When Soechtig and her team plea to federal charges for violating the nation’s commonsense gun laws, we’ll know they’re serious about cutting down on gun crime. Until then, we’ll know they’re just a bunch of ignorant, gun-trafficking profiteers who want to take away our rights while they violate the very laws they demand with absolute impunity.
Sean Davis
June 3, 2016
Katie Couric’s Anti-Gun Producers Repeatedly Violated Federal Gun Laws
[The laws Soechtig and team committed should not stand up to scrutiny by the courts but other people are still going to jail for them. And as long as other people are going to jail over them it should doubly apply to Soechtig and her gang. Since she wants us to go to jail for violation of nonsensical laws then she needs to understand, first hand, the significance of what she demands.
Update: Image supplied, copyright free and no permission required, by Stephanie.—Joe]
This proves our thesis that prohibitions apply only to the law-abiding, that anyone willing to break the law will have guns no matter the law, thus giving law-breakers a government enforced monopoly on deadly force over the law-abiding. I would thank Couric and her associates for making this clear.
If we’re consistent we’ll stand up for Soechtig’s and the others’ second amendment rights. If any of them should go to jail it should be for “Conspiracy to Deprive Rights” as defined in 18 USC 241. The point here is that we can be consistent and still we have plenty of “ammunition” against the enemies of America’s Promise.
Years ago I criticized the NRA for opposing gun restriction legislation and then later, once the laws had been passed, calling for their enforcement. I maintain that position. We can’t claim something is unconstitutional and then support it when it suits us.
They are extremely unlikely to be prosecuted. But others will.
If we demand they be prosecuted and raise a big enough stink about it they may be prosecuted. And the publicity will increase the likelihood other people who have done nothing wrong will be able to successfully use her “get out of jail free” example as a defense for themselves.
It is my opinion that vigorous, ruthless, and extremely public enforcement of nonsensical laws is one of the best ways to get such laws eliminated.
I see your point. So like when you get together with a group of fellow gun owners in civil disobedience of Washington State’s new gun transfer initiative, you’d prefer to be vigorously, ruthlessly and publicly prosecuted? That is one way to do it, and it’s been known to work on occasion. The way I see the last eight years, we’ve often been encouraging LEOs to refuse to enforce unconstitutional laws, or at least we’ve been expressing satisfaction when they refuse, and so it seems that we’re bouncing from one side of the map to the other.
Protecting the second amendment by ruthlessly violating it seems like a dangerous strategy, the satisfaction of seeing someone like Couric hoisted with her own petard notwithstanding. Then again we do credit Obama for being the greatest gun salesman, possibly of all time, so by that standard we should vote for Hillary or for the most outrageous communist on the ticket.
It’s a tough call, and I don’t claim to have The Answer. I’d just like to see the perpetrators go to jail for the right reasons and for us to retain our principles. I believe there are ways to accomplish both.
I don’t claim to have The Answer either. And I know I bounce around on some parts of the issue. You are correct to call me on that. I see multiple points of view and am unclear on what is best.
After giving it a little more thought I’m thinking we want to push the Federal prosecutors into explaining why they aren’t going to enforce the law in this case. Then use that statement every time they try to prosecute someone else with that same law. If we don’t push them this time they will not respond and we have no real leverage. If they do respond we may be able to “trim their claws” a little bit on this particular infringement.
I have in the past criticized the GOP for doing nothing but turning down the burner on the pot that’s getting ready to boil the frog, asserting that we may have been better off without them. With the burner on full, the pot would heat up so quickly that the frog would jump out before it dies. If we acknowledge that our current situation, nationally and globally, is the result of the slow heating of the pot, then the Republican Party is to blame. Their primary role seems to have been regulating the burner under the pot, to ensure the death of the frog.
By that reasoning, and I believe it’s valid reasoning, there are three paths. We’ve been on the GOP path of the slow burn (which happens also to be the textbook definition of Progressivism). The next one is to vigorously defend civil rights at every turn, and the other, which would assume a lack of hope that the principles of liberty would or could take hold on their own merits, would be to push for the most rapid, most precipitous fall toward authoritarianism under the assumption that the shock and horror of it would wake up the People.
Probably the worst path is the one we’ve been on, nationally. We could call it the Moderate way. It’s the way of the GOP, where you take one stand in one situation, and the opposite stand in some other situation, giving lip service to principles when it benefits you but never demonstrating that you believe or even understand any of it. Liberty will surely die, but not with a loud bang or a fire storm. It will die with a whimper or a sigh, and there will be no rationale for reviving it. No one will have the energy or the drive, and they certainly won’t have clarity to guide them.
If liberty is going to die, then yes; I think it should die with a very loud bang. I’d rather see the authoritarian system die with a loud bang though, demonstrating vigorously and very publicly that it won’t be tolerated.
*IF* they transported the guns in question to another state. We don’t know yet if they did or not.
Straw purchase violation? Maybe.
Of course, they’re scumbags anyways, one way or the other.
I don’t understand the “if they transported” part. You can’t legally buy a gun out of state except from a licensee; it’s the buying that’s prohibited, not any subsequent transport across a state line. At least that’s the rule as I understand it.
See 18 U.S. Code § 922 (a)
I think the story is that they passed the law under the guise of regulating interstate commerce. The sale, in and of itself, is not part of interstate commerce until the gun crosses a state line.
Ok. But section 5 says:
which seems to say that (a) the seller may be in trouble, and (b) the buyer has a problem because he would have had to dispose of the weapon in the state where he bought it (to avoid crossing state lines with it).
Mostly correct (if I understand it correctly). The seller is only in trouble if they had reason to believe the person was from out of state. The buyer can (apparently) legally buy, use, and store the gun in the other state as long as it never crosses a state boundary.