Rare News Desk
When lefty outlets such as Salon or Jezebel write of the need for stricter gun control — usually post-some horrible shooting — they have plenty of outrage, and plenty of body parts to flog for political ends.
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They do not, however, tend to specify how gun control policies will work out in practice, or what the punishments for violating these new, harsh policies might be. They certainly do not mention that gun control would have more dire effects than any shooting, at least in terms of it pushing more people toward our full-to-bursting prisons.
In the last month, conservatarian reporters and commentators have rallied around the case of Shaneen Allen. Allen, 27, was reportedly robbed twice, so she purchased a gun to protect the lives of herself and her children. When driving in New Jersey last October, she was pulled over for a traffic violation. To be safe, Allen told the police officer she had a firearm and some hollow-point bullets. She handed over her concealed carry permit.
New Jersey does not recognize Pennsylvania law, so the legality of her gun and ammunition was irrelevant. Allen had done what she was supposed to, obeyed the law at home, and even told a cop she had a weapon, so he wasn’t surprised by the sight of a firearm and do something rash. Still, this was the equivalent of unlawful possession of a firearm…even though it was a legal one in the state in which she had residency.
The inconsistently of the states’ gun laws, and the harshness of New Jersey’s gun laws has snared other people as well. In 2010, a man named Brian Aitken moved from Colorado to New Jersey with legal guns, and was promptly sentenced to seven years in prison.
Thankfully for Aitken, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie commuted his sentence. However, Christie also signed a bill which upped the mandatory minimum certain firearms violation from three years to 42 months in his state. If other stories are any yardstick, it seems reasonable to far too many prosecutors to punish people not just for gun possession but for possession of a gun that was legally purchased in another location. Following the law becomes illicit firearm possession just by crossing a state border.
So far, Allen has received little attention from lefty outlets. The Daily Kos made the issue purely about mandatory minimums, while tiptoeing around the issue that gun issues do tie into that. Think Progress had a worse, and more timid piece about Allen, which describes the controversy of her charges.
The outrage of drug mandatory minimums has gotten a lot more attention than firearm ones in the press. At this point, it looks like Allen, whose plight ought to be a liberal cause to rally around — a young, minority mother being caught up in a racially stacked criminal justice system for wanting to defend herself and her children — is being left to the conservatives to defend.
This is exactly the wrong approach for liberals to take. Draconian punishments for even simple gun possession need to go the way of harsh drug punishments. They quite literally go together, the latter making the former a more serious crime on the federal scale.
Stacked sentences can mean — as shown in a Families Against Mandatory Minimums chart — decades in prison for someone who say, sold marijuana three times with a handgun on their person.
Both crimes are nonviolent. Hell, the gun itself could have been legally purchased, and legal in that state, it doesn’t even matter. Yet the end result could be 60 years in prison.
This is insane, and needs to be remedied for real criminal justice reform to occur. Federalism isn’t a reasonable dodge here. It ought not apply to a right directly protected in the Constitution. Nor should any state pass laws that mete out truly harsh punishments for nonviolent offenses. Yet the Think Progress piece frets over whether forcing states to honor other gun laws is a good idea when “some states have very lax application processes and some even automatically restore gun rights to those convicted of state crimes after completion of sentences.”
Heaven forbid that someone getting out of prison have gun rights! Violence is not even mentioned here as a concern here, just violating the law. When guns are the forbidden product, the left sounds like the right did 30 years ago when the quadrupling process of the prison population began.
You did the crime, you must do the time. Even if you didn’t mean to break the law.
The Think Progress piece’s final paragraph contains the exceedingly weak worry, “Some conservative gun law opponents have seized on the [Allen] case as an argument against strict gun laws.”
But how else could they interpret it? If the law is so broad as to snag even forthright, law abiding citizens, that law needs to change on a very large scale.
Thanks in large part to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky), a surprisingly bipartisan effort to reduce federal mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders has been making progress in Washington, DC.
This month, the U.S. Sentencing Commission instituted reforms which would allow 46,000 federal prisons to become potential candidates for shortened sentences. Without cross-party support, this effort could stall, and leave America with prisons that are only slightly less bursting than they were before.
The left needs to pick prison reform or gun control. They can’t have both. Refusing to accept this will only lead to more men and women like Shaneen Allen wasting their lives away behind bars.
