IMPORTANT FACTS ABOUT PROJECT EXILE
And Why Maryland Gun Owners Oppose it
‘Exile’ originally referred to a Richmond, VA, program wherein local police would send to the feds anyone with a gun disability whom they caught in possession of a firearm. The goal was to bypass a dysfunctional local judicial system which had allowed crime to run rampant. Since the only laws duplicated between state and federal code had to do with gun possession, guns were how federal officials gained jurisdiction over crimes that locals abandoned. They advertised the program (using federal grants) and generally applied it to truly violent criminals.
The name Exile has taken on a life of its own. Politicians who want to identify with a seemingly successful program exploit the title but freely re-implement details to suit their own needs. Exile as proposed in Annapolis has only the name in common with the original program.
With the Exile story becoming more complex all the time, this briefing is given to help readers understand our opposition to the various measures bearing the name Exile.
The Richmond Exile
doesn’t work elsewhere … nor should we want it to.
Policy makers must understand what really was the original Exile experience. Virginia officials faced a local justice system that wasn’t doing its job, and they sought an alternative in order to make convictions against criminals stick. But moving to federal courts required that they find a set of federal laws to deal with acts that normally fall under local jurisdiction. What they found just happened to involve guns. Their approach cast a wide net, but they used it to fish for thugs they couldn’t get local prosecutors to deal with as they should, buying time while they fixed the local justice system (both fiscally and structurally.)
Maryland officials looking at the Richmond example incorrectly assume it was all about guns, as opposed to actually enforcing some laws. Unlike in Richmond, Maryland has no problem getting prosecutors to do their job, and moreover most state’s attorneys here are possessed of a strong social agenda to ban guns. These differences between Richmond and Maryland are key: here police cast the same wide net using disability laws, but do so in order to snag gun owners, not thugs. Giving increased legal firepower to politically driven Maryland prosecutors is like giving teenage kids a bottle whiskey and the car keys as a means of improving highway safety.
As presently proposed, Maryland Exile would dramatically boost penalties for possession of a firearm by any person who lives under a firearm disability. While analysis presented in the rest of this briefing is expressed in terms of Maryland’s proposed HB 127 / SB 280, most equally apply to any ‘Exile style’ measure being considered.
There is no public
policy reason to stiffen penalties via ‘Project Exile’ type measures.
Supporters promote Exile as a way to crack down on violent crime, yet the measure is based on firearm possession, not use. Any link to reduction in violence is tenuous: gun disability laws jail people in fear of what they might do with a gun. For Exile to reduce violence you must believe that preemptive firearm confiscation will reduce violent crime. There is no scientific reason to believe this is true, and there is every reason to believe it is not true. Criminals intent on violent crime won’t yield to a technical gun law, and no person with a technical disability will suddenly become violent because of gun access.
Examples of technical disabilities that senselessly fall into the scope of Exile-like programs are many and frightening. Certain convictions for littering or traffic violations can bring a surprising gun disability. Bringing five packs of cigarettes into the state without paying Maryland tax will, upon conviction, open the gun owner to prosecution under Exile. Tax violations or other forms of white-collar crime will too. In fact, the majority of people disabled for gun ownership (often without even knowing it) never served jail time for what disabled them in the first place, making it all the more ironic that a subsequent Exile conviction can give them multiple years of jail time without parole. There is absolutely no link from these technical disabilities to subsequent violent crime, therefore no stiffening of these gun laws can reduce violent crime rates.
If instead the focus is only on criminal misuse of a firearm – not mere possession – then there is no lack of ways to ‘get tough’ with criminals. Sentences can run up to 50 years for use of a gun in armed robbery, for example. Maryland prosecutors don’t need more gun multipliers in sentencing (let alone disability laws) to effectively remove a violent thug from society.
In fact Maryland has recently stiffened sentences for criminal firearm misuse, via the so-called Gun Violence Act of 1996. The effect of increased penalties has not yet been felt, since no thug convicted under the new sentencing guidelines can yet be serving time under the enhancements – he will still be serving time on the base crime. Any tinkering now will only apply a second legislative fix to the same ostensible problem, without bothering to check if the first worked.
There is every
public policy reason not to adopt Exile.
Besides the fact that the Richmond situation was unique, objective research now emerging tells us the rest of the story: A Brookings Institute study concludes that crime rates would have gone down there independent of Exile. Apparently on-going efforts to repair their dysfunctional local justice system had a cumulative and positive effect. Transporting Exile to other areas in hope of reducing crime would be like rain-soaked Seattle sending umbrellas to Frederick to fix drought.
What’s worse, Exile fuels the efforts of gun prohibitionists like Montgomery County State’s Attorney Doug Gansler and State Attorney General J. Joseph Curran. Their track record shows they are happy to jeopardize public safety in order to advance their anti-gun agendas. Gansler, for example, helped drive police to implement door-to-door searches for rifles during the 2002 sniper investigation. Focused only on guns and their owners, police failed to handle the snipers’ own attempts to contact officials, and in the interim, more innocent people died.
Exile allows people like Gansler and Curran to divert resources away from proven public safety programs. Their obvious response to stiffened gun law is simple: ‘The legislature demands that we crack down on guns, so we will.’ For example, in Montgomery County a “task force” is now hounding gun owners based on tips saved from the sniper search. Just imagine what real public safety programs will suffer when even more funds are diverted to this witch hunt.
