Because any normal person would be facing charges, like this guy: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/20/dc-businessm...

Don't think those of us in "flyover country" aren't paying attention to this political corruption in the nation's capitol.

If a normal person would face unjust charges and a famous, powerful person doesn't, equality isn't achieved by enforcing unjust charges on everyone, it's achieved by not enforcing them on anyone.

The way to get there is to enforce the law uniformly, so that the famous, powerful people will make noise and get the laws changed.

That is one way. I don't know that putting people in jail left and right and hoping eventually one of them is famous is the most efficient way to go about getting the law changed.

I'm not sure what alternative you have in mind. The pigs who patrol our streets are very much in favor of having crufty laws on the books for the purpose of abusing their political enemies and the less fortunate, and politicians are generally supportive of pigs.

"Equality" is more important than the Rule of Law?

Laws don't just pop up out of the ether. They're created by fallible people. If a law doesn't make sense and isn't making society better, it should be repealed. It shouldn't be kept in place and slavishly enforced out of blind adherence to "Rule of Law".

And yes, equality is something that governments attempt to achieve through laws. Equal application of the law is one of the founding tenets of the US government. In my opinion, yes, equality is a more worthy goal to pursue than blanket enforcement of every law that happens to have gotten onto the books.

Well, it depends on who thinks it "doesn't make sense". The D.C. city government believes suppressing gun ownership in every way they can get away with "makes society better" (well, it makes their ruling over their subjects easier, it's easy to punish areas that don't vote correctly by removing a lot of their police protection, or so I heard when I lived next door in Arlington for a dozen years; classic Anarcho-Tyranny). They have a lot of company, as I'm sure you've noticed.

And the fact is they uniformly enforce these laws, albeit with quite a few jury nullifications, except when people like David Gregory and institutions like NBC commit these crimes. Knowingly in NBC's case.

I wish more people would admit we have a severe problem with having effectively having two sets of laws, one for our nomenklatura and another for the rest of us.

The "DC city government" is an abstract notion representing an ever-changing group of people. As such, it is incapable of conscious thought and does not actually believe anything.

Certain individuals who are part of the DC government believe those things. Some other individuals don't. We count up the ones on each side and then democracy happens. We have the courts to make sure the majority hasn't gone completely crazy.

DC went through a long time where they were leading the US in murders. When people are getting shot around you left and right, it's pretty reasonable to think that maybe you could stop that if you could stop people from having guns. The purpose of the laws was to stop people from getting shot. It's pretty clear that David Gregory was not going to shoot anyone, so putting him in jail was not going to serve the purpose of the law.

Are they willing to be as rational if the person isn't famous? I don't know. I'm not aware of any other cases where a non-famous citizen has gotten ahold of an illegal ammo clip to use as a prop in an argument about gun control.

Minor problem with the post hoc ergo propter hoc example of D.C. becoming the nation's "Murder Capitol": these severe anti-gun laws and administrative refusal to register any more guns happened before that.

"We have the courts to make sure the majority hasn't gone completely crazy."

Yes, that's what Heller was all about, but that hasn't stopped D.C. from engaging in Massive Resistance.

Getting back to the other case, Irvin Nathan had one defective shotgun shell in his home. Is putting him in jail going to serve the purported purpose of the law?

There are plenty of analogous examples to David Gregory with "illegal guns" being used a props by politicians and the like. Of course, they too are members of the nomenklatura that people like you are so willing to excuse.

I agree sending someone to jail over a single shotgun shell is a gross miscarriage of justice and perversion of the law. Committing a second miscarriage of justice by sending a TV news commentator to jail does not make the situation better.

Now you have two people in jail instead of one. We should be trying to have zero people in jail who should not be there. We shouldn't say "Well, we put one person there for a bad reason, so we should put everyone else there for the same bad reason too". This is what you seem to be proposing. I get David Gregory doesn't share your politics, and maybe you just don't like him. That doesn't mean we should put him in jail just so you can feel better about some other person getting screwed. I doubt Irvin Nathan would feel any better about being in jail if David Gregory were there along with him. I'm sure he'd much rather just not be there.

Side note: You can look at actual data here - http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm

The murder rate in DC was rising steadily since 1960 until the gun control laws were passed in 1976. It went down briefly, then exploded with the crack epidemic in the late 80s, early 90s. Obviously, there are many, many factors contributing to the murder rate and you can't control it by modifying only one input. I'm not trying to imply otherwise.

I think you already know that the parent poster is saying that, even if the TV news commentator was the first person to commit the crime, and the commoner was the second, the TV news commentator still wouldn't be punished but the other person would.

This clear inequality appears to bother the parent poster more than the given example of heavy handed punishment.

You might say they bother me at different levels. Having owned guns in an repressive state (but much less so than D.C., although that is and was true of every state to my knowledge), I can empathize with the "commoner".

Whereas the establishment of a shameless nomenklatura in the US is an existential threat to the Republic. Which could, I might add, have even nastier personal consequences.

Invidious gun grabber laws are as old as Reconstruction, but we've been fantastically successful at beating them back starting in 1986. Our fight with our ruling class ... not so much.

Sure, the inequality sucks. The way to solve inequality is not "let's make everything equally shitty for everyone". It's "let's make everything equally good for everyone"

Maybe you were downvoted because posting "Why?" with no follow-up is dumb, adds nothing meaningful to the discussion, and wastes peoples' time.

Adding "He had no malicious intent" would serve to make the asker's intention more clear, but still wouldn't add much to the discussion because it had already been established. I don't think asking why should be discouraged.