Depending on the felony, YES! I do think that. Recidivism rates for pedophiles and violent rapists runs over 90%, and that is just based on those that get caught. Assuming that that the perps get caught the very first time they attack the next person, that means that giving 100 of them a second chance will result in at least 90 women and children being raped. Realistic numbers based on solved crimes puts the number at over 200. Have you no mercy for the innocent?
(In reference to your example amounting to a handful of people) Well, too bad for them, then!
Yes, and too bad for those falsely convicted, and too bad those who's mommy's didn't love them. All very, very sad, but meanwhile I'm protecting innocent lives.
Here, you conflate the issue of excessively harsh sentences for minor crimes, with the issue of sending actually innocent people to prison.
No. I point out that only an overzealous prosecutor would go after someone on the petty circumstances you point out. I then make the case that an overzealous prosecutor can always be too harsh and unjust no matter the law. Its like speed traps. They are their own issue; the answer is not to diminish the law or the punishment because someone, somewhere is over-zealously applying it. Deal with the real problem and continue to protect the innocent.
(c. BATFE agent’s comment)It was said in all seriousness. Remember that this the same BATFE that jails people for writing "Y" and "N" on a federal form instead of "Yes" and "No" and that burns innocent women and children to death, after gassing them with a gas banned under the Geneva convention.
You must have skipped the whole trial by jury concept. Yes, law enforcement can arrest you at any time any where. After this they must justify it. Please provide the case where someone was convicted for marking "Y" instead "Yes". As to the Geneva Convention, it does ban tear gas, not because tear gas is horrible, but because it is covered as a "chemical agent". This is unfortunate as tear gas would be very useful in Iraq right now and save a lot of innocent lives. Did you know that the GC also bans shotguns and deforming bullets? Are you compliant with that?
Nonsensical statements in response to my denial that memorization of the laws is required to prevent being convicted of a felony.
You are obviously unfamiliar with Project Exile, which the NRA fully supports, and which has sent a lot of dubiously harmful people to jail for mandatory minimum federal sentences.
Not at all. As an NRA member, I've fully supported it. Again, give me the case name of the individual that was convicted for having a single .22 LR round on their property.
But that's just it, these aren't "abusive" prosecutions, they're letter-of-the-law prosecutions.
There is nothing mutually exclusive about being "letter of the law" AND overzealous. Prosecutors are elected officers of the court who are tasked with enforcing the laws to protect society. If they use a law selectively to harass someone, then they have to explain that to a jury and ultimately to the electorate. Again I will point you to the speed trap analogy.
(on giving criminals a pass)False, I want to remove so many thousands of laws from the books that are more a tool of oppression than a means of protecting life, liberty, and property.
I too am protecting life, liberty and property. I just have non-criminals in mind.
The flaw in your argument is that the destruction of liberty is a greater harm than the crimes committed by these released guilty people. Governments kill a lot more people than ordinary criminals do, and they use the law as their tool to do so.
Pretty argument. Try telling the woman that just got raped by the repeat offender that she needs to suck it up and take one for the team. Again you create a straw man argument that we can't punish criminals without diminishing liberty for everyone. Just plain nonsense. Do you have children? Are you able to punish the one that broke the lamp, while running in the house, without restricting your other child's freedom to run on the playground? You really are very paranoid. You would hog tie the legal system in fear that every step was the first one on the slippery slope. This is why we have a jury system drawn from ordinary citizens, and a Republican democracy for making and unmaking laws.
I'll ask my question again. How, specifically, are YOU hurt by someone possessing drugs?
1. April 4th, 2005. I had a drug addict stick a 9mm in my face to get $20.
2. July 16th, 2005. The car in front of me went off the road, while the drug addict man was beating the drug addict woman. As all I could distinguish was that a woman was trying to flee and a man was restraining her and beating her into submission, I felt I had to intervene. Both of these people put me at risk of bodily harm or death.
3. My wife sees 60-70 drug users a week at the ER. Besides being occasionally hit or pissed on, it costs all of us about $35,000 a week for their care. That is one of thousands of hospitals.
4. My taxes are higher at a local and federal level both to pay for taking care of these self-induced cripples (and their financial responsibilities) and to pay for the damage they do to society with property damage and harm to other individuals.
5. Ditto my insurance rates.
Go bark up a different tree with that no-harm line.
(Concerning culpability of users for crimes of the trade.)There you go again, bringing explicitly violent crimes into a discussion about drug possession.
Its all the blood and murder that makes connecting the dots so easy for me. For the record I also think that buying black market organs finances murder and that frequenting Turkish brothels finances slavery. When one action directly results in another occurring, it takes fairly simple deductive reasoning to connect it. You have to close your eyes very tight to not see this.
As for your grower-users, I can't say that I've ever read about a person being arrested for growing one marijuana plant. It always seems to be tens or hundreds of plants. That's a lot of puffing for one person isn't it? But I'll answer your question with a question. What harm does child pornography do, especially if the pictures were taken in a country where its legal? Am I just a big meany to want to lock someone away for sitting in their own home and looking at thousands of pictures of children being raped? If your answer is "yes", then we fundamentally disagree on what should be done to protect society, and that is the answer to your question. I don't lose a moments sleep worrying that taking away child porn is a slippery slope to putting me in jail for writing an op-ed.