Beyond the issue of resources are our civil rights. Gansler himself told the Washington Post, “Gun laws are what we use when we can’t get you any way else.” And indeed, the common application of gun laws in Maryland is to pressure someone into giving up their firearms and rights forever, in trade for the state dropping charges. (When a real base crime is in evidence, prosecutors have no need to fool around with the gun technicalities, and they don’t.)
The Exile bill as proposed would give people like Gansler an even heavier club to hold over a citizen who is targeted. Anyone could be subject to the full weight of Maryland’s bureaucracy under the Exile proposal to automatically deny bail to a person charged with some gun crime. Targeted citizens would have to cop a plea or plan on waiting in jail for months until their trial.
Ultimately, the most important reason to oppose Exile is also the simplest: putting people in jail based on a fear of what they might do with a gun is just plain wrong. For what other excuses do we jail people in anticipation of some future misdeed? Absolutely nothing.
There is every
political and strategic reason for pro-gunners not to adopt Maryland Exile.
Never mind the clear public policy reasons outlined above. Today’s gun owners would be crazy to support a project Exile program in any of its incarnations.
Tactically Exile neutralizes the credibility of pro-gun spokesmen. By accepting the false Exile axiom that confiscating some guns can stop violent crime, spokesmen lose the intellectual high ground and end up defensively arguing over what other circumstances they support confiscating firearms to protect society. Instead of defending a clean position, they will become endlessly engaged in fine-tuning other prohibitions. Having accepted wrongly that removing guns gives some benefits, they have no effective response to new gun control. Conservatives who say, “it’s not the gun, it’s the criminal” shouldn’t later say, “okay, so sometimes it is the gun.”
Another way our friends shred their intellectual integrity is by supporting Exile after previously decrying the treatment of people like Don Arnold (from the famous case where Maryland’s own ‘citizen of the year’ was targeted by Maryland State Police over a gun permit.) With what law did police target Arnold? The same disability that Exile enforces. You cannot back Exile while supporting Arnold … not and stay intellectually honest in Annapolis.
Strategically we should not do the bidding of our enemies. Exile is strongly supported by gun prohibitionists as Bill Clinton, the Brady Campaign, and Senator Charles Schumer. Why do liberals like Exile? Said one Annapolis legislator: “As if we would oppose jailing someone for having a gun? Of course we support it. Let gun owners go after guns in criminal hands, while we spend our time getting guns out of the rest of the hands. Together we can get them all.”
There is also the long-term problem of how we educate the public about our issue. Posturing on ‘gun crime’ as if it is somehow worse than other kinds of crime causes us to lose on the issue every time. Prohibitionists pick up on that, and by defining what gun crime means make it easy to vilify guns. Conservatives may think that tough talk about “illegal gun ownership” or “illegal gun use” somehow gives them a moral authority in protecting the rest of our guns, but the record shows they only validate points anti-gunners make in promoting long term prohibitions. When asked about guns one survey respondent at a polling place said: “Guns? The left wing wants to ban them and the right wing wants to jail you forever if you use one. I guess they must be bad.” Surely we can teach a better message that will help our long term survival as a community.
Introduction of an Exile bill without repair of the broad inequities in disability law is a slap in the firearms community’s face. The message is stark: “As thanks for your vote and support, we will advertise heavily in order to teach the public that people should not carry guns, then we will give prosecutors an even bigger club to hold over the head of any of you who find yourselves in technical violation of one of Glendening’s gun laws.” Some politicians thank their people by saying what they’ll do for supporters; in Exile politicians tell what they will do to supporters who get out of line. Meanwhile, legitimate problems that need immediate redress are ignored. Don’t spend gunowners’ political capital to buy gun control legislation that only targets us.
Conservatives routinely lament how big government retains broad bureaucratic power to crush individual liberties. We should not be on the side of expanding the federalists’ leverage over a person’s rights. If notorious prohibitionists like Peter Franchot drafted a bill to expand predatory powers to hold over gun owners, our community would scream bloody murder. We should not give any different response just because the title is “Exile.” Denial of bail is the harshest aspect of the current proposal. “Give up your guns or we charge you, so you can rot in jail until a judge clears you.” That’s not a measure our community can support.
Looking ahead, an even less friendly political environment may someday usher in a full gun ban by expanding the scope of the definition of gun disability. The “possession” law under edit by Exile is exactly where this expansion would occur. As a result, penalties we enhance today will be just what the state imposes tomorrow against civil disobedience by gun owners whose good conscience won’t let them abide by an unconstitutional law. We should not be in the business of enhancing penalties that will chiefly apply to our own people in the future.
Yes, NRA has been a supporter of the Richmond Exile program. That doesn’t make it right, just politically expedient. Exile was picked up by NRA during the Clinton administration as a way to be for something politically. With transition to a more hospitable administration, Exile is off the radar screen of all except those who didn’t figure out the political gamesmanship. In fact, NRA now finds it must oppose some programs coming out of the general Exile fund since the concept is being elastically applied to squeeze small gun dealers out of business in California.
SUMMARY
Gunowners cannot
give the state more laws to get tough with criminals so long as the state sees
us as the criminals just for owning guns. We want officials to consider laws
based on how they will be applied, not how they will sound in a campaign. The
key lessons to take away from this briefing are:
1. The Richmond Exile is very different than what is proposed for Maryland, it never really worked as advertised, and whatever were its results don’t transport elsewhere.
2. Exile laws’ effect depends on how they are
applied, and in Maryland they are applied by gun prohibitionists to serve gun
prohibition.
3. The culture of lawful firearm ownership is terribly disadvantaged when politicians incorrectly link guns with crime.
4. Exile is a helluva way for politicians to pay back supporters in the gun community.