So we can have heroes like this
Woman with Pistol Stops Man Firing at Graduation Party Crowd with AR-15
....How about gun laws which ban AR-15s altogether & punish those illegally possessing or selling them with prison sentences like heroin pushers of 20 years or more minimum
@Blazor?
No. And this is gonna be one of my long posts and it's about drugs and criminal justice.
And heroin users AND dealers should be handled in other ways.
Usually heroin addicts have just one reliable dealer. By the time you get a dealer ....you are a serious user. You are completely addicted. Most dealers NEVER will respond or meet with you until they know you are a legit junkie.
I had to go through my friends boyfriend for a few months before that dealer was cool with just dealing directly with me. Same with another dealers(dealers...there were two who did it togther).
My main dealer was a younger black man....he was about 24. He had already spent time in prison(a few years) for dealing. Like so many black men, he was raised by a single mom. He dropped out of school and and got a job at the gas station trying to help his mother make ends meet and he was the oldest out of 3 siblings and his mother was also raising his cousins because their mother was in prison for homicide. If this sounds freakish to you....know that this story is COMMON for poor people in the inner city.
So this dealer (he went by Negro Netti... that's exactly how he introduced himself and what he wanted to be called. His real name he never told....and that's normal for heroin dealers) got involved selling weed, than crack and then heroin and the money was too good to pass up. He really was telling his mom the money he gave her was from his job. It wasnt.
This is gets really sad because it's easy to see this cycle and guess where it's going. So Netti got busted at 17 with a shit ton of heroin. I think the minimum possession charge is like 5 years....of you are a user, you will get the opportunity to chose being sentenced to a rehab facility and go through the MI "drug court" and your charge gets reduced to misdemeanor level. Otherwise you are going to go to prison for at LEAST 5 years.
But Netti wasnt a user. He was a dealer. Which usually turns out worse.... but since he was only 17 and he was so honest about it, he turned in his supplier in exchange for 3 years in prison. He still had a felony charge. He was let out after 2 years and was let out on parole for the next year.
So....he gets out and cooperates completely. He takes GED courses and passes and gets his GED. He went to work at a friend of the families party store in a shitty part of Detroit. (My dealers were always residents of Detroit....so I went down there to get the drugs). Mets a woman and she becomes pregnant.
So when was close to 9 months pregnant.....her mother kicked her out. I have no clue why. So she moved in with Netti....who was living with his mother. The house was small so they were sleeping in the living room. She worked as a waitress but had to stop because her pregnancy became high risk(she had a partial previa, where part of the placenta is covering the top of the cervic and would therefor cause hemorrhage during labor) so she had to quit. They had saved money for move in costs at some shitty apartment complex still in Detroit. She was on medicaide, food stamps and on a wait list for sec 8.
Well the party store owned by a friend of Nettis family gets raided and shut down for reasons I dont know. He didnt share that with us. We did ask if it was human trafficking and he said "hell no....nothing like that" and we believe him.
So now they are scheduled for a csection to beings their baby girl into the world. They live in a shitty apartment complex, are waiting for section 8 and neither have a job. So Netti is frantically searching for a job. Any job. He is riding the damn smart bus all over the tri county area everyday trying to get a job. And was turned away everywhere.
NOT because he was BLACK. It was because of his FELONY. You cant get hired easily at ALL if you have a felony. And places dont care WHY you have a felony....just that you have a felony.
After the baby was born....they were knew they were going to be evicted.
So take a guess what Netti did? He went right back to dealing crack and heroin. Told his girlfriend he was working for a cleaning service and it was a "call when a job pops up" deal.
Can you blame him? This guy is a black drug dealer in Detroit. A black Detroit felon. And all he was doing was SURVIVING.
This is why I have my libertarian stances over drugs. If this guy had just been given a chance....he wouldnt have turned back to drug dealing. He made some bad choices certainly. But there would be a much better outcome here had Netti been able to get a decent job. This little family came from a life of poverty and crime. Had they had just a little more support.....it would have been a completely different outcome for them.
This is a part of what I'm talking about when I say that Democrat policies drive high crime and poverty. Sure you can argue that "he shouldnt have got that girl pregnant" and you can say "that's why we need abortion". But the fact is....we need to focus on rehabilitation where there are victimless crimes (and no....junkies are not victims). People do not deal (or use) drugs just because they are asshole losers. Mostly they are misguided people who have been deeply harmed/abused and people who were dealt a shit hand in life and didnt play it wisely ....but CAN turn it around if they just had a little help.
And with that.....we need to be much harsher and more seriously on violent criminals. Murderers, rapists and traffickers.
I'm pretty split when it comes to criminal justice. I view plastering felonies on people who commit victimless crime driven by survival as a waste. Its costs the tax payers more when they can get jobs because of a felony and they end up repeat offenders and have children that need to be on welfare. When that could have all been avoided by some rehabilitation measures. Treat their consequences as if your goal is to reintroduce them back into society a BETTER version of themselves with the tools and resources they need to be productive members of society. It literally costs US more and creates a whole cycle the way its handled now.
My other dealers (the women) were in similar boats. Single moms just trying to give their kids more. Remember welfare will kick you off if you get a stupid small raise.....people end up finding ways around that. Its basic survival. We need some sort of programs that helps people get stable on their own two feet. It would be less expensive in the long run.
Oh and guess what? They all had guns illegally. They needed guns for protection and they couldnt get them legally so they did it illegally. It's a whole cascade of shit.