Friday, December 05, 2008

Oh, now, that's nice...

or, as the old saying goes, When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department is readying indictments that could send Blackwater Worldwide guards to prison for at least 30 years for their involvement in the deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting of Iraqi civilians, people close to the case said.
Charges could be announced as early as Monday in the shooting, which left 17 civilians dead and strained U.S. relations with the fledgling Iraqi government. People familiar with the charges said they may include an aggressive Reagan-era anti-drug law cracking down on assault weapons.
...
Though drugs were not involved in the Blackwater shooting, the Justice Department is pondering the use of a law, passed at the height of the nation's crack epidemic, to prosecute the guards. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 law calls for 30-year prison terms for using machine guns to commit violent crimes of any kind, whether drug-related or not.

Come on now. You knew it was coming. It's just the way government rolls — you give them certain powers and they will eventually misuse said powers. We know what's been said before — as long as you have a War on Drugs, you will have a War on Guns — and really, we should have seen this coming. We should have foreseen the day the government would use laws for the first to fight the second. And you know it's just a hop, skip and a jump from using the law for this purpose to using the law to prosecute folks like you and me for whatever reason, from being a day late on renewing their gun registrations (if it's ever put into place) to a failure to, as Dianne Feinstein said, "turn 'em all in." I'd like to think that if that last thing happened the government would be too busy dealing with other things (if you know what I mean) to be filling the prisons even more than they're already being overfilled, but it should never have been assumed that those laws would have always been used in the limited scope they were supposedly intended to be — just as the federal racketeering laws weren't. Of course the U.S. Supreme Court slapped that last tactic down, but I don't expect them to do the same here. Honestly, though, it's frightening to think our government would have so little respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. Really makes Ladd Everitt and his kind look even more like the clueless Eloi they are. Something tells me the Founders would have gone for tar and feathers long before now...
h/t David Codrea)