David Gregory and Why Law Is Only for the Little People

The well-connected and powerful escape regulation that ensares the less fortunate.

As with most prissy, arcane regulations, laws that are designed to regulate the functionality of firearms tend instead to serve as an invitation to caprice. Herewith, a report from William Jacobson on the Extraordinary Tale of NBC’s David Gregory:

The short version is that the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department warned NBC News that it could not possess an actual high-capacity magazine, but NBC News went ahead and did it anyway. The MPD recommended a warrant for Gregory’s arrest, but that request was nixed by the D.C. Attorney General Irvin Nathanbecause — my paraphrase — Gregory was just too nice a guy and had no other criminal intent.

That attitude stood in stark contrast to the D.C. Attorney General’s vigorous prosecution of other lesser-known people who also were nice people and had no other criminal intent, but violated D.C.’s gun laws.

I do not intend to reiterate here just how extraordinarily difficult it is to execute laws that aim to track pieces of unserialized metal. Nor, for that matter, will I attempt to lay out what any earnest attempt to do so would end up doing to privacy rights in the United States. Rather, I want to focus on the grossly unequal manner in which such rules will inevitably be enforced, and to examine also what this does to the notion of equal protection. From my perspective, the startling thing about the Gregory affair is not so much that the powers-that-be eventually declined to prosecute him for his transgression, but that he was so unfailingly sure that he would be allowed to break the law without consequences. In a vacuum, it is easy to make the case that there was no need to indict NBC for its crime. Indeed it is difficult to imagine a set of circumstances in which doing so could be considered a good use of the city’s time and resources. But the entitled nonchalance with which Gregory presumed that his behavior would be ignored should worry all of us.

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