The dishonesty of Democrat Lacey "Kooky" Rzeszowski

The first thing that strikes you about Lacey Rzeszowski is her kind of attractively kooky intensity.  But then all that saccharine language hits you square in the brain and you remember where it was that you heard this false earnestness before -- it was on television, in those badly acted 1980's soap operas. 

And then there's the lies she tells.

Hold on to your shorts, because here comes a big one...

"Statistics tell us that the states with the weakest gun laws are the ones whose citizens suffer the most from gun violence."  Well, not really.

Here's a tip for Kooky Rzeszowski -- never claim "sanity" when inverting statistics.  Dyslexia maybe, sanity no.

The District of Columbia has the toughest anti-gun laws in America... and the highest murder rate. 

States with pro-Second Amendment gun laws like New Hampshire, Wyoming, West Virginia, and Colorado all have vastly lower murder rates than New Jersey.

There are cultural and socio-economic factors that are far more accurate in predicting the level of gun violence than is the presence of so-called "anti-gun" legislation.  If merely passing laws mattered all that much, then illegal drugs would have been unavailable the whole time Kooky Rzeszowski was growing up and going to college -- as they would be today.  And yet, somehow we suspect that the wealthy enclave in which she resides is not entirely free from the sale of illegal drugs.  Even if Kooky scrapped the Constitution and repealed the Bill of Rights, why would she believe mere laws would make guns any more difficult to buy than narcotics?

What new laws do is send men with guns into new areas of "enforcement."  If Kooky really believes that "Black Lives Matter" or indeed, that any lives matter, she should think long and hard before criminalizing something else.

In his famous article on the subject, conservative columnist George Will argued that "overcriminalization" was responsible for the death of Eric Garner, a sidewalk merchant who was killed in a confrontation with police trying to crack down on sales tax scofflaws.  Will raised the question of how many new laws are created by state legislatures and by Congress in the rush to be seen to be "doing something." 

In other words -- it is not the police who are the problem, it is the politicians who send them.  The cops only go where they are ordered to go.  It's the damnable politicians who give the orders.  And Kooky wants to give more orders, not less.

Will's brilliant column is a must read for folks like Kooky Rzeszowski -- who jump in with a solution even before the reason has yet to be determined.  Legislators preparing to propose their next round of laws that will end up being enforced by men with guns should think before they legislate.  An excerpt from Will's column is printed below:

America might at long last be ready to stare into the abyss of its criminal-justice system.

By history’s frequently brutal dialectic, the good that we call progress often comes spasmodically, in lurches propelled by tragedies caused by callousness, folly, or ignorance. With the grand jury’s as yet inexplicable and probably inexcusable refusal to find criminal culpability in Eric Garner’s death on a Staten Island sidewalk, the nation might have experienced sufficient affronts to its sense of decency. It might at long last be ready to stare into the abyss of its criminal-justice system.

It will stare back, balefully. Furthermore, the radiating ripples from the nation’s overdue reconsideration of present practices may reach beyond matters of crime and punishment, to basic truths about governance.

Garner died at the dangerous intersection of something wise, known as “broken windows” policing, and something worse than foolish: decades of overcriminalization. The policing applies the wisdom that when signs of disorder, such as broken windows, proliferate and persist, there is a general diminution of restraint and good comportment. So, because minor infractions are, cumulatively, not minor, police should not be lackadaisical about offenses such as jumping over subway turnstiles.

Overcriminalization has become a national plague. And when more and more behaviors are criminalized, there are more and more occasions for police, who embody the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, and who fully participate in humanity’s flaws, to make mistakes.

Harvey Silverglate, a civil-liberties attorney, titled his 2009 book Three Felonies a Day to indicate how easily we can fall afoul of America’s metastasizing body of criminal laws. Professor Douglas Husak of Rutgers University says that approximately 70 percent of American adults have, usually unwittingly, committed a crime for which they could be imprisoned. In his 2008 book, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law, Husak says that more than half of the 3,000 federal crimes — itself a dismaying number — are found not in the Federal Criminal Code but in numerous other statutes. And, by one estimate, at least 300,000 federal regulations can be enforced by agencies wielding criminal punishments. Citing Husak, Professor Stephen L. Carter of the Yale Law School, like a hammer driving a nail head flush to a board, forcefully underscores the moral of this story:

Society needs laws; therefore it needs law enforcement. But “overcriminalization matters” because “making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it.” The job of the police “is to carry out the legislative will.” But today’s political system takes “bizarre delight in creating new crimes” for enforcement. And “every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence.”

Carter continues:

It’s unlikely that the New York Legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.

Garner lived in part by illegally selling single cigarettes untaxed by New York jurisdictions. He lived in a progressive state and city that, being ravenous for revenues and determined to save smokers from themselves, have raised to $5.85 the combined taxes on a pack of cigarettes. To the surprise of no sentient being, this has created a black market in cigarettes that are bought in states that tax them much less. Garner died in a state that has a Cigarette Strike Force.

To continue reading... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394392/plague-overcriminalization-george-will

George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist at The Washington Post.  The above column was published on December 10, 2014.