Dexter Taylor broke the law by building AR-15s while living in New York.

That's not really a matter up for discussion. He admits to building them, even.

But while the case is officially over and he's sitting in a cell in Riker's Island, we are still debating what happened to him.

In fact, Gothamist actually decided to look at Taylor's story.

Brooklyn prosecutors say Dexter Taylor is a danger to society. The 53-year-old built more than a dozen illegal firearms in his Bushwick apartment and is now serving a 10-year sentence in a maximum-security prison.

But Taylor and his friends say he's not a threat, he’s a tinkerer — a software engineer, electronic music composer and amateur TikTok philosopher — who made guns as a hobby. They say he doesn’t belong behind bars.

Taylor was convicted earlier this year of various charges, including criminal possession of a weapon, unlawful possession of pistol ammunition and violating New York’s prohibitions on homemade firearms, known as ghost guns. His case blurs the lines of the traditional political debates about gun rights and gun violence.

I don't see that it does, though, and we'll get into it here in just a moment.

Second Amendment advocates say he was prosecuted under state laws that are too strict and unconstitutional — especially for someone who wasn’t accused of shooting anyone or selling his firearms on the black market. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office says people who try to evade those laws must be held accountable in the interest of public safety. Now his lengthy sentence is being used to deter others thinking about building guns at home, whether or not they plan to use them to commit crimes.

“If Dexter Taylor knew what the law was and he did it anyway, then Dexter Taylor is going to pay whatever the law sentences him as in the state of New York,” said Rick Vasquez, a former official with the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and gun rights supporter. “Now, do I think it's right? No.”

Exactly.

Now, let's understand that Taylor built guns. However, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he sold them. To me, that makes a bit of a difference, at least when looking at Taylor and his case as a whole.

He broke the laws, but the laws are ridiculous and deserve to be broken. Since Taylor wasn't selling his guns, he shouldn't have been required to jump through all of New York's regulations in the first place. Especially when we know those regulations aren't doing jack squat to the state's homicide rate.

My hope is that, in time, these unjust laws will be overturned, but how long will Dexter Taylor spend in prison before that happens? That's assuming that it will happen, which after Rahimi, I'm not as convinced of as I might have been this time last year.

However, unlike Zachy Rahimi, Taylor does appear to be a sympathetic defendant. By all indicators, he's a great guy. He just had a hobby the state didn't approve of.

We should never have to ask the state for permission to exercise our constitutional rights. If I want to sit outside of city hall and protest to my heart's content, I can do that and the government cannot tell me I can't. How is the Second Amendment any different?

That's where you'll find the injustice in this case. It's not that Taylor didn't break the law, it's that the law should never have existed in the first place.