Comment by downandout
7 years ago
Interesting article about a guy who was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison for building hidden compartments for customers of his car stereo shop:
7 years ago
Interesting article about a guy who was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison for building hidden compartments for customers of his car stereo shop:
From the article:
I.e. the court's argument is that he was perfectly aware that he was building these for drug cartels. If we take that judgement at face value I don't see the problem with this. You don't get to wink wink nudge nudge your way out of being a knowing accomplice to a crime.
By that logic, shouldn't gun companies be prosecuted for the crimes committed by the drug cartels who use their weapons?
Given the current state of affairs in the US and the publicly available statistics on gun crime, one could argue that continuing to manufacture guns is knowingly supplying criminals, no?
It's a slippery slope..
A better analogy is an FFL knowingly selling firearms to cartel members, which is already illegal.
No. The guy in the article wasn't prosecuted for every hidden compartment he made, just the ones he made that he was well aware were going to be used for illegal activity. Just like guns, the vast majority of them won't be used for anything illegal, even though some of them will be. But the moment you knowingly and willingly facilitate criminal activity, you become a party to the crime. That's true with guns, secret compartments, candy bars, or anything else.
That's absurd. The legal test is whether a reasonable person could have known that they were an accomplice to a crime.
The article makes it clear that this man knew he was building these for cartels, and tried to weasel his way out by claiming he'd never seen drugs with his own eyes, but had seen almost a million in cash from some very shady guys.
This would be like running a "Taxi service" that catered to Balaclava wearing gentleman exiting a bank, claiming that you had no idea you were helping with a robbery. Perhaps they're just really ugly businessmen in a hurry? Would that mean nobody could drive a Taxi anymore? Of course not.
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Why? Don't the cops carry guns, too? Aren't guns value neutral, like all technologies? It is humans that do evil deeds with guns, not the guns themselves. Guns don't enable crime anymore than they enable to ethical application of the law. If you look at Brazil, there is a thriving underground gun manufacturing industry that supplies the criminal element because guns are a 200+ year old technology that is well understood by pretty much all of humanity at this point. It's a lost cause to ban technology like that.
as opposed to people actually using those compartments in an illegal fashion. Out of control government...