Have a gun license? Plan to bring your gun to my hometown? Don't.
Mean New York authorities will make your life miserable.
Patricia Jordan and her daughter flew here from her home state of Georgia. She wanted her gun nearby for protection.
Jordan obeyed all the Transportation Security Administration's rules: She put her gun in a locked TSA-approved case with its bullets separate. She informed the airline that she had a gun. The airline had no problem with that.
In New York City, she kept the gun locked in her hotel room. She never needed it, but her daughter told me, "I was glad she brought it just in case something did happen."
When leaving the city, Jordan followed the TSA's rules again. At the airline counter, she again told the agent she wanted to check her gun. But this time, she was told: "Wait."
"Next thing I know, they're getting ready to arrest me," she said.
Her daughter was crying, "Please don't arrest my mom!" But New York City cops arrested her, jailed her and told her she was guilty of a felony that mandates a minimum 3 1/2 years in jail.
Jordan's ordeal is not unique. Roughly once a week, New York City locks up people for carrying guns legally licensed by other states.
Another Georgia visitor, Avi Wolf, was jailed although he didn't even have a gun. He just had part of a gun—an empty magazine—a little plastic box with a small metal spring. He brought it to the city because it wasn't working well and he thought a New York friend might repair it. He couldn't believe he was being arrested.
"Somebody could've done more damage to an individual with a fork from McDonald's," Wolf told me.
Wolf, too, checked with the TSA beforehand. They said, just declare it to TSA agents. So he did.
"I'm telling them... I have a magazine here. It's empty, no bullets... Next thing I know they're pulling me over to the side, they're like, 'Do you know what you have in your bag?!' 'I know what I have in my bag, I told you what I have in my bag.'"
Following TSA instructions didn't do Wolf any good. "Fast forward about an hour and it was four Port Authority police there. The chief of LaGuardia airport is there, [as if] they thought they found somebody trying to do 9/11 repeat," he says.
"They asked me if I had a gun license. Of course I had a license. I'm from Georgia, and everybody there's got a gun license. And they're like, well, sir, you're going to be getting arrested now."
Wolf and Jordan spent less than a day in jail, but each had to pay lawyers $15,000 to bargain the felony charge down to "public disorder."
"We are not going to apologize for enforcing our gun laws," said Assistant District Attorney Jack Ryan when I confronted him about these pointless and cruel arrests. He said New York City enforces laws as "humanely and as compassionately as we can."
But the system is neither fair nor humane.
Patricia Jordan kept her bullets separate from her gun, as TSA regulations require.
"The officer could not even find my bullets in my suitcase. I had to show him where they were," she told me.
That didn't matter, said the DA, because the gun and bullets were in the same suitcase.
"Under New York law, if they're together, they're loaded," says Ryan.
"They're loaded even if they're not loaded?!" I asked. Yes, he said.
I called him a sadistic bully (the full video is at JohnStossel.com).
He replied that New York City must make sure people are "not threats."
New York claims this keeps us safe. But people like Jordan and Wolf actually make us safer. Texas data shows licensed gun owners are seven times less likely to murder someone than a nonlicensed person. They also prevent some crimes. Nationwide, crime has dropped as the percentage of people with concealed handgun permits has risen.
Licensed gun owners aren't the problem. Crazy laws and callous prosecutions are.
"...the right of the people, to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Yes. What this case is about is the contours of that right - what the parameters of the right are, where the right begins and where it ends.
Those are matters for the legislators and judges and executives define, not individuals deciding for themselves.
A parallel example exists regarding freedom of speech. "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."
Congress has had laws against speaking national secrets since the beginning. Also, judge-made common law against speaking and writing false things to induce the creation of a contract (i.e.: fraud), and against publishing malicious, damaging, untrue statements about people (e.g.: slander, libel) has been around since the beginning.
Does "Congress shall make no law..." mean that the Judiciary CAN nevertheless make such laws, through the Common Law creation practice, or that the Executive can make such laws through the regulatory process? (The courts say no.)
Does the pre-existence and application of espionage, slander, libel and fraud-in-the-inducement law mean that the freedom of speech is not synonymous with the freedom to say whatever you want to say.
Do the child pornography laws abridge the freedom of the press?
Or is it that the "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" are not synonymous with the ability to speak and the ability to write, but is a smaller set of things that one can speak and write without being punished?
(Yes, that is what it means. The "freedom of this" or the "right of that" are bounded by law. The Constitution says that you can't impose laws that further restrict the existing restrictions on speech, the press and firearms.
"The freedom of..." or "the right of..." didn't START unlimited in 1789, but was already a limited set of rights and freedoms.
