A Modest Proposal
One hopes that our better-read readers will recognize this title as taken from a Jonathan Swift-written essay suggesting that the best cure for poverty would be to sell off poor children to be fattened up to be table fare. Sort of a “we’re having the children for dinner tonight” sort of thing.
Relax, it was a satire on all the “proposals to fix the social ills” popular in the early 18th century. No one could possibly treat their young so cavalierly as to kill them out of hand, could they? Anyway, moving on:
I keep seeing all of these proposed solutions to gun problems: universal background checks, universal registration, raising purchase ages, red flag laws, casting magic spells, you name it… here’s a slightly different idea.
Make it mandatory that gun charges are not subject to plea-bargaining – non-negotiably, they have to go to trial. That’s it. Everyone complains that there are thousands of gun laws and prosecutors don’t use them. Why not? Because the gun charges are plea-bargained out immediately. You have some guy who robbed a 7-11, he’s charged with assault with a deadly weapon and felony robbery – his lawyer says “you toss the gun charge, he pleads to misdemeanor robbery” and the guy is out on the street within hours. Instead, make the gun violations a major pain in the neck. None of this tit-for-tat trade-off nonsense, make prosecutors and judges actually deal with it. If the charge is bogus for some reason, pronounce him innocent and send him on his merry way.
That’s it. No new laws, no inconvenience to the law-abiding public. Just mandatory prosecution of some of the ones we already have on the books. Who’s going to object – the criminals?
Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists, Guns
Add to that the elimination of the AFT, as everyone’s favorite president calls it. In place of that nefarious agency, each state decides what is best for them. Then we’ll see a population shift to the free states.
Never mix alcohol and firearms.
I admit nothing. Call my lawer. And ATF should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
What if you mix your alcohol WITH firearms? Use your 1911 to muddle and stir an Old Fashioned? Sounds like a plan…🥃
Don’t forget the “T” in ATF, enjoy a choice See-gar while shooting!
Nah, I’ll smoke one of Clint’s short “El Rope-o’s” from the Spaghetti westerns.
Nope, can’t do it. Makes wayyyy too much sense.
Lets prosecute everyone who falsifies an ATF Form 4473 as a start.
Let’s do away with AFT Form 4473.
Except if they’re a politician’s son or sonething…
Won’t work. Your proposal would clog the system with slow moving cases. Their objective is to move the thugs through as fast as possible. Get the “win” and move on.
The police will be told not to charge “gun” for ordinary street crime. Then the mandatory “no deal” is applied to the poor schlub who forgot his permit isn’t valid in store X.
You have a naive belief that this is about justice or reducing crime, versus societal control. They are deliberately not enforcing existing gun laws. They won’t enforce your proposed one, either.
Except against you.
Exactly. Put the law abiding in a situation where they fear their government more than they fear criminals and you ensure compliance. Prosecutors in Chicago will never prosecute a gangbanger for carrying a pistol. But they’ll sure as hell throw the book at you. Hopefully that fat fuck Pritzker keels over from a heart attack soon. I can’t wait to read his obituary. Oh, and, Illinois residents? Don’t move to Indiana, we don’t want you fucking up our state.
Here ya go: https://youtu.be/fZL_tZxyBDo
Way too much common sense going on in this post. If crimes were prosecuted, more criminals would be in prison. It follows that if we went back to the concept of penetintiaries vice prisons, they would not want to go back to prison either.
Not having much experience with either, other than a name what is the difference between a penetintiary and a prison?
I take it one you do not have a right to a TV, and internet, or fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe!?
Essentially none that I can find.
Now if you’re talking about a difference between a jail and a prison (or penitentiary), there is a difference.
Jails primarily hold prisoners who are awaiting trial (and can’t post bail or held on no bail) or have not been convicted of a crime or have been convicted of a misdemeanor meaning a term of less than one year.
Prison is for those convicted of a felony receiving a sentence of one year or more.
Jails are usually run by counties. Prisons by the state or federal government.
Well, you know where they’re going… an example (anything sound familiar?):
The Big Cat Public Safety Act (signed last month)… bans private ownership of lions, tigers, cheetahs, pumas, snow leopards and leopards (or even handling of their cubs as “posession”) by private civilians. Existing owners nust register them with authorities for their (the authorities’) safety.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/263
Sounds like a great idea…now how to get politicians to actually vote for it.
