MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Federal Prison’

Joe Biden Wants a Huge New Tax on Gun Owners | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 5, 2020

The stick behind the stick is a penalty of up to ten years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine. Registration involves filling out a thirteen-page registration form and providing fingerprints and a photograph of yourself.

According to Biden the pragmatist circa 1985:

During my 12.5 years as a Member of this body, I have never believed that additional gun control or Federal registration of guns would reduce crime. I am convinced that a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control. In my opinion a national register or ban of handguns would be impossible to carry out and may not result in reductions in crime.2

Despite his recognition of the futility of using gun control to reduce crime and gun violence, the “pragmatist” turned to the dark side when it became politically expedient to do so.

https://mises.org/wire/joe-biden-wants-huge-new-tax-gun-owners

Mark Thornton

Joe Biden’s gun policy platform offers support for almost all conceivable forms of government restrictions on the Second Amendment. This includes bans and restrictions on sales, expansion of registration and background checks, expansion of buyback programs and gun-grabbing statutes, and the closing of all sorts of “loopholes.”1

While we are only at the policy platform stage, where proposals are grandiose and imprecise, Biden’s legislative agenda will clearly be anti–Second Amendment and not a program to reduce crime and violence. First, he wants to stop the “gun violence epidemic” with restriction on rifles when it is handgun shootings, not rifles, that are a problem and one that is mostly confined to big cities controlled by leftists. Second, he wants to go after “assault weapons” and “weapons of war” when he should know that rifles like the AK and AR “sporters” are not military-grade fully automatic weapons. Third, he would like to hold gun manufacturers civilly liable for criminal acts committed with guns, a move which would shut down the industry, the true goal. In support of the government’s buyback program, i.e., the carrot, Biden has added a gun tax for anyone who wishes to keep their rifles and high-capacity magazines. If you want to avoid the buyback and keep your guns and high-capacity (greater than ten rounds) magazine, you would have to register both under the National Firearms Act, which triggers a $200 tax for each rifle and magazine—the stick. The stick behind the stick is a penalty of up to ten years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine. Registration involves filling out a thirteen-page registration form and providing fingerprints and a photograph of yourself.

ye-join-button_250x55.png

ye-join-button_250x55.png

This is certainly bad enough for gun owners and Americans in general, but if history is a teacher the end results could be much worse, potentially catastrophic.

Joe Biden was sold to the American voter in 2020 as a moderate of the Democrat Party.  He was not a conservative, but neither was he an AOC progressive or a Sanders socialist. His image as a white moderate male was also used to help sell the voters on Barack Obama.

There was also a time when Biden was actually a pragmatist on Second Amendment rights. As the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, he helped pass the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, which overturned decades of anti-gun court rulings and regulations to restore most gun owner rights and reexpanded commerce by eliminating restrictions on how and where guns could be sold. The legislation’s passage helped lay the foundation of the modern gun rights movement. According to Biden the pragmatist circa 1985:

During my 12.5 years as a Member of this body, I have never believed that additional gun control or Federal registration of guns would reduce crime. I am convinced that a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control. In my opinion a national register or ban of handguns would be impossible to carry out and may not result in reductions in crime.2

Despite his recognition of the futility of using gun control to reduce crime and gun violence, the “pragmatist” turned to the dark side when it became politically expedient to do so. In 1993 he helped pass the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which required background checks through a new national checking system (the National Instant Criminal Background Check System [NICS]). The next year he helped obtain a ten-year ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazine sales.

As vice president, he was President Obama’s point man in developing legislative proposals and executive orders to shore up gun control at the national level, and yet even that administration admitted that gun control is almost a futile endeavor and that their efforts amounted to little more than feel-good measures.

While no law or set of laws will end gun violence, it is clear that the American people want action. If even one child’s life can be saved, then we need to act. Now is the time to do the right thing for our children, our communities, and the country we love.3

Indeed, with more than a century of experience we know that gun control does not reduce crime but rather increases it, as John Lott has demonstrated. According to Lott’s evidence and that of independent researchers, no form of gun control has positive effects and most forms have negative effects on crime, murder, and mass shootings. Indeed, the most noteworthy policies that improve these problems are the elimination of gun-free zones and the expansion of concealed carry laws.4

With respect to Biden’s proposed gun tax, what are the expected outcomes? The tax is certainly not designed to raise revenue, as it would raise little and entail a good deal of bureaucratic spending. It would no doubt encourage gun buybacks and reduce gun ownership at the margin, but to what end? It would mostly impact responsible gun owners economically impacted by the lockdowns and unemployment. These are the gun owners who reduce crime rates because of the deterrence factor they provide. The gun tax would also encourage the diversion of guns and high-capacity magazines to the black market.

Most importantly, would the gun tax reduce access to guns and in turn reduce crime and violence? Biden has already admitted that the answer is no: “a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control.” Efforts to reduce gun violence through policies of red tape and taxes are doomed to fail and only lead to further inroads of enhanced policies of restrictionism and even outright prohibition.

For example, in order to address the real and imagined problem of narcotics addiction, which was already in decline at the end of the nineteenth century, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in 1914 to regulate and tax the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and cocaine products.

However, the courts interpreted the legislation to mean that doctors could prescribe these drugs in the course of normal treatment, as a dental anesthetic or for short-term pain management, for example, but not as a treatment for addiction. This turned regulation into prohibition and quickly turned the imaginary crimes of blacks and Asians into very real crimes all across the country. Desperate addicts were willing to pay high prices and commit crimes to satisfy their addictions, and smugglers and drug dealers quickly developed a black market.

