Why we should rally behind the Virginia mom whose son shot his teacher

Image by stevepb from Pixabay

We’ve covered the story of the six-year-old kid who shot his teacher in the face. We’ve recounted the story of the Virginia mom who is now under fire for failing to prevent her child from getting the gun.

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She’s not the most sympathetic individual we can find to look at from a gun rights perspective. After all, she clearly screwed up by the numbers.

The fact that she’s now facing charges for cannabis use while owning a gun is just the latest, and one many gun rights supporters aren’t speaking up about.

But there’s a warning here.

Virginia shooter’s mom charged with being an unlawful user of a controlled substance in possession of a firearm. It’s inevitable that people want to legally blame Deja Taylor for the actions of her 6-year-old son, who brought a gun to school back in January and shot his teacher, Abby Zwerner. Perhaps Taylor does deserve legal culpability, though that certainly depends on the circumstances by which her son got his hands on the gun. In any event, state charges for child neglect and failing to properly secure a handgun should be sufficient to sort that out.

But law enforcement isn’t stopping there. Because those running our criminal justice system can’t seem to resist ruining lives to the maximum extent possible, Taylor also faces a federal felony gun charge.

Taylor legally purchased the gun that her son later used to shoot his teacher. But federal prosecutors say that Taylor is a marijuana user, and thus the purchase violated a federal prohibition on illegal drug users buying or owning firearms.

The rule doesn’t stop drug users from owning guns so much as it adds an extra level of punishment to a prosecutor’s arsenal when they do bust someone for drugs. In this way, the law lends itself to being used in a discriminatory manner and as a bargaining chip to coerce people into pleading guilty to drug crimes.

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Now, many of you may be looking at this and thinking, “I don’t use pot, even if it’s legal, so why would I have to worry?”

The reason is that the mindset behind these additional charges could apply to literally anyone else for just about anything else.

After all, there are countless regulations in this country. It’s impossible for anyone to know them all. So, if you get caught violating some law you didn’t even know existed, the mentality of stacking the charges as much as possible will play a hand in your prosecution as well.

And that brings us to the gun charges.

The Virginia mom made plenty of mistakes. No one really wants to rally to her defense because of all those mistakes. However, we should because these gun charges are really nothing but an attempt to add additional punishment on those accused of wrongdoing.

In reality, much of the opposition to things like constitutional carry laws isn’t because it somehow impacts criminals but because now they can’t stack more and more charges on those who are accused of some other crime. It’s one less thing they can put on someone.

For you or me, though, gun charges could be more difficult to spot. Imagine, for example, you’re carrying your firearm in accordance with the law. You commit some felony you’re completely unaware of, but the local police arrest you for it. Your firearm was irrelevant to the alleged crime, but now you’ve got a “possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony” charge as well.

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What’s happening to this Virginia mom is precisely why gun control advocates keep wanting more and more laws that anyone with half a brain knows won’t actually stop criminals from getting guns. They don’t want to disarm bad guys, they just want anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the legal crosshairs to catch as many charges as possible.

All while they look the other way on Hunter Biden.

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