It probably isn't as Mark Trail-twee as the Cabela's shrines, but the inventory came cheaper.
This guy in Wisconsin was a career game cop for the DNR. Over the years he busted hunters and took their guns, not because anyone had found them guilty of anything but because he accused them. This conforms to the letter of our tyrannical civil forfeiture laws, and Smokey would probably have endured to collect his pension except for one thing.
He kept them, if you believe the prosecutors. His excuse is that Wisconsin required him to have a home office, and that's where he stashed citizens' guns -- beginning in 2003, apparently.
I'm not going to take time to dig them out, but there are a number of TMR posts on the subject. The general idea is that cops often have very nice gun collections assembled at astonishingly low costs.
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And even if this guy had turned them in to his boss cops, there's that annoying Constitutional mumbo jumbo:
"...nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
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It just so happens that I'm working on position statements for my 2016 presidential campaign and decided to focus on crap like this after reading about government agents' lust for free stuff. The platform plank is brief and applies also to the more formal confiscations by regular cops, game cops, the IRS and its 50 state affiliates, and God knows who else in our multi-million corps of bureaucrats with badges. To wit:
CIVIL FORFEITURE: Fuck no. If you want to take a citizen's stuff, convict him of something first.
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