Movealongmovealong
Sharpshooter
And, as a matter of fact, the SCOTUS agrees with you.
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class d felony: will it stop an LTCH?
- Thread starter TJSieling
- Start date
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And, as a matter of fact, the SCOTUS agrees with you.
You must have failed logic.
Even if all violent felons had a history of non-violent crimes, that tells you nothing about non-violent felons except that some of them may, one day, become violent felons. But the same is true of the general population as well (some people who have never committed a crime in their life become violent felons as well). But even you use the weasel word, "generally." I suspect that it'd be easy to show that people who commit one type of crime are heavily correlated with groups that commit other crime. That does not, however, demonstrate that engaging in one type of criminal conduct leads to, or causes, or has any necessary connection whatsoever to any other type of conduct, criminal or not.
If I've lost you, I'll try to put it more simply. Even if you assume that everything in the quoted sentence is true, it does not demonstrate the "fail" that you suggest it does.
My suggestion, if you want to discredit my point, is to find some sort of concrete evidence that those who engage in tax evasion or some other kind of non-violent, felonious conduct are demonstrably more likely to engage in violent, felonious conduct. I suspect that this will be impossible, because there is no reason to believe that if Wesley Snipes were released tomorrow, that he'd be any more likely to commit a murder or a burglary than he was before he was convicted of tax evasion. There's just no reason to believe that there's any causal connection at all between these two types of behaviors, generally.
It's also, additionally been demonstrated that the continued punishment of ex-convicts after they leave prison presents tremendous hardships for them--some of which may find it impossible to gain meaningful employment, thus creating incentive for them to engage in criminal conduct. So, even if you could find a strong correlation between non-violent felons and future likelihood of committing violent felonies, you'd be hard pressed to distinguish between those who do so out of the blatant disrespect for the law that convicted them of the non-violent felony or out of desperation with their life and social position afterward.
After all, the first purpose of criminal law is to deter crime. If our system of punishment is creating perverse incentives, thereby encouraging the amount of crime through lifelong, punitive punishments that extend well beyond one's prison sentence, we, as a society, ought to think very carefully before encouraging our representatives to enact policies that create these perverse incentives.
There's a great deal of evidence that shows "three strike" laws have created these sorts of perverse incentives. I have little doubt in my intuitive mind that these same sorts of incentives will manifest themselves when lifelong punishments are put in place, especially when referring to criminals who never do a day in prison, accept a plea bargain for probation, and then end up with a felony record and all that goes along with it despite never serving a single day in a real prison, post-trial.
Snayperskaya
Marksman
Last time I checked, and I admit it could have changed since then, the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America does not read:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.*
* Unless they do something we deem unreasonable, and take away their rights
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.*
* Unless they do something we deem unreasonable, and take away their rights
LTCH, whether you and I agree with it or not, is a matter of public trust. A felon has lost public trust. 15 years is a reasonable amount of time to detemine whether that person has changed his/her ways.
Violent or non-violent, they've lost the public trust. Poor decision making in one area of your life leads me to belive a person will be similarly affected in all areas of his/her life.
Waaaaaaahhhhh!!!! If you want people to trust you enough for them to give a job, then don't be a felon in the first place. "You stole a stereo out of a car? Why would I trust you to not steal from me?" "You cheated on your taxes? Why do you think I would trust you not to cheat me?"
The stigma is well deseved.
I disagree. The first purpose of criminal law if to PUNISH crime. The fact is, that even the death penalty does very little to deter capital crimes.
I have little sympathy for adult criminals. Far less for repeat criminals.
Still a fail.
ETA:
56% of violent felons are repeat offenders and 61% of all felons are repeat offenders.
source: geekpolitics.com
According to the criminologists, 6% of the criminals in America commit 70% of the crimes. It stands to reason that if we can identify this 6% and incarcerate them for as long as possible, the crime rate will decrease and out city will be a safer place to live.
source: R.O.P.E.
