By Kevin
D. Williamson
Thursday,
February 16, 2023
There
are two guilty parties in the Michigan State shooting: One is the shooter, who
had a history of mental-health problems and criminal behavior involving
firearms, and the other is former Ingham County Prosecutor Carol Siemon, a
public official of the kind for whom a self-respecting society might consider
dusting off the pillory.
It is
too late to punish the killer, who took his own life shortly after murdering
three college students and wounding five others. It is not too late to hold
Siemon to account, even though she is retired. As a moral matter, rather than a
legal one, she is a party to this crime and ought to be recognized as
such.
Like the
great majority of people who commit murders in the United States, the Michigan
State shooter had a criminal history—one that would have prevented him from
legally purchasing a firearm if not for the cowardice and incompetence of the
prosecutors in Ingham County, Michigan, where Siemon served as chief prosecutor
until her retirement late last year. She was the head of the office in
2019. That’s when the Michigan State shooter last came to the attention of
authorities—when he was brought in on a felony charge of illegally carrying a
handgun. As is all too common in these matters, a second, lesser charge was
introduced, this one a misdemeanor. The future killer pleaded guilty to the
misdemeanor, and Siemon’s office dropped the felony charge.
A
convicted felon cannot legally purchase a handgun from a licensed dealer in
Michigan or anywhere else in the United States. Someone convicted of a
misdemeanor charge generally can. Apologists try to wave this away, claiming
that the misdemeanor charge and the felony would have produced similar
sentences. That may be, except for two big things: One, felons can’t legally buy
guns; two, felons can and do acquire firearms illegally (far more often than
they purchase them from licensed retailers, in fact), but felons who are locked
up do not shoot up college campuses. We need to take people who commit gun
crimes off the streets before their criminal careers escalate to include
murder.
In
addition to its straightforward felony gun-carrying charge, Michigan has a law
on the books enabling prosecutors to charge those who commit or attempt to
commit felonies while in possession of a firearm with a separate
“felony-firearm” charge carrying a minimum two-year sentence. But prosecutors
have to make the charge, and Siemon, as a matter of publicly stated
policy, refused to do so, changing the rules in 2021 for the predictable
reason—because of racial disparities, real and perceived, in law
enforcement.
The
decision to go easy on gun crimes is, to be clear, a political decision, the
rationale for which was offered by defense lawyer Wade Fink in the Detroit News: “If everybody went to prison for that, you
would have an overcrowding problem and you would be giving a lot of younger
people felonies, which hurts them their whole life.” That might be a plausible
argument if we were talking about an 18-year-old who got busted selling a
little weed, but we are not talking about that: We are talking about people who
carry guns illegally, which is a felony in Michigan, and who commit other
felonies while carrying a firearm. We know from long experience that these are
precisely the people who go on to commit more serious crimes.
“What
would have stopped this is more difficulty accessing guns,” Fink said. A felony
conviction would have made it more difficult to access guns—it would have made
it impossible to do legally. And if prosecutors had really done their jobs in
the felony gun-possession case rather than drop it, the future killer could
very well have still been in prison—and three college students would still be
alive.
The
decision to knock that felony down to a misdemeanor is much more directly
connected to the murders of those college students in Michigan than is anything
else you’ll hear about in this matter: the NRA, “assault weapons,” etc.
Democrats—of
course Carol Siemon is a Democrat—insist that we have a gun-policy problem, but
they keep demonstrating that what we have is a problem with police,
prosecutors, and other criminal-justice officials refusing to do the basics of
their jobs. They will do anything except their jobs: We have law-enforcement
officers forming literal gangs (as in the current Los Angeles
County Sheriff’s Department or the old LAPD “Ramparts” squad of thugs,
drug-dealers, and bank-robbers) or organized into groups that
behave in effect as criminal gangs (as in the violent, apparently murderous,
now-disbanded Memphis “SCORPION” unit, which shared its name with a half a
dozen current and vintage criminal organizations from Chicago to Surrey), we have prosecutors who simply cannot wait
to wave the bloody shirt and use every spectacular crime, however horrifying,
as an occasion for rank electioneering, we have a splendidly funded network of
penal institutions and surveillance organizations—but catch an actual criminal
committing an actual crime involving an actual firearm and … nothing,
usually.
And I do
mean usually. In many big U.S. cities, the most common outcome for
a criminal charged with a crime involving a firearm is outright dismissal, a
trend that has grown measurably worse since the George Floyd riots. In
Philadelphia in 2016, 30 percent of gun-crime cases were dismissed—a high
number, to be sure, but less than half of
what it is today: 61 percent.
When
Siemon changed the rules for charging armed felons, the likely outcome was
obvious enough, and she was roundly criticized for it by more responsible
people, including the county sheriff. Her successor reversed her policy
on his first day in office.
These
problems don’t come out of nowhere, and, by this point, they should not be any
surprise.
Understood
properly, the gun-control arguments put forward by Democrats such as Siemon
have a two-fold purpose: One is to shift the blame to distant lawmakers in
Washington and to culture-war enemies such as the National Rifle Association.
The second goal is, in its way, more earnest: Democratic prosecutors and
criminal-justice officials believe, with varying degrees of sincerity and stupidity,
that they can be liberated from the unpopular and difficult parts of their jobs
by stripping Americans at large of their civil rights under the Bill of Rights.
They use federal policy to paper over the inability and/or unwillingness of
local yokels in Ingham County, Michigan—and Chicago, and Baltimore, and St.
Louis—to do their jobs.
The good
people of Idaho live under the same Second Amendment as the people of Missouri,
but the local homicide rate in Boise is 1/74th that of St.
Louis. Gun policy does not seem to be a very important variable—the refusal of
public officials such as Carol Siemon to do their jobs certainly is.
It is
not as though the people living under this buffoonery do not have a
choice: These miscreants are elected.
No comments:
Post a Comment