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GOP feigns outrage MSU killer wasn't prosecuted for a felony gun law they are working to eradicate [1]

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Date: 2023-02-15  

In 2019, MSU mass-murderer Anthony McRae was charged in Michigan for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit — a felony in that state. For reasons unknown, prosecutors dropped the felony charge, and McRae instead pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge of keeping a loaded gun in his car. Had McRae been tried and convicted on the concealed carry felony charge, he could have been imprisoned for up to 5 years, as well as been ineligible to legally purchase firearms in the future.

The GOP and the gun lobby’s water-carriers, trying to turn public attention away from their many successful years of criminal-friendly gun proliferation activities, have seized on McRae’s earlier case to claim that the problem isn’t guns, but failure to prosecute for existing gun laws.

Let me say that it was stupid for prosecutors to have dropped the felony charge against McRae. But here’s the thing: the GOP has been working with the gun lobby to make concealed carry without a permit perfectly legal throughout the entire nation, anyway. Permitless carry (what the gun lobby is calling “Constitutional Carry”) is now legal in 25 states, made possible entirely through the efforts of those respective states’ GOP-controlled legislatures. And the Michigan state GOP has been trying since at least 2019 to make McRae’s illegal concealed carrying of a handgun without a permit a perfectly legal thing to do.

You know what the Democrats continue to fail to do on this issue? Making a concerted and coordinated rallying cry that it’s been the GOP which have truly been the ones “soft on crime”.

Would it be against the rules for Democrats to speak out and often about how the GOP has made it a piece of cake for criminals nationwide to easily get their hands on as many guns and ammo as they want thanks to the GOP’s gun-lobby-friendly policies? Legalized private sales which require no background checks; soft or non-enforced penalties for “law-abiding” gun owners who leave their guns in cars — guns which often end up being stolen and then later used in the commission of a crime; deliberate knee-capping of the ATF; required destruction of gun purchase records. And so much more.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/15/2153106/-GOP-feigns-outrage-MSU-killer-wasn-t-prosecuted-for-a-gun-felony-they-are-working-to-eradicate

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