“A former police officer, accused of killing two people during a robbery at an east Tennessee pharmacy, gunned down his victims after they complied with his demands for painkillers,” the AP reports. “The victims had just given Jason Bryan Holt several bottles of oxycodone when he began the killing at the Down Home Pharmacy in the community of Bean Station, said Grainger County District Attorney Jimmy Dunn. ‘There was no confrontation,’ Dunn said. ‘He just shot them.'” I bring this story to your attention because New York legislators are set to create a “carve-out” for ex-cops that would exempt them from the Empire State’s SAFE Act prohibition against “assault rifles” and “high-capacity” magazines. And that’s just wrong. But let me be clear . . .
I believe police are, as a group, more likely to commit a firearms-related crime than the general population. Day after day, I read story after story about cops gone bad, from the above story of a double homicide to today’s latimes.com tale of SWAT and SIS team members selling department-sourced guns off the books.
I have no statistical evidence to back-up the suggestion that ex-cops are more likely to enable or create “gun violence” than any other group of civilians. In the same sense that there’s no evidence that ex-cops are any more law-abiding than their fellow citizens.
What difference does it make? United States citizens are innocent until proven guilty. All of them have a natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. So if ex-cops want to own a dozen or more modern sporting rifles in the Empire State, why not? If they want umpteen magazines that can hold 10, 20, 30 or 100 rounds, sure.
Just don’t tell me that they have any special right to do so. Because they don’t. Again, anyone who supports a “carve-out” for cops that allows them to exercise their gun rights while denying fellow citizens those same rights is supporting tyranny. The gun grabbers are OK with that, but The People of the Gun most decidedly are not.
Nor will they ever be.