Ignorance of the Law . . .

by Claire Wolfe


. . . is no excuse.

So authoritarians like to say as they demand harsh punishment for every poor boob who runs afoul of any obscure diktat.

They're only partly correct. Historically, the phrase carried a more
humane implication: Ignorance of a law that everyone should know is no excuse. In other words, you can't murder your mama and claim you didn't know it was against the law. But you might fairly claim that you had no idea that failure to complete line 42B of Form 7630-X from the Federal Pencil Sharpening Board was a felony.

There was also a historic legal concept, mens rea, that protected harmless folks from being punished for crimes they might not have meant to commit. Mens rea means “a guilty mind." It is from a Latin phrase that translates as, “The act does not make a person guilty unless the mind is also guilty.”

In other words, in a just legal system, you can't innocently bumble your way into committing a crime when you have no intent to do any harm and aren't even behaving recklessly.

And that brings us to today’s legal system, where you can be guilty of
thousands of things without even knowing it. As attorney/author Harvey Silverglate notes, the average person probably commits three felonies a day.

Specifically that brings us to the lair of the Great Satan — at least where Second Amendment supporters are concerned — New York City.

In recent weeks there has been a spate of gun-owning innocents running afoul of NYC’s draconian antigun laws — in some cases not merely in spite of being proverbial “law-abiding citizens,” but because they thought they were abiding the law.

Take Tennessee tourist and med student Meredith Graves. She faces 3 1/2 years in prison and a $12,000 fine for being naive enough to seek a place to check her gun when visiting NYC’'s 9-11 memorial. Because she holds a concealed carry permit in her home state, she thought she was okay to carry in New York and that all she had to do was find a place to store her gun.

Next we meet Ryan Jerome, a young jeweler and ex-Marine and a concealed-carry permit holder in Indiana. He brought a gun on his first business trip to New York to protect the $15,000 worth of jewelry he carried. He
was honest and naive enough to ask a guard at the Empire State Building where he could check his sidearm. He may face 15 years in prison.

Frank VanKirk, another visiting businessman with a concealed-carry permit from Ohio, was foolish enough to leave firearms in plain sight in his hotel room. The maid ratted him out.

At the same time all of the above was going on, Mark Meckler, founder of Tea Party Patriots, tried to get a firearms declaration for the unloaded gun he had in his luggage at LaGuardia airport. He was actually obeying posted signs in the airport describing the procedure. Whoops. They hauled him off in handcuffs, too.

Now, it’s likely that none of these folks will end up paying the maximum penalty. Meckler has already gotten off by pleading guilty to the catch-all charge of “disorderly conduct.” They’ll never see their guns again, but with luck they’ll suffer no more than a few thousand in lawyers’ fees and a few months of dread and/or minor jail time.

But what were they thinking?

If you’d have asked me a month ago, I’d have sworn that every gun owner in the country knew that NYC was “Venezuela on the Hudson” when it came to draconian antigunnery. Is it really possible that four apparently educated gun owners didn’t know that? Meckler, who holds a carry permit from California (where such a thing is still darned difficult to get) and who is a political activist to boot, surely must have been aware of New York’s notorious gun laws.

My first response to this onslaught of news is, “What? Are they all freaking morons?”

My second is to guess what they might have been thinking. Maybe they imagined the licenses they got from their state governments were like driver’s licenses, good anywhere. Maybe they vaguely knew about the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court cases that said states and cities can't outright ban guns. Maybe they didn't realize cities still have the court’s blessing to make life miserable for anyone who wants to carry a gun.

My third thought is that, even though obviously none of them intended to become legal test cases, it would be interesting to see that happen.

Whatever. Fact remains that not one of the four intended any harm or did any (except to themselves). Fact remains that they broke laws that are common knowledge among gunfolk. Fact remains that they got into hellish trouble with Authoritah.

So . . . do these four solid citizens deserve whatever punishment or harassment New York City cares to dish out? Should Meredith Graves become a felon and have her career ruined? Should Ryan Jerome lose his freedom and his business? Does Frank VanKirk deserve to spend a few years in the slammer? Does Mark Meckler still qualify as the “law-abiding citizen” he so proudly claims to be?


Claire Wolfe is the author of the Paladin books The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship, Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook, and I Am Not a Number, and a contributor to The Paladin Book of Dangerously Fun Stuff and Tough Times Survival Guide, Vol. 2.