Florida threatens criminals with up to life in prison if they use a gun, but few suspects in Orange County get such tough mandatory penalties even as the campaign to end gun violence enters its 10th year, the Orlando Sentinel has found. [More]Now hold the phone--I'm all for throwing the book at any animal using force and weapons to threaten, harm or kill victims. But "use a gun" is a far cry from some loser hiding under his mother's bed during a drug raid...
The police state receives major sustenance from the War on (some) Drugs. As does violent crime from both sides of "the thin blue line." That's a separate issue, but I'll repeat something I've long maintained:
Anyone who can't be trusted with a gun can't be trusted without a custodian.
Still, I'm sittin' here wondering how that guy got 23 days and Wayne Fincher got six-and-a-half years...
[Via Bruce Mills]
5 comments:
Maybe it's better to just go ahead and lie, cheat, rob, steal, deal in contraband, and kill. THOSE people get early release, therapy, public and media sympathy. After all, they provide jobs for our multi-billion-dollar correctional and justice systems. WE'RE just a drain on their resources. If you don't confiscate a barrel full of drugs and gold jewelry, how can you buy that Porsche pursuit car and those neat naked-under-your-clothes body scanners?
I see that a New York man agreed to go to prison for six and a half years for using his satellite TV company to allow customers to watch Hezbollah's TV station.
Now... Media types and intelligence analysts watch the yammerings of terrorists on TV and on tape all the time. It doesn't mean they support terrorism.
This sounds like the act of some other country. Suppose Hezbollah isn't saying what they tell us they're saying? We'd never know the difference. Remember "anti-government right-wing neo-Nazi white supremacists militias"?
Not that I think Hezbolla has a sane person among them. There IS that First Amendment issue, though.
"Supporting a terrorist organization" was the charge.
Was it Pay-Per-View?
You can find Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and Mao's Little Red Book in Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores. Are they supporting fascism and communism?
George Orwell was an optimist.
Six and a half years.
So called "firearms enhancements" are totally out of control. They are used for no other purpose in many cases other than to pad charges. In most of rural Kentucky, I doubt you will find many houses without a gun in every room or nearly every room. But when the local "only ones" break in to arrest the home owner for using pot (a tyrannical law, but not the debate at the moment) they always get to add on "Firearms enhancements" for every gun they find in the home. Doesn't matter if it is a scoped deer rifle in the closet in a gun case, a .45 beside the bed or a shotgun in a rack in the rec room. The the gun in the house is enough to add years to the person's sentence.
Somehow, despite their guilt-by-association social engineering efforts, nearly as many people use light drugs as don't, just as as many people own guns as don't.
That only spurs them on to greater efforts. Obviously their budgets aren't big enough...
When you're starting to p!$$ of EVERYONE, it's time to look at your goals and methods. I know that's hard for government employees, but it beats the alternative which seems almost inevitable.
Hey, Australia's government is developing the Great Barrier Firewall to block 1,300 Internet sites they don't think The People need to see. I bet this is one of them. Dangerous ideas here. How can you be an authoritarian if people are reminded daily that you HAVE no authority over them?
Freedom elsewhere: Australia is setting up a national firewall to block 1,300 internet sites (for a start) the government feels the people don't need access to, AND Vietnam has passed a law to prohibit bloggers from discussing subjects THE GOVERNMENT deems sensitive or inappropriate. Only personal stuff allowed.
We HAVE to hold the line HERE.
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