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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Could this work by "all law-abiding citizens no longer carry, only the criminals, so now if someone is stopped and found to have a gun, the book gets thrown at them NO EXCUSES so for once we can keep Denzil The Drug Dealer in jail for longer than ten minutes"?

I don't see any serious approach where it could. There's already a lot of normally law-abiding citizens who are going to go far out of their way to break this particular order, and the order was issued with far too little notice for law-abiding normies to obey it if they wanted. And the punishments are trivial compared to traditional criminal law.

Perhaps more damning, I'm not sure why anyone would issue this order for that purpose, as opposed to simply directing her branch of the government to do it directly. There's some fun constitutional questions for whether drug users or sellers can possess firearms legally, but they're less constitutionally dubious than this. And the simple bit of "actually just go after drug dealers and violent criminals" is right there waiting for someone to pick it up.

There's a (very limited) steelman where this becomes a police tool, as a fig leaf for a broader stop-and-frisk; even if no one's ever prosecuted for breaking the order, it gives a lot of space for police to do random searches for weapons (and thus drugs and contraband and fleeing-from-police and not having a license for a gun and not having a gun that's not the one listed on your CHL and whatever). But even that doesn't really do a great job of actually focusing police power on violent criminals; it's one of the major flaws with actual stop-and-frisk. And it of course only augments the constitutional issues.

No, fails the disparate impact test.

No, no it can't.

Which means Denzel just hires local youths to be his security. Drug dealers have been splitting up roles for decades to make prosecution harder.

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