Emily Miller, “it” girl of the Second Amendment (and author of a lively book about her adventures in exercising her gun rights) brings us another example of inequality under the law, as the D.C. police hand over a pile of confiscated gun parts to a gun-control group for use in a silly demonstration. (They had blacksmiths beating the guns into plowshares outside the National Cathedral.)
As Emily writes at the Washington Times, not only is it awfully convenient for the authorities to provide activists with props for their demonstration, it’s a blatant violation of the hyper-restrictive gun laws in our nation’s capital:
It is illegal in the District to possess a firearm that is not registered. When asked about the event, Police Chief Cathy Lanier’s spokesman said that, “These are not firearms. They are scrap parts only, and they are inoperable.
“That’s actually legally irrelevant. According to the District firearms laws written after the Supreme Court’s Heller decision in 2008, even a non-functioning firearm must be registered and can result in criminal liability.
The chairman of the Fraternal Order of Police for D.C., Kris Baumann, disagrees with the department participating in this event. “We are supposed to be the police and, as such, the laws must be applied to everyone without bias,” the head of the 3,600 member union told me Friday. “The minute we become politicized in how we enforce the law, we become compromised and we lose public trust. This is not rocket science, and yet there appears to be no learning curve on this issue.”
Emily goes on to mention previous incidents in which NBC News personality David Gregory, and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), were allowed to violate D.C. gun laws with impunity, because they’re on the “right” side of the war against the Second Amendment.
This is just one aspect of the increasingly obvious hierarchy of law in the United States. The ruling class exempts itself from laws it finds inconvenient, or simply ignores them, especially when fidelity to the law (i.e. bringing charges against grandstanding big-shot media figures or politicians) would provide a useful demonstration of the law’s idiocy.
The rest of us are rats in a maze of shifting walls and booby traps, liable to run afoul of the government’s immense enforcement army at the most unlikely moments. But the ruling class and its favored constituents are exempt from everything that thwarts their political agenda or costs them money. The very notion of applying the law as written to the aristocracy is considered laughable.
I’ve written at length about how creating a vast body of law is just the first stage of tyrannical government; the stratosphere of power is breached when the ruling class can issue waivers and dispensations to itself and its ideological allies. Our degenerate system could be annihilated overnight by merely asserting the principle of equality under the law – no exemptions, no waivers, no special breaks or “progressive” rates. Politicians would fall all over themselves to repeal most of the Leviathan State if they actually had to live with its rules, and savor the full measure of their unintended consequences.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.