Probably slightly more chance than term limits or bans on insider trading
Bundle it in an omnibus bill, you know, “we have to vote for it to see what’s in it”.
Again, it is all about the control of We, The People, NOT control of the gunz.
We could use a few more Judge Roy Beans.
It is a nice proposal except it is totally racist as there would be far too many POC incarcerated as another example of white privilege. You have to institute another racially / gendered biased quota system to make sure you aren’t discriminating, except that is totally discriminatory.
Cool Looking Chick in the above pic.
Who Wears Short Shorts waxed by the Royal Teens 1957 on the Power Label.
Like I said, I like brunettes. And I get to choose.
What else did she wax?
Wax was the term years ago when the group was making the record because of the type of material used in making the record.
This is the basic problem with the law in all of these United States.
We are raised as children to believe the law is like hardened titanium rods, rigid and inflexible for all…then as adults we realize the law is a lot more like Silly Putty, it can molded into any shitty clay art you like and sometimes you can lift ink off paper with it as well.
Very few involved in the lawyerly part of the law actually concern themselves with justice, they concern themselves with clearing cases and saving the rather limited time of the court system…we don’t want to address the fact that the court system is so limited because we have so many goddamn laws you can’t take a piss outside without violating 2 or 3 of those laws…when we spend weeks trying a case over a crime that’s victimless we don’t have time for all the armed robbery cases, rapists, and violent offenders.
When we can no longer distinguish the difference between a no bail situation for a first time offender who shoplifted less than a hundred dollars and a guy who pistol whipped an old lady for her purse I think we have a larger, systemic problem with “justice under the law”.
Your idea makes sense which is why it will never be implemented because the fear of additional time in prison for the gun charge makes a lot of offenders plead out in exchange for dropping that charge and the attorneys involved all believe that they’ve at the very least taken someone off the streets for a little while.
Such is the nature of the application of the law in the United States in 2023…a myopic, Byzantine, and seemingly endless stream of ineffective bureaucrats all patting themselves on the back for a job well done while their work continues to fail all of American Society…
After spending 27 years in LE, and a lot of time in court, I could never understand how a trial for any crime could last more than a week, or maybe two weeks. Except my subpoena for any trial said I had to be present at 0830, and court usually convened about 0945, then the judge took a break at 1030. Broke for lunch at 1130, reconvened at 1300, broke again at 1415 and adjourned, usually at 1600-1615.
And Friday was given to motions and pleas.
When I was a cop in Honolulu, a friend of mine practically lived at the courthouse. He must have caught up on his sleep waiting to testify if he did at all. He wrote up LOTS of tickets requiring a court appearance. He just smiled when the civilian said, “See you in court!”
I was only a cop for about 3 years, but if I was subpoenaed to testify (and that happened pretty often), I actually took the stand only twice in 3 years.
I testified a lot, in the felony trials. Most tickets I wrote never went to court, and the misdemeanor arrests, I’d get a subpoena for a trial, and the guy/gal would show up and plead guilty.
I don’t think we’d crowd the prisons.
Recent studies have shown that most violent crimes [ones involving the use of firearms] tend to be clustered in a specific group of large American cities [Chicago, LA, New York among them], and that within these cities the crimes also tend to cluster in specific neighborhoods, and are committed by perps that are known to the police. I believe the figure quoted in one study was a total of 250 known perps in Washington DC accounted for most of the violent crime.
So, naturally, instead of having the police saturate those places and targeting those small groups of criminals, the left wing pols want to throw all their weight into “Social Programs” that promote equity, equality, gender awareness, gay friendly, work program, diddilly do dah day.
That as well as no cash bail and letting criminals back out ASAP with no consequences for their actions which further emboldens them.
Less than 5% of criminal cases got to trial. This is the only reason that the CJS functions at all. We would have to increase the number of lawyers, judges and court rooms by about double to send all the gun cases to trial. Since those found guilty would have to serve longer than normal than we would need new prisons.
The worst part is it wouldn’t deter crimes a bit, criminals not being the most forward thinking part of our population.
ChatGPT can be used for good:
I would adjust the must go to trial to “plea to accept 90% of max time for gun charge or go to trial”
Most pleas are made to avoid the cost of a trial and to save tax payer money.