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Paco Bedejo
Master
I'm with you downzero. I get tired of reading the argument that American citizens have the right to keep & bear arms... except when certain people get squeamish.
Your right to be afraid doesn't trump someone elses itemized & inalienable natural rights.
Either someone is a danger & needs to be locked up or they're not a danger & their natural rights shouldn't be infringed upon.
Paco Bedejo
Master
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
If you don't wish to return someone's liberties to them at the end of their jail/prison sentence...then why even let them out?
Remember, the quote above doesn't say, "They who can give up their own essential liberty...". It merely says "essential liberty", leading me to believe it's more than applicable in this situation where so many of you are vehement about denying others the liberties which you espouse to believe are naturally given.
I'm with you downzero. I get tired of reading the argument that American citizens have the right to keep & bear arms... except when certain people get squeamish.
Your right to be afraid doesn't trump someone elses itemized & inalienable natural rights.
Either someone is a danger & needs to be locked up or they're not a danger & their natural rights shouldn't be infringed upon.
Must a punishment only be a jail term? Jail is a sentence of slavery for a period of time. It could be for life. Is it completely unreasonable to have a life sentence from keeping and bearing arms?
I think voting and gun right denial for felonies should be reserved for only certain crimes, but I think punishment can be other than jail or a fine.
Kludge,
"Public trust"? And you accuse me of whining? I think you should look deep inside and ask yourself if you really can "trust" your fellow man with his freedom. After all, his LTCH is conditional on "public trust," so anything the legislature determines is felonious has obviously violated that.
Whoever wrote the websites to which you refer is ignorant of the last fifty years of law and economics scholarship, and just generally foolish as to what the criminal law serves to do. They must be under the assumption that with sufficient punishment, that it'd be possible to eliminate all crime. This is preposterous in a world of limited resources. It's no different than Obama convincing us that we can get something for nothing in health care, financial reform, or any other of his pet projects.
A rational, amoral person will commit crimes up to the point at which marginal expected benefits equal marginal expected costs. Punishment, which you claim is the purpose of criminal law, serves to increase the marginal expected costs, but it does nothing to curb the benefit. Case in point: if burglary were punishable by death, but none of us had locks on our doors and windows, or lights outside our homes, or alarms, or guns, the fact that burglary was punishable by death would do little to prevent burglaries. People would be easy targets. Additionally, as I stated before, because the marginal cost of killing you during the burglary would be zero (since the burglary itself is/was a capital offense), the criminal would be irrational not to kill you, unless he or she had some particular value for your life, which is unlikely.
Understanding the criminal law for its deterrent effects allows us to understand why it is important to consider incentives for both victims and offenders. We want people to lock their doors, buy alarm systems, carry guns, etc., because those things have (at least potential) deterrent effects and low costs. We will never have the resources to prevent and/or punish every crime, so the probability of being punished for a given crime has a probability of less than one.
A simple model of crime expresses it as a maximization function of the criminal's of the expected payoff minus the probability of getting convicted times the severity of the punishment. Changing any one of those three functions through policy is how society expects to benefit from having a system of criminal law.
If you were right, and the only purpose of criminal law was to "punish" criminals, we wouldn't need a system of criminal law at all. We could use tort law to accomplish the same ends. The criminal would merely need to compensate his victims if caught, and so long as you were compensated in a manner in which all of your economic loss was compensated, you would be indifferent between being a victim of a crime and not. There are numerous problems with this sort of system, namely, that costs are hard to measure, life is nearly impossible to value, etc. A system that compensated victims, or even one that incorporated punitive punishments for criminals would be insufficient to eliminate crime. That is why effective deterrence is necessary, so that we can bend down the expected payoff curve, increase the probability of getting caught, and maximize the use of our tax dollars with only the severity of punishment necessary.
