No matter how potentially evil a thing, by itself it is a neuter. So next time you're in your head shop and feel like getting a glass pipe to blow bubbles with or something, y'all just go right ahead in these parts.
Keep the idea of your gun in the back of your head while you digest this. Some Des Moines cops decided to bust a store and confiscate glass pipes as drug paraphernalia. The owner sued to get them back, lost in district court, but won at the Iowa Court of Appeals.
The report from Radio Iowa says: "The Appeals Court ruling says the law requires the pipes to be used to ingest drugs to be considered illegal. The court says no drugs were found in the store and there was no evidence to conclude the pipes had been used."
There you go. Drugs are evil but glass pipes for smoking them are not, so...
Hold it Jim!
Yes, stupid of me to lose the distinction, even momentarily.
Drugs and pipes share no moral qualities. They are ethical castrati at least unless some mysterious happenstance empowers a smoky hemp plant to vote in congress. (Tempting as it is, I won't go further in that direction today.)
People who use them are possibly evil and probably stupid to begin with; certainly they become dumber by the puff. Or the guzzle in the case of ethanol based drugs.
Now, about all those "illegal" guns the politicians and journos keep yakking about: Wouldn't it be nice if a senior court hearing an appeal from an innocuous, law-abiding fellow charged only with possession of a weapon heard about the Iowa pipe case and got to thinking along the same lines?
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