My Douchebag Senator
One need only be suspected of an ineffective “feel-good law” to be deprived of rights.
In the wake of this past weekend’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) announced in a press release today that he intends to introduce new legislation which “would prohibit the purchase, possession or shipment of a firearm by anyone convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime or who received a hate crime sentence enhancement.”
What makes Casey’s “Hate Crimes Prevention Act” especially noteworthy is that a conviction would no longer be necessary to deprive someone of their Second Amendment rights. Merely being “reasonably suspected to be guilty of a misdemeanor hate crime” would be enough. It is not clear who the senator would authorize to determine whether a person is reasonably or unreasonably suspected to be guilty of any particular crime, much less one that tries to get inside the head of a suspected criminal and police their thoughts.
Per Casey’s press release:
“If you have proven you will commit criminal acts based on hate, you absolutely should not have access to a gun. It’s common sense,” Senator Casey said. “It is time we as members of Congress do something. If you are a member of Congress and you say you care about security then you have to take steps to keep guns out of the wrong hands and ensure our law enforcement has the resources needed to keep communities safe.
Casey’s press release also states that “known hate groups are growing in the United States” and cites the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)’s statistic that “892 hate groups are currently operating in the United States, up 14 percent since 2014 and almost 33 percent since 2000.” Earlier this year, Reason‘s Jesse Walker examined the SPLC’s often very-fuzzy math and its frequent tendendency to define “gang slayings, domestic violence, and other apolitical or ambiguous assaults in which the killer also happens to subscribe to an ‘extremist’ worldview” to fulfill their pre-determined theory that hate crimes and hate groups are almost always on the rise in the U.S.
