspect that the underlying rationale is simply prejudice against the poor. Basically, people don’t want poor people specifically to have guns, even though this is based on pure prejudice rather than fact.

I therefore see brothel employees with illegal guns as engaged in a little welcome civil disobedience, albeit surely not intentionally. It should force people to appreciate that gun policy in CR is class biased and counterproductive.

$249 is too much to expect a person to pay for the privilege of buying a gun legally from a legal seller, and forcing an applicant for a permit to make a minimum of five trips to different locations is too much hassle. Of course, it’s even worse in presumably isolated cases like mine in which the government clerks screw up, but even the smoothest sailing is excessive. If the fees were lowered to like $50 and registration were a one-stop process, then I would expect brothel employees to have only legal guns. Now I can’t expect it and find the illegal guns welcome civil disobedience.

Could the fees vary by location or have risen? My records, which admittedly are chicken scratch, show that I paid $60 for a “gun exam” on Friday February 22nd, which if memory serves was deposited into a bank account, and $74 for a “shrink” the following Monday at the exam (along with $16 for bus and cab fares, bringing that day’s total to $150). I just used the “shrink” who was onsite. Maybe there are cheaper ones and I got taken, but lots of others were lining up for the test there so I figured that was the way to do it.

As for counting every cent, your real transportation cost includes the cost of the vehicle, depreciation, insurance, etc. Mine are surely more representative of those paid by the poor and middle class, since they don’t own cars.

You are right, as I recall, that the gun shops only charge $10 for the lawyer, so my $75 lawyer fee was a lot higher. However, I was also saving $200 off the price of the gun and there seemed to be a fair amount of legal paperwork that the gun shops probably have ready and thus indirectly pass along to their customers in higher prices.

Well, you’re mistaken about black market gun prices in CR, and IMO unfairly mistaken about hookers likely being drug addicts. I don’t understand how you can say these kinds of things and then characterize what I say as “rants.” Perhaps it’s because you express your erroneous opinions with calm authority?

Fair point about the cost of ammo (though the solution is obviously to lower the cost) and wanting those with guns to be sufficiently trained to be responsible with them. However, we seem to disagree over how to achieve this goal. You seem to be content to try to keep guns out of the hands of the poor, while I want to lower the barriers of responsible legal gun ownership for them. I think I win this debate, since as this story and lots of data show, high barriers to responsible legal gun ownership don’t prevent the poor from being armed but rather encouraged them to be armed with illegal weapons, no practice, etc.