A refreshing take from USA Today of all places

[gejohnston]

It mixes gun control and over incarceration in one.

Police are horrible, racist monsters who want to lock up minorities over even trivial violations of the law! And police are also the only ones who should have guns!

These two beliefs, it seems from my observations, are often held by the same people. Yet there is a conflict: If you favor strict gun control laws, laws that will punish people severely simply for possessing a gun or ammunition, then you will wind up throwing a lot more people in jail. And many of those people will be minorities.

This was the point of a talk by George Washington University law professor Robert J. Cottrol at a Georgetown Law School conference on guns and gun rights that I attended last week. As Cottrol noted, “Gun-control laws have a tendency of turning into criminals peaceable citizens whom the state has no reason to have on its radar.”

This is the part that stood out to me.

Traditionally, penalties for malum prohibitum acts were generally light, since the conduct that the laws governed wasn’t wrong in itself. But modern American law often treats even obscure and technical violations of gun laws as felonies and — Cottrol noted — prosecutors often go out of their way to prosecute these crimes more vigorously even than traditional crimes like rape or murder.

He even used Shaneen Allen and Ray Rice as an example.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/11/09/glenn-reynolds-gun-control-enforcement-takes-human-toll-column/75414186/

[upaloopa]

1. Seems there is a push to relate gun control

to another idea that people don't support.
I think I saw two yesterday and this one today.
Where is this coming from? Is it a result of Hillary's campaign?
Seems like you take something Hillary supporters would be for and link it to gun control in a negative way. Like this one linking social justice to gun owners' rights.
I think it is a fail because it is self serving and not honest.

[gejohnston]

2. it is called consistency

and it is related. Going to prison simply for having a pistol, bag of pot, eagle feather, or some other victimless crime falls under the same concept.
It isn't the gun, it is the larger issue. The gun is part of the larger issue. It isn't about gun control per se, but putting the screws to Ms. Allen for a technical violation while letting Ray Rice slide for a violent assault is unjust. It doesn't matter if Allen had a pistol, a joint, or eagle feather. Doesn't matter. Justice is justice, double standards and ideology need not apply. It is honest and consistent and not seeing that is cognitive dissonance.

[beardown]

3. Not sure what you mean by not honest.

There's a long history in not only the US, but other nations of gun control working out that only the rich white guys or their security having guns. Was very common in the post civil war south.

Like most things, fire, gun control, they can be used for good or bad reasons, but obviously gun control has been at times pushed for bad reasons in the US. Even if it's not legislated there is still a huge built in bias effect.

Crack (black and poor drug) had harsher penalties than cocaine (white drug).

Then top it off with the repeated and now systematic repub led sweeps of possible felons from voter rolls right before elections which removes folks with joint possession crimes and crack crimes that heavily tend to be poor minorities that did not have the resources or benefit of friendly police to not get charged with a crime.

This doesn't invalidate every gun control benefit, but it most certainly is a factor to consider on implementing any gun control measures to make sure that they do not fall disproportionately on minorities and the poor.