Bay Area police union leader allegedly smuggled fentanyl into US to sell in bulk

SFC John D. - I was more commenting on your use of dog-whistles than anything else. I know you "feel" what you say is the case, but I doubt you can find the statistical data to support "couple of mass shootings on a weekly basis in many of the cities". By all means, lets see the data that supports this statement. I will bet you there are an equivalent amount of shootings in trailer parks.

Surprised to see that you would actually support a law to keep guns out of the hand of domestic abusers, so I guess some level of infringement is okay. Now you have to consider how difficult that would be to pass at the state level without getting seriously watered down by lobbyists and bank-rolled politicians, not to mention the Federal level where they could set the same standard for the entire country. I feel even well meaning people, and lets say you are one of them, would take the position that even if the law makes perfect sense it would somehow weaken the 2nd Amendment and set a precedent for restricting firearms to certain people and oppose the law on those grounds. Perhaps that is because I see how many oppose laws to remove guns from the mentally incompetent and unstable even though the state of mental health is what many scream about after yet another mass shooting.

And don't you worry. Mass shootings and the killing of Americans will continue for a long time to come and we will have ample opportunity to disagree down the road and very little will change... which, ultimately, is what the "conservatives" want.

As CPT Lawrence Cable said, it's not that the law is watered down, it's that progressive prosecutors feel that it is somehow not in their best interest to prosecute the criminal.... which, ultimately, is what the "liberals" want.

Every right has a level of infringement of them - none of them are absolute. However, that does not mean the right can be taken away.

Freedom of speech is not absolute as there are categories of speech the Supreme Court has said you cannot say. This doesn't me that you get to censor all speech you don't like "in the name of controlling misinformation" if you are the government. You have the freedom of assembly, but that doesn't mean you can break the law while doing so. However, the government can't repress expression unless it is unlawful or there is danger of imminent harm. And so on ... bottom line, is that no right is absolute, however this does not mean that you can curtail a Constitutional right because some feel that those rights are inconvenient when others use them.

Red Flag laws have their place - IF the right is removed with due-process and the judge uses a high standard of evidence before depriving someone of a Constitutional right. A lot of people see problems with many of the state's implementations. For example, in Vermont a judge can issue a confiscation order based on evidence only from a petitioner and that evidence only needs to meet a preponderance of evidence level (the lowest level required in the legal system). After the weapons are seized, then the defendant can petition the court to have them restored. So, yes, people that are concerned about Constitutional rights do have an issue with that.

.... I'm going back to the point of this post. I just realized you lead me down a rabbit hole that has nothing to do with the OP.

As I said up top, I and people that actually care about drugs flowing into the country, could care less about the citizenship of the individual bringing the drugs (especially fentanyl) into the country.

If you're a drug smuggler (I understand the SJWs wants to use the term "Drug Worker" instead so you don't demean the criminal) you get thrown in jail. It doesn't matter if you're a non-citizen or a citizen of the US ... even if you're a Democrat Union boss that's doing the smuggling (yeah .. should have researched the article a bit before trying to use it to base the right).

MSgt Steve Sweeney -Using the state of Illinois own numbers. https://icjia.illinois.gov/researchhub/articles/illegal-gun-carrying-motives-consequences-and-illinois-arrest-trends.
Now things to note. "Illinois arrest charges for firearm-related offenses increased 70% from 2012 to 2021, with the largest jump occurring after 2015, while overall arrest charges were declining." So as SFC Davis indicated, catch and release problem.
And "We found a majority of persons arrested for firearm-related offenses in Illinois in 2021 had prior arrests (77.5%) on their records and about one-fourth (27.1%) had prior convictions." So again, not prosecuting a chargeable crime.

CPT Lawrence Cable - Given that arrest charges for firearm-related offenses increased 70% in the time period studied, how do you jump to a chargeable crime was not prosecuted? Have you considered that in the course of prosecution, due to the nature of the law, there wasn't enough to return a conviction - so as I said previously, a problem with watered-down gun laws and the influence of the 2A lobby.

Your citation provides some statistics, but does not characterize the prior arrest, or if the crime was prosecuted or not. Are you assuming all that get arrested are automatically guilty? That is a pretty big leap. Strange from those who are so fast to trot out the "innocent until proven guilty" line when one of their own gets snapped up.

If you are going to try and impress me with statistics, you first have to know something about statistics, and possibly a little bit about how the law works.

I am curious, did you read the entirety of the study, or did you just try to extract some statistics you thought supported the argument you are trying to make? Did you review the study limitations? It would not appear so.

When the argument fails (which usually happens a lot on the left), all that is left is an appeal to emotion. Why do you think that the majority of the left's arguments end in cries of "your racist!" (or sexist, ageist, or whatever-ist)

For example,

Left: Guns need to be banned!
Sensible Answer: According to studies Defensive Gun Use prevents crimes between 500,000 (on the low-side) and 2.5 million (on the high-side), with most agreeing that it's around 1.5-1.7 million. Of those, around 400,000 are life-threatening violent crimes.

Left: Well ... then just ban those Assault Weapons, because they are weapons of war and if you get rid of them then everything will be good!
Sensible Answer: According to the FBI data from 2019, the weapons that would be targeted if the Federal Assault Weapons Ban from the 1994 crime bill were reenacted, it would target only 1.6% of the weapons that are used in crimes (overall rifles, which include those assault weapons that would be targeted, counted for only 2.6% of all homicides in 2019).

Left: Stop arguing with me! You're Racist!
Sensible Answer: .....