This story has elements of big government, invasion of privacy, property rights, and gun ownership. Where is the outrage from the Republican party in Missouri?
WaPo outlines how the myriad towns in St. Louis County, Mo., nickel and dime their poor residents with traffic tickets and court fees.
This is worth reading just for Antonio Morgan's stories. Morgan is a small business owner that is targeted by his municipality for picayune fines:
Morgan says that over the last few months, his employees have been cited and fined by Pine Lawn police five times for operating a business without a license. Morgan has a license for his business, but it’s in his name. The citations are happening when he isn’t there.
“The police come by and ask to see the license. A couple times, the guy working for me didn’t know what they were talking about, so they wrote him up. The other times, they showed the cop the license, but it was in my name.”
Morgan, black and dreadlocked (strike 3 and strike... 3) is also a legal gun owner. When he and a friend were wrongly arrested and "detained" for three hours, police ripped his truck apart and found a gun, for which he had a concealed carry permit. They kept the gun.
“They told me they’d have to ‘run’ the gun to see if it was stolen or had been used in a crime, and that it could take up to 30 days. I told them I hadn’t been accused of any crime. When I tried to get it back later, an officer told me they’d have to keep it longer because of my record.”
Morgan says when he replied that he had only been convicted of traffic violations, the officer noted that he had recently been arrested for burglary — the same burglary for which the police had wrongly arrested him, confiscated the gun, and released him three hours later. Morgan just got his gun back in February, nearly three years after it was confiscated.
Where is the Cliven Bundy freedom posse for this guy?