A recurring problem I see with many gun control laws is that they exclude certain people. In particular, they often exclude police officers.
Now, I'm not talking about laws prohibiting people from carrying guns in a police station other than officers--I may not agree with it, but if you're going to have a rule like that, sure, exempt cops--but about far more expansive laws such as what people can and cannot own.
See, many times, police officers are exempt from these laws. Police departments are almost always exempt. In fact, a small-town police department can lawfully buy enough miniguns to equip all of their police cruisers with several, just so long as the check clears.
This is funny because the people who don't blink at these exemptions are also the ones who will spray paint ACAB on a brick wall. All cops are bastards, but they should be as armed as they want to be.
What could possibly go wrong with this double standard?
Well, how about the fact that while not all police officers are terrible people, at least some may well leverage their exemptions to certain gun laws for fun and profit?
Adair, Iowa, had a population of 794. So, it seemed suspicious when its three-person police department asked regulators to buy 90 machine guns, including an M134 Gatling-style minigun capable of shooting up to 6,000 rounds of ammunition every minute.
Federal agents later discovered Adair's police chief, Bradley Wendt, was using his position to acquire weapons and sell them for personal profit. A jury convicted Wendt earlier this year of conspiracy to defraud the United States, lying to federal law enforcement and illegal possession of a machine gun. Wendt is unapologetic and has appealed his conviction.
"If I'm guilty of this, every cop in the nation's going to jail," Wendt told CBS News just days before a federal judge sentenced him to a 5-year prison term. Wendt's crimes appear to be part of a nationwide pattern.
A CBS News investigation found dozens of law enforcement leaders — sheriffs, captains, lieutenants, chiefs of police — buying and illegally selling firearms, even weapons of war, across 23 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., from the Deep South to the Midwest, Northeast and California coast.
A nationwide review of government audits and court records over the last 20 years uncovered at least 50 cases of police illegally selling their weapons online, through dealers, out of their homes or the back of their cars. In many cases, the weapons were sold to gun enthusiasts, often at steep markups as high as 10 times what they were bought for.
In several cases, the guns wound up in the hands of violent felons and were used to commit crimes including drug trafficking, international arms dealing and, in one case, the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy attending a high school football game.
Now, let's be realistic for a moment here. 50 cases over 20 years isn't all that many cases, especially because, as of 2020, there were 1.28 million sworn police officers in the United States. Two to three cases of officers doing something illegal aren't really statistically significant.
But on the same token, remember that police officer exemptions for these laws are often predicated on the idea that they can be trusted with firearms that you and I, just regular folks, can't be. Never mind that many of us have extensive training in firearms and firearm safety. Never mind that the rate for law-abiding citizens suddenly killing people is next to nil.
No, we can't be trusted.
So, a double standard is created, only for some of these same people to lose their minds when it turns out that the police officers they demonized for years are actually regular people, where some are good and some aren't. Shocking, I know.
