Glenn Reynolds: How gun laws put the innocent on trial
Glenn Harlan Reynolds 8:04 a.m. EST November 9, 2015
If you care about civil rights for minorities, gun control is not the answer.


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.”

Cottrol noted that crimes like carrying or owning a pistol without a license are what the law has traditionally termed malum prohibitum — that is, things that are wrong only because they are prohibited. (The contrast is with the other traditional category, malum in se, those things, like rape, robbery, and murder, that are wrong in themselves.)