Ja Rule

Going through another day blissfully ignorant of pop culture, I was confronted with a question about Ja Rule going to prison. Stumped, but with piqued interest, I looked it up.

Ja Rule is a rapper, as in musician. His real name is Jeffrey Atkins. Maybe he didn’t want to be confused with the country music star with a similar last name.

So, what heinous crime landed Mr. Rule is prison?

In 2007, Rule was pulled over in his Maybach sports car after a concert at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre. Police found a loaded .40 caliber handgun in the back seat, which turned out not to be registered in accordance with New York state law.

He was not using the gun in the commission of a crime, mind you—the gun was the crime. In Michael Bloomberg country, there is no greater offense.

For his part, Rule took full responsibility and accepted a deal for a two year prison term as opposed to going to trial and facing a three-and-a-half year mandatory minimum sentence.

“Laws are laws,” he said on Good Day New York, a morning TV show. “There’s nothing I could really do but own up to the situation.”

Now, I don’t know Ja Rule and I’m not in any position to pass judgment. But one thing I do know is that Mr. Rule has never tried to take away any of my constitutionally protected individual liberties.

The same cannot be said of New York City’s lunatic mayor. It was Mike Bloomberg, after all, who lobbied the state legislature to pass the law making it a Class 3 felony, the same as robbery or burglary, to carry a loaded, unregistered handgun in the Empire State.

Bloomberg’s favorite cause, in fact, is taking away gun rights from law-abiding Americans. He calls the group he founded “Mayors Against Illegal Guns,” but the name is a sham.

Presumably, no mayor is for “illegal” anything. He should, to borrow a phrase from Ja Rule, “own up” and not use such a misleading name. “Mayors Against All Guns” would be more accurate.

Bloomberg’s group opposes concealed carry laws and the ability of private citizens to buy or sell their own personal firearms without government interference. It is pushing a bill to prohibit people on the government’s “terror watch list” from possessing firearms, without the protections of due process of law, and it would reinstate the Clinton gun ban.

In short, Bloomberg’s mayors haven’t come across an anti-gun bill they wouldn’t support.
But laws against carrying firearms for self-defense must be looked at hard in the light of the recent Heller and McDonald Supreme Court decisions reaffirming that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. New York’s anti-self defense laws, in particular, create their own category of victimless crimes, treat gun owners like criminals and make streets and neighborhoods fertile ground for violent thugs.

Ja Rule will now sit in prison for the next 18 months or so. Maybe some people don’t mind seeing a tattooed rapper go to prison. But the same thing could happen to a nurse working the midnight shift at an inner city hospital who carries a gun because she doesn’t want to be raped or carjacked, or to someone who carries a firearm for protection when driving deserted roads upstate.

Here’s an idea. If they’re so intent on disarming the population, how about we send politicians like Bloomberg to prison the next time a person is unable to defend himself or herself because they were disarmed by anti-gun laws?