But don't take my word for it. An older edition of Cooter and Ulen's Law and Economics is available here:
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=robert_cooter
David Friedman also wrote a book entitled Law's Order: What Economics Has To Do With Law and Why It Matters. It's available here:
Laws Order: The Web Page
I highly doubt you're going to read the scholarship, but it's there if you wish to understand further how, politically, we should structure an effective system of criminal law.
And FWIW, this is not about sympathy for criminals. This is about maximizing the deterrent effect of the taxpayer's money. You are obviously among the many who believe that tightening the screws on criminals can eliminate crime. My answer to that is that if you think that's true and you hate the deficit now, you'd really hate to hear what that would cost.
"Public trust"? And you accuse me of whining? I think you should look deep inside and ask yourself if you really can "trust" your fellow man with his freedom. After all, his LTCH is conditional on "public trust," so anything the legislature determines is felonious has obviously violated that.
Whoever wrote the websites to which you refer is ignorant of the last fifty years of law and economics scholarship, and just generally foolish as to what the criminal law serves to do. They must be under the assumption that with sufficient punishment, that it'd be possible to eliminate all crime. This is preposterous in a world of limited resources. It's no different than Obama convincing us that we can get something for nothing in health care, financial reform, or any other of his pet projects.
A rational, amoral person will commit crimes up to the point at which marginal expected benefits equal marginal expected costs. Punishment, which you claim is the purpose of criminal law, serves to increase the marginal expected costs, but it does nothing to curb the benefit. Case in point: if burglary were punishable by death, but none of us had locks on our doors and windows, or lights outside our homes, or alarms, or guns, the fact that burglary was punishable by death would do little to prevent burglaries. People would be easy targets. Additionally, as I stated before, because the marginal cost of killing you during the burglary would be zero (since the burglary itself is/was a capital offense), the criminal would be irrational not to kill you, unless he or she had some particular value for your life, which is unlikely.
Understanding the criminal law for its deterrent effects allows us to understand why it is important to consider incentives for both victims and offenders. We want people to lock their doors, buy alarm systems, carry guns, etc., because those things have (at least potential) deterrent effects and low costs. We will never have the resources to prevent and/or punish every crime, so the probability of being punished for a given crime has a probability of less than one.
A simple model of crime expresses it as a maximization function of the criminal's of the expected payoff minus the probability of getting convicted times the severity of the punishment. Changing any one of those three functions through policy is how society expects to benefit from having a system of criminal law.
If you were right, and the only purpose of criminal law was to "punish" criminals, we wouldn't need a system of criminal law at all. We could use tort law to accomplish the same ends. The criminal would merely need to compensate his victims if caught, and so long as you were compensated in a manner in which all of your economic loss was compensated, you would be indifferent between being a victim of a crime and not. There are numerous problems with this sort of system, namely, that costs are hard to measure, life is nearly impossible to value, etc. A system that compensated victims, or even one that incorporated punitive punishments for criminals would be insufficient to eliminate crime. That is why effective deterrence is necessary, so that we can bend down the expected payoff curve, increase the probability of getting caught, and maximize the use of our tax dollars with only the severity of punishment necessary.
But don't take my word for it. An older edition of Cooter and Ulen's Law and Economics is available here:
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=robert_cooter
David Friedman also wrote a book entitled Law's Order: What Economics Has To Do With Law and Why It Matters. It's available here:
Laws Order: The Web Page
I highly doubt you're going to read the scholarship, but it's there if you wish to understand further how, politically, we should structure an effective system of criminal law.
And FWIW, this is not about sympathy for criminals. This is about maximizing the deterrent effect of the taxpayer's money. You are obviously among the many who believe that tightening the screws on criminals can eliminate crime. My answer to that is that if you think that's true and you hate the deficit now, you'd really hate to hear what that would cost.
Whatever punishment a criminal receives should come from a judge or jury, and be imposed on the criminal for a particular case. If it doesn't, what we're talking about isn't a legitimate criminal punishment.
If that were the case, we'd have to look seriously at the consequences created by instituting such a system.
