Legal is whatever the Police decides it is on the Spur of the moment!
It's Subjective,not Objective!

I hope you don't buy that, lol

Legal is whatever the Police decides it is on the Spur of the moment!
It's Subjective,not Objective!

From 3 to 4,500: What laws have you broken today?


The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, write Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller for the Wall Street Journal.

Clarence Darrow anticipated the prison nation that America is today a hundred years ago in his book Resist Not Evil. All areas of life have become part of the penal code, with an army of people operating as police, legislators, and the court system to enforce these laws through force and violence. But even Darrow wouldn’t have dreamed that the unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear image, or of the slogan “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” can land a person in federal prison.

Fields and Emshwiller’s frightening article tells about a father and son chased by the Feds for unknowingly digging on federal ground for arrowheads. “The Andersons are two of the hundreds of thousands of Americans to be charged and convicted in recent decades under federal criminal laws—as opposed to state or local laws—as the federal justice system has dramatically expanded its authority and reach.”

The Amercian Bar Association can’t even tally up the federal offenses exactly but believe the number exceeds 3,000. The ABA’s report said “the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades.”

A Justice spokeswoman told the WSJ, that there was no quantifiable number. “Criminal statutes are sprinkled throughout some 27,000 pages of the federal code,” write Fields and Emshwiller.

These crimes of the state’s making are sending 83,000 people a year to federal prison. While the US population has grown 36% in the past three decades, three times more people are going to prison, with immigration and drug violations making up over 60% of the offenses in 2010. The federal prison population has grown eight fold during this period.

Of course much of the public cheers on the increasing prison state.

Roscoe Howard, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, argues that the system “isn’t broken.” Congress, he says, took its cue over the decades from a public less tolerant of certain behaviors. Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says. “It would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those options away.”

One wonders if Howard believes 77-year-old race-car legend Bobby Unser deserves to have a criminal record “for accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land, violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm.” Or whether a Pennsylvania woman who violated a 1998 federal chemical-weapons law tied to an international arms-control treaty should spend six years in prison. The woman spread some chemicals that burned her husband’s paramour on the thumb.

The woman has challenged the law’s constitutionality and the Supreme Court is sympathetic.

During oral arguments in the case, Justice Samuel Alito expressed concern about the law’s “breadth” by laying out a hypothetical example. Simply pouring a bottle of vinegar into a bowl to kill someone’s goldfish, Justice Alito said, could be “potentially punishable by life imprisonment.”

And this is today’s justice system? Darrow wrote in 1902,

the state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice. [It] has no way of arriving at the facts. If the state pretends to administer justice this should be its highest concern. It should not be interested in convicting men or punishing crime, but administering justice between men. It is obvious to the most casual observer that the state furnishes no machinery to accomplish this result.


http://archive.mises.org/17835/from-3-to-4500-what-laws-have-you-broken-today/

Please do NOT Edit my Posts!

@boredinaz06
I saw a little of that on the news yesterday. It is busy bodies like that who waste time and money with false claims. In many parts of our country, it is not uncommon for children to grow up in a house that hunts and they get a hunting gun at a young age. Now my dad use to hunt but it does nothing for more. I grew up knowing the guns were dangerous and loud. Didn’t want to mess with the real ones, even though I did take hunters Ed. in 7th grade. Now that I am older I want to learn how to handle a gun.

Really????
not editing your post!
It is a specific reference, to a QUOTE from your post, hence the word QUOTE we click to use some or all of someone elses posts, as a reference point.
relax, everything is going to be fine.

Please do NOT be so petty.

I do my best not to intentionally offend my elders, please do not view me any other way.

please quote in entirety or not at all!

You added your comment into my post,and cut the reference!
Not good Forumpractice!
Anyway,let's forget about it!

accidentally, I'm not sure why it turned out as 1 quote, instead of my comment under yours....didn't mean for it to be that way, dagnabbit

its still posting in quote box form....aaaarrrrggggghhhhhh

possibly a Glitch of the Site,happens sometimes!

you are on the right track...however, due to the government, being "of the people, by the people and for the people," I feel it is all of society to blame for current events...we run the government, but that has been long forgotten by most everyone.
with each generation their is clear evidence, of gradual "conditioning" of the minds of children to believe everything they hear in school and on the news.
Society as a whole, is being sucked into mindless whirlwind of gadgets and gizmos and sports to occupy and divert attention from the fact that we are being used as pawns by our government.
Thanks to so many people putting on the blinders of obliviousness, those of us who want to stand up are currently overpowered by the drones who have been programmed to prevent us civilians from seeing and knowing to much.

LOL funny. its all bass ackwards

The pisser of it all is there is nothing done to those who make false claims of abuse. Hold people accountable for false accusations and this will stop.

agreed. we are all responsible for the mess we are in because it is our responsilbility to participate in our democracy but most of us don't . Instead we sit back and complain about those who do. Clearly an apathetic public is easy prey for those willing to spout one thing during an election, and then do whatever they please in office. The irony of Mr. Obama is that his policies will probably most hurt the people who put him in office, widening the gap between the haves and have nots...why? because people voted by race or race guilt without listening to what he was actually proposing. (and yes I donned my helmet and safety gear before making that statement..lol)

Our politicians aren't listening any better. I read the web boards daily on all kinds of issues. The "People" want our troops home (as much as is feasible), limited involvement in the middle east, energy independence, clean air and water, preservation of natural & scenic areas, and a say in policies that affect the environment (no more non disclosure rules for chemical wastes for example), they want choice not obamacare, they want immigration laws that currently exist to be enforced even if it means a police action with Mexico. And they want jobs with a liveable minimum wage. I see varying degrees of these opinions on the boards everyday...whether or not they agree with my own opinion, our politicians are NOT doing any of these things. Often just the opposite. So how does that make sense?