You got to ask yourself; Do I Feel Lucky?
An officer with the city of San Francisco was arrested on gun charges Tuesday after the department’s internal affairs division ended a yearlong investigation. Thomas Abrahamsen, 50, a Berkeley resident, was charged with one felony count of manufacturing of an assault weapon and one felony count of possession of an assault weapon. Authorities say internal affairs began its investigation in the summer of 2015 after learning Abrahamsen was in “possession of a prohibited AR-15 style assault rifle and AR-15 receiver components.”
It is no longer enough to expect that the Second Amendment ("... shall not be infringed ...") is sufficient to protect a citizen from prosecution by overly zealous local politicians; now even laws which are not constitutional are being used to prosecute those whose career is based on enforcing the law.
What was that old song? "I fought The Law, and The Law Won!"
"SHOULD HAVES"
It's too easy to descend to the "Should Have" arguments:... if the officer wanted to own an AR15 (he should have known it was illegals), he should have moved to Oregon where it's still legal to won an AR15. So far.We should have all seen this coming. New York, California, Chicago, etc. ... all have draconian (and extra-constitutional) anti-gun laws, and The Supreme Court has not weighed in on many of them. Certainly this Law Enforcement Officer knew what the local laws were, and he deliberately decided to ignore them. At best, he made a decision to challenge the local (state) laws, and offer himself as a test case against their constitutionality.
It's difficult to believe that he expected to "get away with it".
I hope that was the purpose; I hope he fights like hell for his Constitutional Rights, and wins.
Sounds expensive; I don't expect him to get away without jail-time.
He will certainly be fired from his job.
I have no recommendations. I don't think he's going to be employable in the state of Californai, and if he's convicted, he'll never be employable as a 'serving officer' in this country.
Officer Abrahamsen knew what he was doing ("Test Case", or else he's an idiot, which I doubt) so we can count on a very interesting court case. Which he will lose.
Or he will ... eventually .. win in appeals to a higher court (which I doubt) and we will hail him as a hero of the Second Amendment.
Two Words: Fat Chance.
2 comments:
The law is the law and we hold our law enforcement officers to higher standards than we do our politicians. Many things are forbidden in California that are legal in most of the rest of the nation.
@Anonymous 6:55 am:
Right. But LEOs are also granted multiple exemptions to "assault weapon" bans and "high-capacity magazine" bans.
He's a police officer. Until now, he's probably done pretty well, served his department and community, stayed out of trouble. Yet California's insane gun laws still bit him in the @ss.
The point is, we will be hard-pressed to find a better or more sympathetic plaintiff against California's unconstitutional "assault weapon" scheme. Hypothetically, "Sumdood" - a "known-to-police" community gang banger who (somehow) has a clean record - has the same Constitutional claim, but nobody truly believes he's innocent or deserving. That's not usually true of a cop. A panel of judges is likely to be more sympathetic to an innocent person getting caught in the legal meat grinder of bad laws if that innocent person is a cop.
It'll be a long slough, and it'll be expensive, but like I said, we'll be hard-pressed to find a better plaintiff.
Post a Comment