Glenn Reynolds: How gun laws put the innocent on trial

[sarisataka]

Glenn Reynolds: How gun laws put the innocent on trial
Glenn Harlan Reynolds 8:04 a.m. EST November 9, 2015
If you care about civil rights for minorities, gun control is not the answer.


Police are horrible, racist monsters who want to lock up minorities over even trivial violations of the law! And police are also the only ones who should have guns!

These two beliefs, it seems from my observations, are often held by the same people. Yet there is a conflict: If you favor strict gun control laws, laws that will punish people severely simply for possessing a gun or ammunition, then you will wind up throwing a lot more people in jail. And many of those people will be minorities.

This was the point of a talk by George Washington University law professor Robert J. Cottrol at a Georgetown Law School conference on guns and gun rights that I attended last week. As Cottrol noted, “Gun-control laws have a tendency of turning into criminals peaceable citizens whom the state has no reason to have on its radar.”

Cottrol noted that crimes like carrying or owning a pistol without a license are what the law has traditionally termed malum prohibitum — that is, things that are wrong only because they are prohibited. (The contrast is with the other traditional category, malum in se, those things, like rape, robbery, and murder, that are wrong in themselves.)

[Eleanors38]

1. Prohibition movements always seek to criminalize masses of people by legislation.

Gin, gays, guns, ganja -- and now tobacco -- the effort to outlaw a thing, status, or practice will criminalize in broad strokes. This is a political short cut to attack the ethics and morals of large populations; to disparage them as inferior, "the other," and of course "criminal."

Laws prohibiting practices harmful to others, if they have any effectiveness, are based on deep, wide-spread, historically-persistent values.

[virginia mountainman]

2. Salon magazine said about this same thing back in July...

It is perhaps counterintuitive to say so but gun control responses to mass killings – whether racially motivated or otherwise – are a deep mistake. The standard form of gun control means writing more criminal laws, creating new crimes, and therefore creating more criminals or more reasons for police to suspect people of crimes. More than that, it means creating yet more pretexts for a militarized police, full of racial and class prejudice, to over police.

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/24/gun_controls_racist_reality_the_liberal_argument_against_giving_police_more_power/

But to the elite, gun control advocates, they care little, about the end result, only the end result, collateral damage is just "too bad".

[beevul]

4. They're far more concerned with the means than the ends.

Shown time and time again in this forum.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

3. K&R

Theoretically contempt could get y more time than rape. No plea bargains allowed there.