The Magazine Raids Are Starting

I saw an interesting article courtesy of author Matt Bracken today.  (Matt is the author of the Enemies series, which chronicles the events of a future dystopia in which guns are banned and innocent Americans are persecuted by socialists and racists.  Sound familiar?)  The article recounts the arrest of a man in LeRay, New York (a town of which I haven’t heard before) for possession of high-capacity magazines.

Two things are disturbing about the news piece.  One is that I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anyone actually being charged with possession of high-capacity magazines when they weren’t already committing some other crime with a firearm.  The article doesn’t say what preceded the discovery of these magazines, but consider this:  The crime, on paper, is simply that this man had in his car several metal boxes containing springs.  That’s it.  They weren’t firearms.  He didn’t do anything violent (that we know of according to this article).  He just… had magazines.

The second thing I find alarming about the article is the casual way the discovery is described.  The magazines were found “during a vehicle check.”  Was this some kind of checkpoint? A roadblock? An intoxication check?  Did Haddad, the fellow arrested, have magazines in plain view in his vehicle? Did he consent to a search?  We just don’t know.

I don’t like the landscape this paints. I don’t like the world we’re all going to end up living, where those fellow citizens who haven’t (as I did) sold their guns to preempt this problem are now considered criminals for doing nothing more than possessing property they previously owned quite legally.