Left-wingers keep saying we can’t enforce immigration laws because it would scare relatively law-abiding “undocumented persons” away from cooperating with the cops in their effort to nab the real bad apple illegal aliens, as the good ones are just as illegal as the bad ones re immigration status.
C.D. Michel, a civil rights lawyer from SoCal specializing in gun laws, writes in a Portland, Oregon publication about the folly of city laws criminalizing the failure of gun owners to report that their guns were stolen, that California’s similar law has been counter-productive:
Perhaps worse, California gun owners who truly are burglary victims now refuse to speak with police if their stolen gun is recovered at a crime scene. If the gun owner failed to report the loss at all, or on time, he or she faces possible criminal prosecution if he or she cooperates with police investigating the recovered gun. So he or she remains silent, gets a lawyer and seeks immunity first.
Legal representation is also appropriate when a gun is first discovered missing. The owner can be prosecuted if the theft is not reported within 48 hours of when she “should have known” the gun was missing. Proponents believe “responsible” gun owners “should know” a gun is gone instantaneously. That’s just not reality. And the fear of prosecution has encouraged those who miss the 48-hour window not to report the loss at all.
Effectively, the proposed ordinance places legitimate gun owners in jeopardy of prosecution for being a victim of crime. In light of these liabilities, gun rights groups and the criminal defense bar now advise gun owners – who would ordinarily be happy to assist police with their investigation – that they need a lawyer if they are contacted by police.
Sam Adams, the Mayor of Portland, is demanding such a law. Ironically, he probably also hearts illegal aliens from Latin America, and would make the standard argument I detailed above.
In more 2nd Amendment news, a California middle school principal named Gunn doesn’t like one of his students wearing a T-shirt pronouncing his high showing in a trapshooting event. The irony of that is that the event took place at the Illinois state-funded shooting center at Sparta, Illinois, not far from St. Louis, a center which Illinois’s many anti-gun statewide elected office-holders, from then-Gov. Blagojevich, to then-Lt. Gov. and now Gov. Pat Quinn, to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, actually congratulated themselves on funding and opening. (Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator at the time and in the State Senate during the debate over state funding, but I am not aware that he chimed in with an opinion. Then again, he probably wasn’t even aware that there was a Sparta, Illinois, as he admitted, during his very first campaign rally for the U.S. Senate race on the East St. Louis riverfront after he won the Democrat nomination in March 2004 that it was the very first time he ever laid eyes on the St. Louis Gateway Arch.)
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