This story is sad. The Fail Boat set sail early in this one and touched many ports.
Here's the short story. Dude pulls a burglary in 1990 and is convicted. Does his time. Gets married, settles down, has a kid. Someone breaks into his home so he calls police. Police come, he shows them around, even points them to his wife's .22 and .380 she owned before they met.
He's now busted and back in jail.
At 18, Luke Groves made a bad decision and ended up with a felony conviction. I don't know the details of that part of the story but suffice it to say he got busted, and paid his dues. Kids can do stupid things and I'm all for punishing crime so I'm not going to defend him as some poor, wayward child.
Fast forward many years, he falls in love and marries a woman who happens to own firearms. According to the law, she must get rid of her guns or put them in some sort of situation where he has no access to them. The only way to do that is a safe that he doesn't know the combo to which is hard to prove / disprove, but it also punishes her as it renders the firearms useless for self defense.
Now, the next bit of failage is pathetic. He was an idiot for showing the cops where the guns were, they were idiots for reporting it, the DA was a fucknozzle for pushing the case, and Mr. Groves went above and beyond the call of idiot-duty by not taking the plea bargain.
Nobody came out smelling like roses here.
What really frosts my ass about this though is the whole 'felons give up their Second Amendment rights forever' shtick. Why? Because the term 'felon' has very little meaning any more. In fact, we're all felons
In his new book, the Boston-based civil liberties advocate and occasional Reason contributor Harvey Silverglate estimates that in 2009, the average American commits about three federal felonies per day.
In my personal opinion, a felony is a crime so heinous it generally results in the possibility of the death penalty or life in prison. Someone who commits a felony should be considered dangerous to society at large, and dealing in cat pelts doesn't quite rise to that level, yet it's a felony here in my home state.
Instead, we've declared writing a bad check for over $500 to be a felony. It's a crime, no doubt, but not one where someone should be punished for the rest of their lives.
The other pisser is the fact that you can have your right to vote restored, but not your Second Amendment rights without going through a near impossible dog and pony show.
I can hear some people now. "Robb, are you saying you want to give felons guns????". No, they can buy their own. What I’m saying is this, and it’s a pretty easy concept to explain
If you are such a danger to society that simply being in a home with a firearm is a crime, you should not be out loose in society. Period. We release people from jail because we consider them to no longer be a threat to those around them. If they are a threat, why are they out in the first place.
Gun control is closing the barn doors well after the horses have all hightailed it out of Dodge. Attempting to ensure dangerous people don’t do dangerous things by making laws that they can’t be near a single, dangerous item is idiocy and madness rolled up in one.
Let’s look at all the other deadly things felons are legally allowed to do
Now, if 'giving felons guns' was such a dangerous concept, why would we still allow them the ability to cause harm and mayhem with the preceding list?
In summary, we're too fast and loose with the term felony and if a person is a danger to society, they shouldn't be in society. Combined, we get sad stories like the one listed above where everybody loses yet nobody was harmed. I argue this point because we're all one grumpy DA away from having our rights stripped from us as there is no way we can exist without breaking a myriad of laws. Buying into the 'felons should not have guns' canard simply gives the anti-gunners legitimacy where they deserve none.
I appreciate your thoughts on this.
What's annoying about the whole felony confusion is how it came about. The difference between a felony and a misdemeanor is the length of the sentence: more than a year for the felony, less than a year for the misdemeanor.