A strange occurrence took place in a Portland court room earlier this week. 30-year-old Marcell Lee Daniel Jr. was undergoing sentencing for completing a drive-by that killed a young man. While Daniel Jr. faced Judge Kenneth Walker, the judge decided to go on a tangent about gun control.

If I could I would take all the guns in America, put them on big barges and go dump them in the ocean, nobody would have a gun. Not police, not security, not anybody. We should eliminate all of them. We could save 33,000 people a year if we didn’t have guns in this country.

I understand the judge being upset about the killing of an innocent man but really? No guns? Not even for police officers? Talk about living in a utopian society.

Australia after a major shooting rounded up all the guns, and they haven’t had near the death that we do here in this country.

Definitely not true. Homicides and suicides still occur in Australia. Yes, there was a slight decline in the use of firearms. All that did was A) create a black market for guns and B) force criminals to use new weapons for their crimes.

Remember: guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

I just saw last night a statistic that 11,000 people in America are murdered each year and another 20,000 commit suicide with guns.

Again, if firearms were completely banned in the United States, a black market would be created. Guns would still exist in our country. People would smuggle them across the border from Mexico and Canada. If criminals want to get their hands on a weapon, they can and they will.

They are a scourge of this country and no one should have one as far as I’m concerned. There’s no defense to guns. There’s just absolutely no reason to have them. But it is a right of people in this country to own and possess them, and I will not say anything to affect that right.

Don’t you think this is a strange tangent for a judge to go on? It’s not his job to interpret the Constitution. It’s not his job to express his opinions on these issues. If it was, he would be sitting on the Supreme Court. But he’s not. So why is he talking?