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.”

Traditionally, penalties for malum prohibitum acts were generally light, since the conduct that the laws governed wasn’t wrong in itself. But modern American law often treats even obscure and technical violations of gun laws as felonies and — Cottrol noted — prosecutors often go out of their way to prosecute these crimes more vigorously even than traditional crimes like rape or murder.