One devious reason for the illogical nature of anti-gun laws

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Oleg Volk

Most violations of the myriad of Byzantine laws and regulations are prosecuted as felonies. Having an 11-round magazine in a state that forbids anything over 10 opens a person for prosecution. If that prosecution succeeds — a lifetime disenfranchisement AND a lifetime prohibition on gun ownership! If the prosecution does not succeed, at least the victim suffers a massive legal defense expense in money, time and stress. That is why the gun laws go into so much seemingly pointless trivia.

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20 Responses to One devious reason for the illogical nature of anti-gun laws

  1. Gregory Markle says:
    December 23, 2012 at 6:58 am

    “It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” – Alexis de Tocqueville

    • Firehand says:
      December 25, 2012 at 2:23 pm

      As to how well it works, ran across this the other day:
      http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/22/gun-restrictions-have-always-bred-defian
      which includes
      “Well, says the Small Arms Survey, a research outfit established by the Swiss government, the United Kingdom, with just shy of 1.8 million legal firearms, has about four million illegal guns. Belgium, with about 458,000 legal firearms, has roughly two million illegal guns. In Germany, the number is 7.2 million legal guns and between 17 and 20 million off-the-books examples of things that go “bang” (a figure with which the German Police Union very publicly agrees). France, says the Survey, has 15-17 million unlawful firearms in a nation where 2.8 million weapons are held in compliance with the law.”
      All those laws, and all those condescending comments toward us, and they’ve got this to show for it

  2. Stan says:
    December 23, 2012 at 7:10 am

    Another example: Having any ammunition components in Massachusetts without a permit is also a felony. So if i drive to Mass and have one piece of leftover brass in my car? Felony.

  3. Flint says:
    December 23, 2012 at 10:39 am

    As has been noted by many, the goal of modern legislators is to create a system in which compliance is impossible, so that /everyone/ is an unarrested criminal.

    That way, they don’t have to use secret police dragging folks off in the middle of the night; they can do it in broad daylight, under the spotlights of the press.

  4. Paul Koning says:
    December 23, 2012 at 11:22 am

    We all know the saying “ignorance of the law is no excuse”.
    I realized recently that in fact NO ONE — not a single American — knows the law. It’s obvious if you consider that the Federal Register, which is where laws (and regulations, which have the force of law) are published, runs to 200 or so pages every day. Clearly no one can remember such a flood of words, and no productive human can even afford to attempt to read that much stuff.
    One could do a variation on the old (1980s) Apple ad, where they dropped a stack of PC manuals on a table and the table broke in half. Just do that with a day’s worth of Federal register printouts. (Or a week’s worth, to make it even more impressive.)

    • Paddler112 says:
      December 23, 2012 at 3:56 pm

      The founders feared that by enshrining the Bill of Rights, it would be assumed that those were the only ones.
      Here’s one right rarely articulated. Laws should be understandable to any common citizen. It is against natural law for legislated laws to be propagated in such profusion as to be unintelligible and impossible to obey.

      • Paul Koning says:
        December 24, 2012 at 12:28 pm

        You’re quite right.
        “It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?” — James Madison (in Federalist #62).

  5. Robb Allen says:
    December 23, 2012 at 11:25 am

    This is one of the reasons we had HB45 (Preemption with teeth) passed here in Florida. Cities knew that due to preemption, they couldn’t actually convict anyone, but they went ahead and arrested people simply because they knew they had deep pockets and the citizen didn’t, so it was assumed that the hassle alone would prevent people from exercising their 2A rights.

    Then HB45 was passed. Anyone with illegal laws on the books (either stricter or looser gun laws) *personally* faced a $5,000 fine that they could not use city funds for and could be removed from office by the Governor.

    The president of Florida Carry personally was on the phone when he had city commissioners take a crowbar to their No Gun signs. Once the elected feel the heat on their chestnuts, their tune changes.

    • Flint says:
      December 23, 2012 at 1:11 pm

      Yup. There are almost no cases of improper denials of CCW’s here in NH, because the individual officer who does so is /personally/ liable. No passing it off to the department or town’s budget. See the court clerk on your way out, or face the penalties for contempt. Makes them much less likely to play games.

      • Bear says:
        December 24, 2012 at 7:42 am

        You might want to talk to Penny Dean or Evan Nappen about that. Denials are more common than you may realize, and the courts pretty much take the cop’s word for it when he says he believed he had justification to deny. The other neat trick is simply refusing to process the application at all. I had to deal with the latter, and only got the license issued after my attorney pointed out the _town’s_ liability (and the PD still screwed me around by telling me the license was ready for pick-up, but always being closed when I went in at the scheduled appointment — and yes, they refused to mail or otherwise deliver it –, and they still gave it the wrong expiration date).

        • Flint says:
          December 24, 2012 at 5:47 pm

          Penny’s my attorney.

          And I stand by my statement that there are almost no cases of improper denials. It certainly happens, but it is exceedingly rare. Most attorneys who work in that field can list the cases where it’s happened, from memory. In most other states, you could fill an encyclopedia with the cases.

          • Bear says:
            December 24, 2012 at 7:16 pm

            Penny was my attorney, too. And when I wanted to go after the Lyndeborough PD chief (Yeah: Basinas; you probably heard of him), she cited several cases to make it clear why it wouldn’t do much good for anyone but her (attorney fees, you know). I figured I was paying her for expert legal advice, so I took it. [grin]

            I’ve been licensed in a couple of states. NH was the one where I had t/h/e/ /m/o/s/t/ ANY trouble. NH’s _laws_ are pretty good, but local chiefs can be pretty bad.

  6. MAJMike says:
    December 23, 2012 at 6:28 pm

    I won’t run. I won’t submit. I aim to misbehave.

  7. LarryArnold says:
    December 24, 2012 at 12:05 am

    Another reason is that anti-gun laws are by their very nature illogical.

    • Dean Weingarten says:
      December 24, 2012 at 8:31 am

      Anti-gun laws are only illogical *if* you assume that they are passed for the purpose stated.

      *Progressives* lie all the time and have no problem with lying. The purpose of anti-gun laws is to disarm the people. If you assume that, and a strategy of doing it incrementally, they make perfect sense.

      • Mr Evilwrench says:
        December 24, 2012 at 2:17 pm

        That’s their MO for all kinds of laws. Look into “unintended consequences” then think about it for a while. How could so many of their laws so consistently result in unintended consequences? The “aha” moment is when you realize, these consequences are not unintended; they’re quite intentional. When you look at the title of a law, and its contents are blatantly opposite to that title, it has to begin to dawn on you. It’s easy to think these guys are stupid, and some of them are (islands don’t capsize) but at heart, they’re evil. And stop telling me to conserve water.

      • LarryArnold says:
        December 25, 2012 at 12:47 pm

        Half agree. Gun laws are for the purpose of disarming people.

        OTOH disarming people is itself illogical.

  8. UTLaw says:
    December 24, 2012 at 8:28 pm

    Additionally, even if the prosecution fails, the guy still may not be able to buy the gun because he will be denied when the check hits on the arrest. Eventually, the store will likely be given a “conditional proceed” but most stores don’t want to take the risk when someone has been rejected, so that person is now stuck with a private sale as his only option (if that is legal in his state).

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