The fault for that is people like you, who vote for drug war funding, who vote for long sentences that will cost everyone even though you can't articulate how YOU were harmed.
Again you find the innocent to blame for the criminal's behavior. I supoose it was your mother's fault when you broke curfew, because she set the curfew to begin with. As for articulating the harm, I've done nothing but. You just don't think the harm is sufficient to infringe on the desire to get high. When the harm hits you and yours, I will expect a sea change in attitude.
Curiously, it took a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, but not to ban pot, or heroin, or cocaine. I don't think the laws are Constitutional.
No Constitutional amendment was required to ban alcohol. It was simply the route that was taken. In my opinion a poor use for an amendment to the Constitution. The decision has been taken to control certain substances that are found to be exceedingly dangerous or harmful when misused, e.g. dynamite, cocaine, DDT, rockets, machine guns, artillery, etc. Your logic would make all items and substances uncontrollable by Constitutional protection. I don't much care for anarchy, even when paraded as freedom. The Constitution provides us direction on where some lines must not be drawn and also a system which allows us free and open debate on where to draw other lines.
(concerning the prediction that you would come down against allowing shorter sentences if they had to include real hard labor)That's not a concern, but profiting from labor of prisoners is something Red China does, and I'm not sure we should do it here, unless the ones who profit are the criminal's own victims. If The State profits from violations of law, it will be in The State's interest to criminalize as many things as possible.
So in short, I was correct that you would be against it. As you think it would be profitable to incarcerate people for $40,000, so that you could profit from their ditch digging, I assume you are not running a business. You don't see much hard labor in the United States any more, simply because its no profitable. I want hard labor as a punishment, and I'm certain prison ditch diggers won't be sidelining bulldozers, but then I don't have your sensibiities.
It is now openly admitted that seatbelt laws and speed limits are foremost about revenue generation, and only distantly (and dubiously) about public safety. But the wool is over enough people's eyes like yours, that such laws have strong support. Drug laws are in the same category, especially when the harm that illegal drug USE (not, e.g. gang killings over drug sale turf) bring, compared to tobacco and alcohol use.
As someone that knows how and by whom those laws are lobbied for, you are dead wrong. I'll tell you my ER Doc wife has issues with seeing the 4 and 5-year-olds that come in without limbs or smashed skulls, she's also gotten tired of calling people in the middle of the night to tell them that their daughter, wife, son, husband, etc. is dead. That's why she pushes for these laws. But she is just being selfish, and we are thinking men who know what is really important, so please share your fair solution to people who fail to restrain/protect and fail to have adequate insurance or any insurance at all to pay for the $300 thousand to $1 million dollar medical bills that some of the revenue and our insurance premiums are offsetting.
Should we require proof of insurance before we extract the mangled bodies?
Perhaps we can take $20 a week out of their pay? That should straighten things out it 500 to 1000 years.
What should be the penalty for not having insurance? You know it could be an accident on their part, so don't be too harsh.
I wonder if you are aware that people used to machine-gun speakeasies during The Prohibition, but that somehow stopped when Prohibition ended, which means that the criminal activity associated with alcohol at that time was more associated with prohibition, than with alcohol. The killings over drugs today are likewise.
So all those stills that kept running were for historical purposes only? Isn’t it odd that we don’t still have “machine-gun speakeasies” full of minors?
Drug addicts kill and steal because they can’t/don’t/won’t earn enough money to support their habit. Unless you are going to force me to pay for their free drugs, this won’t stop. The idea that these recreational drugs would be so cheap that it wouldn’t matter is absurd to anyone familiar with normal pharmaceuticals. And good luck finding a manufacturer that will last five minutes after they are pounced on by the hordes of tort lawyers that will be massing at their gates.
For the third or fourth time, that's a violent crime, which is not what I'm talking about.
[I'll ask my question again. How, specifically, are YOU hurt by someone possessing drugs?] 1. April 4th, 2005. I had a drug addict stick a 9mm in my face to get $20.
That's not "possession" that's armed robbery, which is a violent crime. (For something like the fifth time.) Inicdentally, the Drug War costs ~$50 billion/year, which is something like $250/taxpayer/year, or the same as getting robbed of $20 every two weeks.
2. July 16th, 2005. The car in front of me went off the road, while the drug addict man was beating the drug addict woman. As all I could distinguish was that a woman was trying to flee and a man was restraining her and beating her into submission...
Assualt, DUI, reckless driving, kidnapping - not possession.
3. My wife sees 60-70 drug users a week at the ER. Besides being occasionally hit or pissed on, it costs all of us about $35,000 a week for their care. That is one of thousands of hospitals.
Drug poisonings are partly a result of poor purity controls, since the manufacturing chains are all illegal. (And, there were a lot of people poisoned or blinded by methanol or glycol during Prohibition, too.) The $35,000 cost is a consequence of socialist laws, that we have to pay for another's care, it's not a consequence of "drugs."
