Excitement at the Gun Show

[painter777]

Prisons are bursting at the seams, and there is insufficient room for hard-core violent criminals because the space is already taken by nonviolent criminals serving mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums are the best thing that ever happened to violent criminals, because mandatory minimums prevent today's judges from doing what they want--putting violent thugs away for a long time. Mandatory minimums force the prison system to waste precious space on nonviolent offenders, like the teenager who sold a bag of pot to his friend. The violent criminals out on parole are given their opportunity to commit more crimes by a criminal justice system fixated on drugs.

It should also be remembered that few violent criminal careers, even those of repeat offenders, persist far into middle age, and virtually none persist into old age. Thus, the continued incarceration of a 55-year-old who may have perpetrated armed robberies in his teens and twenties may do little to benefit public safety. So prison cells that are used to hold geriatric prisoners who are very unlikely to commit violent crime are unavailable to hold younger, active violent criminals. Whatever value there is in incarcerating the 55-year-old until he dies in prison 20 years later is derived from the social interest in retribution, rather than from a public safety interest in incapacitating an active criminal, as well as the difficult to quantify deterrent effect that a three-strikes law might have on criminals with one or two convictions today. Balanced against the possible deterrent effect is the fact that, in the absence of any realistic potential for imposition of the death penalty, a logical criminal with two strikes against him would have no incentive not to kill witnesses and victims; the punishment for the third felony (life in prison) would be no less than punishment for a homicide (life in prison).

Bottom line.......The drug busts with the cash and property seizures get the funds to the Feds and make for bigger headlines.

Charlie-painter777

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[DaveHH]

Around here, staring down a million dollar prosecution bill as opposed to a plea bargain, the plea wins every time. I personally look at prison as a vocation for these fools and I say make it as bad as possible inside so they won't choose to come back. The whole LE situation makes little sense here. The cities continually have drunk stops that catch a very few drunks and 20-35 llegals with no license or insurance. These are real money makers for small towns ( the city of Petaluma has demanded HALF of towing and storage fees associated with these crimes from the towing agency ), and with MAD and the like, the public doesn't say anything. I think that the public would be better served by having those officers on the street catching gang bangers and burglars, but there's no money in that so they fleece the guy who had 3 glasses of Pinot Noir because he has the ability to pay. It has become a giant game of GOTCHA, with huge parking fines, speed traps, drunk stops, while ignoring the fact that the gangs have taken over the streets. God bless LE, but when they put revenue over crime, we all lose. And I guarantee that the average officers prefers to get the criminal.

[imarangemaster]

The Sheriff's Office in Kalifornia I retired from actually had a good sense of priorities. If you wrote too many tickets or chippy arrests, you weren't doing your job. It kept you tied up too much. Besides, we were spread REALLY thin, and din't have time to mess with petty cr@p. We used traffic stops as a tool to see who, was where, doing what, but wrote few tickets. Consequently, felony arrest rates were pretty good! My Sgt. told me if I wanted to write lots of tickets, I should have joined the Highway Patrol!

[Gibbs505]

Great save there jim!!!

[Bill Hollinger]

The LEO didn't do anything about it because he didn't know there was an issue with it being marked M2. With my many years as a LEO I can tell you that cops can be the most ignorant people in the world when it comes to guns. That cop probably didn't know an M2 from R2D2. This was one of my biggest gripes when working the streets. There is very little formal training for LEOs about firearms identification. I tried to hold a couple of classes but the participation was dismal at best. I would consistently have other cops call me to respond to ID one gun or another. Most of my beat partners started catching on.

For a number of years ATF, Bakersfield PD and Kern County SO would go into a shop that sold military surplus. They would do random checks but never found anything out of the ordinary. Above the counters there were four "dewat" machineguns hanging from chains. An M1 Tommy gun, type 26, MP40 and a Sten gun. All were fully functional and two, the Sten and MP40 had loaded magazines in them. Nobody ever caught it until some CSI techno-geek went in to but a set of BDUs for work.