Malum Prohibitum: Guns Are Immoral Because They Say “They” Are

By Ammoland

Opinion by Liston Matthews

USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- Some years ago, before the smoking ban in Tennessee, my wife and I went to a new restaurant. We asked for a non-smoking table. After a while, the manager took us to a table to be seated. With a not-so-sleight-of-hand motion, he reached over and grabbed an ashtray and put it behind his back.

The ensuing dialog went something like this:

“I asked for non-smoking.”

“This is non-smoking.”

“But you just picked up the ashtray! That’s not a non-smoking table.”

His response!? “It’s non-smoking because I say it is.”

So it is with gun laws. Gun laws make guns bad because someone says guns are bad.

The problem with gun laws is that they are Malum Probibitum, which is defined at Cornell Law School as “An act which is immoral because it is illegal; not necessarily illegal because it is immoral.”

Malum Prohibitum contrasts with Malum in Se, defined as “An innately immoral act, regardless of whether it is forbidden by law.”

From ancient times, certain acts have been deemed crimes and have been accepted by most societies as innately immoral. The …Read the Rest

Source:: AmmoLand