If gun laws like marijuana laws were enforced

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Fresh Toast.

I am proud to announce that my Texas state legislature supports the “Law for the Protection of Star and Stripes”who punish professional sports teams for not playing the national anthem before matches. Unfortunately, they couldn’t change the text so they still say something about “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. That could give people the wrong idea.

For example, the same group has just decided that Texans cannot be trusted to have marijuana, although the penalties can be reduced for a small amount.

Photo by FatCamera / Getty Images

A 2021 University of Texas / Texas Tribune poll found that 60% of Texas voters believe that possession of small or large amounts of marijuana should be legal for any reason, but the majority of the legislature trust the voters who voted for it not have.

There were more than 45,000 arrests for marijuana possession in Texas in 2019, but that was a decrease from the nearly 63,000 reported arrests in 2018, most in America (out of half a million nationwide).

Ironically, the Texas Department of Public Security issued a memo in July 2019 instructing DPS officials to issue subpoenas for possession of less than 4 ounces of marijuana rather than making arrests. The Texan police are more enlightened than the legislature! (Slight praise.)

Previously, lawmakers voted to allow Texans to make handguns legal without a license or training. A solid majority of Texas voters believe that unauthorized wear should not be allowed latest survey from the University of Texas / Texas Tribune.

Texas lawmakers have also passed a number of other laws restricting the right to vote, ostensibly to “protect democracy”. But why bother?

The contrast between enforcing marijuana laws and gun laws at the national level can be seen in an article published by The Trace, a nonprofit “Investigating Gun Violence in America”.

SEE: ATF catches thousands of illegal arms dealers every year. It shuts down very few

Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

The article begins with a report on Uncle Sam’s, a huge pawn shop in man, a small town in West Virginia:

“This was the third ATF inspection of Uncle Sam in seven years. The two most recent audits revealed that the store had transferred weapons without performing background checks and failed to provide safety advice to handgun buyers. ATF records show that at one point more than 600 firearms that should have been in stock could not be found – a red flag for the arms trade. “

Law enforcement is not always so lenient. “Black people in West Virginia are 7.3 times more likely than whites to be arrested for cannabis possession, although national use rates are similar. a report released on Monday unveiled by the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia. “

GO TO Guns And Marijuana. The drug war is the greatest threat to gun ownership

In 2018, the last year I could find sales data, 8% (53,000) of 663,000 marijuana misdemeanor arrests were for selling or “making” the plant. There are more marijuana arrests than all violent crimes combined, but sales arrests are usually prosecuted as crimes.

There were 14,400 firearm-related homicides in the United States in 2019, and those involving a gun accounted for nearly three-quarters of all homicides in the country that year. Of course, no marijuana-related deaths have been reported.

SEE: America’s Gun Culture in Charts AND: Guns and Marijuana. The drug war is the greatest threat to gun rights.

Richard Cowan is a former NORML National Director and author of Differences Between Buying CBD Online And Offline.