Jailed for selling gun to cop

Photo: Facebook - Rodney Boesel

Rodney Boesel will serve three years in jail for selling a shotgun he found to an undercover RCMP officer.

A Merritt man will serve a three-year sentence for trying to sell a shotgun he found to his drug dealer for $80 and a rock of crack cocaine.

On the morning of May 1, 2014, Rodney Boesel was doing renovations at a Merritt apartment building when he found a Browning 12-gauge, semi-automatic shotgun, wrapped in plastic, hidden under a pile of lumber.

Boesel called his drug dealer, who he had recently met, and offered to sell him the weapon.

However, the drug dealer had been arrested the day prior, and Boesel had actually arranged the deal with an RCMP officer. He was immediately arrested when he attempted to make the sale.

“I just thought it was a way that I could make some money,” Boesel told police after his arrest. “It was a stupid, spur of the moment kind of thing, you know.”

He pleaded guilty in December 2015.

The trafficking of illegal firearms carries a mandatory minimum sentence of three years in jail.

Boesel argued the three-year sentence “would be grossly disproportional to both his circumstances and other reasonable hypothetical scenarios,” and that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Boesel says he has struggled with drug addiction after he was treated with opiates following a car accident at age 32, and the “addiction stuck.”

He has served time in jail before, after several break-and-enter convictions in 2008. His mother argued further jail time would not assist her son, but Justice Hope Hyslop said “Mr. Boesel's drug addiction, though a factor in sentencing, cannot overcome trafficking of a firearm.”

Boesel was given credit for 15 days of time served.