4. My taxes are higher at a local and federal level both to pay for taking care of these self-induced cripples (and their financial responsibilities) and to pay for the damage they do to society with property damage and harm to other individuals.
Again, a cost of socialism. (You forgot to mention that you also have to pay for the JBTs and the courts and the prisons, too, but you apparently enjoy paying for that - and forcing others to pay, too.) But, once again, this isn't "possession."
5. Ditto my insurance rates.
Go bark up a different tree with that no-harm line.
LOL! You still haven't answered my question, you've only offered changed subjects. If someone is growing their own, how does it harm YOU? You offer violent crimes in response to my question of possession. I don't know if you can not understand, or if you will not understand, but what is clear is that you do not understand.
Its all the blood and murder that makes connecting the dots so easy for me.
Your position is simply bigoted. KKK members and white supremacists can not distinguish between criminal and non-criminal black people; they're all out to rape white women as far as they are concerned. Brady Campaign gun grabbers can't distinguish between lawful and criminal gun ownership - any NRA member owns guns only to shoot up schools, as far as they are concerned. And you, similarly, are incapable of distinguishing between otherwise peaceable drug users, and armed robbers and kingpin dealers, who would kill police with abandon, just as part of the job. Same zebra, different stripe: bigotry.
For the record I also think that buying black market organs finances murder
So do you support an above-board market for organs, then?
and that frequenting Turkish brothels finances slavery.
Do you support or oppose legal brothels here, knowing that if they aren't legal, there will be more slavery elsewhere? Your answer will say a lot about you.
When one action directly results in another occurring, it takes fairly simple deductive reasoning to connect it. You have to close your eyes very tight to not see this.
One action: Criminalization of something, e.g. drugs. Another action occuring: criminal activity associated with the first, e.g. armed robbery. You have to close your eyes very tight to not see this.
As for your grower-users, I can't say that I've ever read about a person being arrested for growing one marijuana plant. It always seems to be tens or hundreds of plants.
It doesn't matter if there were such cases, because I doubt it would make any difference to you.
That's a lot of puffing for one person isn't it? But I'll answer your question with a question.
Answering a question with a question doesn't work for Mike Rosen and it doesn't work for me.
The decision has been taken to control certain substances that are found to be exceedingly dangerous or harmful when misused, e.g. dynamite, cocaine, DDT, rockets, machine guns, artillery, etc.
So you agree with the lefties about DDT? FYI the harms of that were grossly overstated, and even the lefties are starting to realise it.
Your logic would make all items and substances uncontrollable by Constitutional protection.
False. Constitutional Amendment is the ONLY legal way to ban something at the federal level, what with specifically enumerated powers and all that. Not that you care about Constitutional restraints to federal power.
I don't much care for anarchy, even when paraded as freedom.
Straw man. I didn't say "abolish all police and government" which is what anarchy is.
The Constitution provides us direction on where some lines must not be drawn and also a system which allows us free and open debate on where to draw other lines.
Indeed, it does. The federal government ONLY has powers where the Constitution specifically, explicitly gives it. And the result of this open debate for where to draw other lines is a Constitutional amendment.
So all those stills that kept running were for historical purposes only?
No, they were for criminals to make money with. (Like the Kennedys, who are still in political power as a result.)
Isn’t it odd that we don’t still have “machine-gun speakeasies” full of minors?
First, you misunderstood me, "machine-gun" was used as a verb, not an adjective. Second, alcohol is now decriminalized, which has reduced the incidence of teen drinking. Teens today find it easier to get drugs than alcohol, so your prohibition doesn't do what you apparently wish in terms of availability to children, at least.
Drug addicts kill and steal because they can’t/don’t/won’t earn enough money to support their habit.
On the contrary, many do, the so-called white-collar addicts. (Just as there are many responsible drinkers today, in fact the overwhelming majority - contrary to the representation of the Prohibitionists) But you don't care, you'd throw them in prison anyway, even though they don't steal or anything else other than buy or grow, possess and use.
The idea that these recreational drugs would be so cheap that it wouldn’t matter is absurd to anyone familiar with normal pharmaceuticals.
Can you remind me how much it costs to grow a weed? You have to spend money to eradicate it.
And good luck finding a manufacturer that will last five minutes after they are pounced on by the hordes of tort lawyers that will be massing at their gates.
Cook your own - at your own risk.
Imainge a parallel universe, where everything is the same except drug legality. Some guy passes you on the sidewalk, carrying dope. In that universe, he goes on about his way, because it's legal, where in this one, you notice it and drop a dime on him, and he is violently arrested and convicted and incarcerated. In neither case did he directly harm you. Yet you apparently would prefer to live in this one. It has nothing to do with drugs, because they are present in both cases. The real question is, why do you have this need to violently deprive others of their liberty?
You're throwing pearls before swine. Its too bad those that dispute you hide behind the "the drug war has failed" mantra and refuse to see the Big Picture. Even sadder that they are here on FR, spewing their pro-drug venom at everyone with a family to protect.