Similar negative consequences resulted from the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which started as a tax to reduce imagined crimes by minorities, i.e., Reefer Madness, only to quickly devolve into an outright prohibition. Fortunately, we as a people have recognized this mistake and are moving to legalize cannabis and hemp, i.e., marijuana, in a state-by-state process that works in the face of federal and international law.

As horrific and far-reaching as the consequences of the war on drugs have been, the consequences of “commonsense” gun control laws are potentially much greater in the long run. In a very important contribution, Stephen Holbrook demonstrates that the Nazis used gun registration information instituted and collected by the Weimar Regime to rapidly disarm the Jews and other political adversaries. This in turn greatly facilitated the Holocaust.5 A disarmed American population would similarly be much more vulnerable to political repression.

But putting this possibility aside, Biden’s gun control proposals, including the gun tax, offer no possibility of improved security, while most of them will make us less secure and more prone to crime and violence. Most importantly, they are all an affront and threat to our liberty as enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

Author:

Contact Mark Thornton

Mark Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and the book review editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He has authored seven books and is a frequent guest on national radio shows.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

I’m Jealous of the Death-Row Inmates – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/10/david-gornoski/im-jealous-of-the-death-row-inmates/

By

“Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.” – Hebrews 13:3

The following is an article by Craig J. Cesal, a federal prisoner sentenced to life without the possibility of parole as a first-time offender convicted of conspiring to distribute marijuana.

I am a first-time offender convicted of conspiracy to distribute marijuana. In 2002, my Chicagoland truck repair facility serviced semis a Florida company used to haul marijuana. I never bought or sold marijuana, never received proceeds from marijuana marketing, and didn’t even smoke marijuana. By operation of the War on Drugs, I am sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, even though no person was hurt, and marijuana is legal in some form throughout thirty-three states.

I am awaiting the end of my sentence, my death, at the Federal Prison at Terre Haute, Indiana. Over the next couple of months, five others housed here will end their sentences when they are executed by lethal injection. Daniel Lewis Lee killed a gun dealer, his wife, and eight year old daughter to support the Aryan People’s Resistance. Lezmond Mitchell killed a 63 year old and her nine year old granddaughter to carjack their car for use in the robbery of a trading post on the Navajo Reservation. Wesley Ira Purkey raped, murdered, and dismembered a sixteen year old girl after taking her across state lines. Alfred Bourgeouis molested and killed his two year old daughter on a military base. Dustin Lee Honken killed five witnesses, including two children, who were to testify against him at his drug trial. From my job in the prison factory, I can see the Death House where they will take their last breaths.

I ponder if anyone not sentenced to die at the hands of the federal government can understand how I see these upcoming executions. Are these really mercy killings, such as putting down a horse with a broken leg, or a house cat with failed kidneys? I haven’t seen a graepfruit, grape, or fresh vegetable in nearly eighteen years. Then there is the US Socialized Medical Service in the Federal Bureau of Prisons who schedule care with the consideration that I am sentenced to die in their care. But unlike the five fellow inmates scheduled for execution, my company undertook the repair of marijuana-hauling trucks. We’re all sentenced to die, just by a different method, on a different day.

“Kill yourself,” is what many say who are not sentenced to life imprisonment, which is a de facto imprisonment until death. My moral compass, likely calibrated by my Catholic faith, does not permit me to kill people, including me. Moreover, none of the other War on Drugs lifers espouse killing themselves, and I’m not aware of one who has. It seems to me, marijuana offenders are not murderers, so we don’t get to have our sentences expired in the next couple of months, like the chosen five named above. Our death sentences are more protracted and more painful than those assigned to murderers.

It is said the government gleans the power to take our lives, our food, our medical care, and our families away based on the consent of the people. My indictment reads: “The People of the United States vs. Craig Cesal.” In the War on Drugs, the jury of our contemporaries does not get to choose a life without parole sentence for us, they aren’t even allowed to know what the proposed sentence would be. Perhaps American juries would prefer euthanasia for marijuana offenders over thirty-five or more years in prison until death.

So how does watching the preparations for these executions feel from the perspective of my prison bunk? Today, I was denied insulin because I’m a lifer and staff, according to them, can do that. The guards broke Shaq’s arm and dislocated his shoulder this week because they believed he was intoxicated by an undetectable drug. I had part of my elbow broken by a guard in August of this year. Because I’m a lifer, and he wanted to. The guards read all of our mail, and if they don’t like it, they throw it away. We don’t know if people don’t want to hear from us, or if the mail never got to them. We earn seventy cents an hour in the factory, only to have guards tear up and throw away our sweat pants and shoes we’ve saved for and purchased at the prison commissary. Some inmates get lethal injections from the guards.

Get this: I find myself jealous of someone sentenced to die by execution. Yes, when you look out from under the burden of a life imprisonment sentence, things look differently then they did previously. Instead of seeking a successful, comfortable life, I can’t help but covet a quick, painless death. Does this mean the War on Drugs is a failure or a success?

Non-murder federal violent crimes expose the offender to up to twenty-five years in prison. Non-violent drug and marijuana offenses should carry the same or less time, or our justice system should let the jury vote to quickly execute the marijuana conspirator. Marijuana offenders should not serve more time until death than multiple murderers, as I see directly in front of me.

Pull out of Syria. Pull out of Afghanistan. Pull out of the War on Drugs.

Craig Cesal

LWOP Marijuana
Reg. #52948-019
FCI Terre Haute
P.O. Box 33
Terre Haute, IN 47808

Be seeing you

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »