Whenever somebody tells me all felons should be prohibited from owning firearms I show them shit like this:
For this, Ms Black might now face up to 20 years in prison and half a million dollars in fines, after a federal grand jury indicted her this month. Little about the charges makes common sense. The federal law in question is the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which was intended to save dolphins, seals and whales from being killed and harassed. The law also banned feeding these animals, on the theory that doing so might compromise their ability to forage naturally in future. Feeding is what Ms Black is now accused of. She says she was using the protocols she had learned from the federal agencies that are now investigating her to observe a natural feeding that was already in progress.
That’s right a marine biologist is facing felony charges for observing Orcas as they feed. The last time I checked observing marine mammals feeding is in the marine biologist job description. This poor woman could lose her right to own a firearm and vote because she was literally doing he fucking job. On top of that she is also being nailed with a double-standard:
Just as ridiculous, says Mr Biegel, is the accusation, increasingly common in federal cases, that Ms Black lied to the authorities, which carries its own prison terms. Ms Black always edits the commercial videos of her whale outings to make them more interesting. When investigators demanded footage, she gave them one of these edited videos. Prosecutors now claim that she had tampered with evidence.
Remember the police can lie to you but if you lie to them you’re in deep shit. Or, in this case, if you give them edited footage instead of raw footage they can claim you lied to them and pile on more charges to ensure you get more than mere felony whale feeding. Felony. Whale. Feeding. Just typing that sounds like a bad joke I would use as a hypothetical example of a stupid overreaching law. The problem here is this law isn’t hypothetical, it’s actually on the damned books and being enforced.
It bears repeating that the prohibition against feeding whales, like all prohibitions, actually requires the use of violence to enforce. If you toss a whale some dead meat you can actually be murdered by the state. Think about that.