Posted on 01/23/2014 4:02:16 PM PST by digger48
INDIANAPOLIS - After Indianapolis saw a particularly violent year in 2013, city and police officials are backing a proposal to significantly toughen sentencing laws for people who use firearms to commit crimes.
A bill authored by Indiana State Senator James Merritt (R-Indianapolis) would allow courts to tack an additional five years onto mandatory minimum sentences for anyone who used a firearm to commit burglary or a felony offense.
(snip)
Shamus Patton, who received an eight-year prison sentence for shooting nine people during Black Expo, served only two years and eight months in prison.
Alexander Dupree, sentenced to 16-years for armed robbery, criminal confinement and a handgun violation, served just two years and two months in prison.
Late last month, Dupree and 10 others were arrested for two violent home break-ins in which police said the victims were raped, robbed and confined for hours.
Riggs said the Patton and Dupree serve as textbook examples of the city's high crime rate and the need for mandatory minimum sentences.
(Excerpt) Read more at theindychannel.com ...
Eric Holder will probably have something to say about that.
So do we need to consider them geniuses for discovering common sense?The tougher the penalty, the more deterrent you will have. What is so hard about that? People aren’t afraid of killing others because they know they’re going to sit on death row for 25 years.
The only problem is that the gun isn’t committing the crime and isn’t really a factor even if used. If someone beats someone else to death with a toaster? Should there be a special sentence for it? How about a screwdriver or hammer wielding killer?
We could do something really crazy and sentence people for their crimes and not their methods.
significantly toughen sentencing laws for people who use firearms to commit crimes.
The problem with this proposal is that is morally absurd: the murder victim is just as dead when stabbed with a knife or bludgeoned to death with a bat or length of rebar, and his friends and family just as bereaved and the murderer’s soul just as corroded by the deed, as when the victim was shot. There is no moral distinction between theft accomplished by menacing a victim with a knife held in proximity to his viscera or neck and theft accomplished by menacing the victim with a firearm.
This is more of the blame-the-tool nonsense that has created the specious category of “gun crime”.
The same brand of idiocy that led some in the Michigan legislature to propose legislation to make it a crime for a felon to possess ammunition.
Any man too dangerous to own a shotgun shell is a man too dangerous to walk the street in the first place.
As some ignorant people are pushing for tougher laws, others will be thrown away forever for violating any one of tens of thousands of trivial gun control laws. Not a wise move.
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