Once again, my state tax dollars are trying to kill me.
A Missouri law forbidding local police from enforcing federal gun laws is hampering efforts to protect the public. The law declares “invalid” many federal gun regulations that don’t have an equivalent in Missouri law. These include statutes covering weapons registration and tracking, and possession of firearms by some domestic violence offenders.
Local departments are barred from enforcing them, or risk being sued for $50,000 by private citizens who believe their Second Amendment rights have been violated. Police are also prohibited from giving “material aid and support” to federal agents and prosecutors in enforcing those “invalid” laws against “law-abiding citizens”, defined as those who Missouri law permits to have a gun, which is just about anybody.
A blistering court brief filed Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice outlines multiple examples. The brief said that after an Independence, MO police officer in a shootout in September, state law enforcement initially refused routine federal assistance in tracing the murder weapon, The Kansas City Star reported.
The brief says the law “poses a clear and substantial threat to public safety” and has “seriously impaired the federal government’s ability to combat violent crime in Missouri.”
The Justice Department says the Missouri state crime lab, operated by the Highway Patrol, also is refusing to process evidence that would help federal firearms prosecutions. The Missouri Information and Analysis Center, also under the Highway Patrol, no longer cooperates with federal agencies investigating federal firearms offenses. And the Highway Patrol, along with many other agencies, have suspended joint efforts to enforce federal firearms laws.
A Cole County court’s decision upholding the law is being appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court.
Emancipation was monumentally great, but apparently the Civil War and all that blood spilled didn’t settle much else. A new Jim Crow is arising, as well as a dangerous sort of Federalism where the US is just a collection of jolly little fiefdoms that can ignore federal law, and people’s constitutional rights depend on their zip code.