While I am inclined to agree with Paco and others that, if one cannot be trusted with a firearm, he probably shouldn't be trusted with his freedom.
You do, as is often the case, make a good point.
If, however, there are to be multiple punishments, it would make far more sense for the rendering of such punishment, as with fines and imprisonment, to be handed down at the time of sentencing by the judge, based on the facts of the particular case at hand. This is what the state pays him to do, after all. Judge.
This would be far better than the current system whereby the legislature, in essence, arbitrarily punishes anyone that has met a certain bar.
This is the same problem that has swelled our prisons and budgets when the legislature inserted itself into the judiciary by creating mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
The legislature does have to make punishments available for the judiciary to use them, but I believe it oversteps its bounds when it inflicts punishment via legislation.
That's a whole new can of worms. The legislature sets the punishment for many crimes. In some cases the judiciary has very little discretion at all.
Personally, I like judges to have discretion. There will always be cases that make you say, "WTF?" but overall I like the idea that there is a human being there who can decide that this particular case doesn't fit neatly into the statute.
I guess the point I'm making is that I agree with you guys on the outcome, but in principle as it has to do with rights, I don't see a problem with a "no firearms" punishment.
Paco Bedejo
Master
I believe it is wholly foolish to eliminate the RTKBA for released felons. If a released felon wishes to commit another felony using a firearm, nothing prevents them from obtaining a firearm illegally (@ a lower price). IMO, such laws only serve to harm & alienate those released felons who intend to live within the letter of the law...which is not exactly the demographic we're concerned about.
I liken it to preventing released sex offenders (not just child molesters, but all of them) from living within 1,000' of schools, bus stops, home daycares, Chuck-E-Cheese, etc. Alienating them & denying them their basic human rights will only serve to put a boot on their necks & potentially help push them back into criminal activities.
If someone commits a violent felony, give them life in prison. If someone commits a non-violent felony (an oxymoron IMO), let them reintegrate fully after they've paid their jury-decided debt to society.
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I believe it is wholly foolish to eliminate the RTKBA for released felons. If a released felon wishes to commit another felony using a firearm, nothing prevents them from obtaining a firearm illegally (@ a lower price). IMO, such laws only serve to harm & alienate those released felons who intend to live within the letter of the law...which is not exactly the demographic we're concerned about.
I liken it to preventing released sex offenders (not just child molesters, but all of them) from living within 1,000' of schools, bus stops, home daycares, Chuck-E-Cheese, etc. Alienating them & denying them their basic human rights will only serve to put a boot on their necks & potentially help push them back into criminal activities.
If someone commits a violent felony, give them life in prison. If someone commits a non-violent felony (an oxymoron IMO), let them reintegrate fully after they've paid their jury-decided debt to society.
You make some good points. The main thrust of my argument was that it's not an unjustified violation of rights. As to the sense it makes as a punishment, that's another story.
Paco Bedejo
Master
I'll concede to you on that point. Capitol punishment & life imprisonment are the ultimate forms of liberty-denial. Those & lesser forms such as house-arrest, probation, etc. are both effective & warranted in many cases.
Trying to tell a "free" felon not to obtain an illegal firearm with which to perform more felonies is akin to telling a sinner to stop sinning. It's just pissing in the wind & the ones getting pissed upon are the freed felons who wish to live rehabilitated, law-abiding lives.
Logical. It's like the laws about guns in and around schools based on school shootings. The reasoning is so ridiculous as to be self-satire. The idea that a psycho intent on murdering dozens of people who isn't deterred by the laws against murder, will be deterred by the law about carrying a gun in a school.
You also touch on another point, the concept of rehabilitation. We've completely given up on the concept, but I think it should be revisited, especially with the very young criminals. I knew several guys in the Army who were thugs in civilian life, but they had grown up and become highly ethical people. I think we give up completely on rehabilitation at our own peril.
While not an african american there is definitely a disproportional effect RTKABA-wise amongst their community. Just as abortion/eugenics has its roots in racism I posit gun control laws share bias against blacks/minorities.
