We rejoice in one bill’s failure this session: a Project Exile proposal. As we’ve shown time and again, Exile was once a good idea, but no longer. Gun laws are enforced by an out-of-control administration that rewards police by how many gunowners they disarm, not how many predators they jail. Proposals like Exile only sharpen the teeth of laws that bite us. It’s a difficult point to make, and it took a while to get some legislators to appreciate what’s going on. (One protests we’re sticking up for criminals, and in a sense it’s true: to Glendening, you and I are the criminals just by owning guns.)

Here’s an analogy that helps tell the story. Recently the New York school system started one of its regular crusades to crack down on truancy. Truant Officers were told to boost the arrest rate of kids not in school. Parents complained bitterly about improprieties, but officials discounted them as malcontents sticking up for truancy. After all, what reasonable person favors cutting school and doing crime? It took an investigative news crew to figure it out. The truant officers were boosting arrest rates by lurking near school entrances at the start of the day, then arresting kids who showed up late. They could satisfy the administration by cheap, statistics-building arrests instead of working hard to identify real truants and solve real problems. Were kids they caught in violation? Yup. But snagging kids already on their way to school (and giving them a bad record) won’t solve any problems. It makes no more sense than hounding gunowners to find some disabling technical violation.

This is what’s going on with enforcement of gun laws. Asked to crack down on gun ownership, police are streamlining their operations to give the maximum number of disabling convictions based on technical gun violations. It’s done at the expense of going after real predators, who are what people had in mind when we got such laws on the books in the first place.

Look past the rhetoric. William Fletcher lawfully possessed firearms for years after he pled guilty to a common law offense for which he served no time. But he’s now dealing with federal charges for possessing guns while disabled. This happened with no other action on his part: police decided to reinterpret what constitutes a disabling crime, a fact Fletcher might not even have known. He came to state police attention – and became a statistic – while obeying a gun registration law: police rewarded his act of obedience with a raid to seize all of his guns, now the subject of forfeiture proceedings in federal court. How does the prosecution of someone while he is trying to follow the rules benefit society, while predators roam free?

Police pretend to make Maryland safe by squeezing people on technical gun law violations, exposed by computer databases. Decent people are hauled in with the wide net cast by ‘get tough on gun crime’ proponents. One chap’s disabling crime was theft of cable service. Another’s? "Hindering." Decades ago he knelt to help a friend who had been in an accident, but was cited by a young officer for being in the way while emergency workers stabilized the scene. He paid a cheap fine and thought nothing more of it, but who’d have thought this single crime would someday remove his rights? Who knew until the era of NICS checks, that let state police use computers to flag a gun in the hands of a disabled ‘criminal’ from the comfort of their air conditioned offices. State police lick their chops at these cheap busts, that fuel the gun grabbing agenda of their masters.

Maryland is investing resources to prosecute (and ultimately jail) people based on fear of what someone might do with a gun, when it wasn’t willing to jail that person for what disabled him from ownership in the first place. Not all pro-gun legislators are concerned, however. A Daily Record article recently described the federal prosecutor’s expanded gun forfeiture program in Baltimore, in which hundreds of guns (some described as heirlooms and expensive antiques) are taken from ‘criminals’ in such technical violations as cited above. Delegate Carmen Amedori praised the confiscation and forfeiture program, saying: "Great! Beautiful! … These would be prime targets for Project Exile. These people had no right owning those guns."