The hard gun controllers are mainly white liberals who would freak out amongst the blacks. Many of us have been in the military and lived alongside them for months at a time, something liberals see as beneath them.
The hard gun controllers are mainly white liberals who would freak out amongst the blacks. Many of us have been in the military and lived alongside them for months at a time, something liberals see as beneath them.
It wouldn't just make sense. The Constitution demands it. This is the essence of procedural due process, guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments.
It is if it is a denial of liberty without due process of law. Juries are not typically instructed in the permanent denial of certain liberties that come with a felony record. In that case, this person would clearly be denied their liberty without due process.
people DO change.
6 years ago i almost burnt to death doing something that i could have been charged with a felony for even though the only life i endangered was my own. the prosecutor was lenient, my friends and i were never charged. He felt that being burnt 48% 3rd degree was punishment enough. i have to live with my decision every day for the rest of my life.
it made me realise i was headed down the wrong path in life. now i volunteer my time with a camp for kids that have been burnt. i just finished my first year of college, and i got a machinist internship with the U.S. Army. i hold a high level clearance and i have a LTCH. Im proof that one bad decision doesnt define who we will be for the rest of our lives.
6 years ago i almost burnt to death doing something that i could have been charged with a felony for even though the only life i endangered was my own. the prosecutor was lenient, my friends and i were never charged. He felt that being burnt 48% 3rd degree was punishment enough. i have to live with my decision every day for the rest of my life.
it made me realise i was headed down the wrong path in life. now i volunteer my time with a camp for kids that have been burnt. i just finished my first year of college, and i got a machinist internship with the U.S. Army. i hold a high level clearance and i have a LTCH. Im proof that one bad decision doesnt define who we will be for the rest of our lives.
Disagree. If the people about whom we're concerned (violent felons) were kept in custody or simply removed from society by execution, we would be addressing the real problem in crime: The criminals. You're correct that we cannot only change the law regarding carry by former felons.
Nope. But the Fifth does.
(emphasis mine)
One's gun is his property, the RKBA is his liberty and may be used in the defense of his life. That said...
The problems I see with this are twofold. One, the number has no Constitutional basis that I see (though I'm willing to be corrected on that if I'm mistaken) and two, the number itself is arbitrary. They say it only takes 30 days to form a habit. Clearly, if someone with a history of criminal acts goes five successful years without committing a crime (or at least being caught at it-after all, he might be a politician!
) I would say that is a good indication that he's on the straight and narrow. We could pick three years as easily as seven, 10, or 15. We have to draw the line somewhere, I know. That's the standard argument, but are there data to indicate that 15 years is so much better than five at so-called "proving" that someone is a good citizen now?
So if you loan someone $20 and he never pays you back, should the banks not trust you with loans either? Loaning him money was obviously a poor decision. (I'm not being snarky, just taking your point to a logical conclusion, as opposed to reductio al absurdum.)
I posted before about a young lady I know who was in a store with a friend. As they were walking around, chatting, she stopped by the register "impulse buys" and grabbed a 99c bag of chips. When they finished, her friend stopped at the registers and paid for her purchases. The young lady of whom I'm speaking had stuffed the bag in her back pocket and absentmindedly forgot it. The money to pay for it was in her front pocket. As they left the store, security stopped them, at which point she remembered, reached into her pocket and offered to pay for it. Nothing doing. The store called PD, had her arrested, charged, and booked for felony theft. The cop thought it was crap. The prosecutor thought it was crap, and apparently the judge thought it was crap, as he dismissed the case unheard. Had the store had their way, though, we would all be much, much safer because this young woman was unable to own a firearm for at least the next 12 more years, and no one should hire her because she didn't feel like carrying a piece of mylar around in her hand and instead chose to keep it in her pocket.
OK, so 61% of felons are repeat offenders. How many repeat offenders are felons? (I'd guess the percentage to be far lower.)
Blessings,
Bill
