carrying an illegal handgun while also dealing would of course not be pardoned Why? If dealing pot shouldn't be a crime, why should being prepared to defend y

carrying an illegal handgun while also dealing would of course not be pardoned Why? If dealing pot shouldn't be a crime, why should being prepared to defend yourself with a handgun while dealing pot be a crime? I don't understand the "illegal" qualifier. Isn't it always illegal to carry a handgun when dealing pot? Isn't having a handgun while committing a federal crime also a federal crime? Obviously there are drug dealers who are aggressively violent, but if they haven't been caught for being aggressively violent why should they be punished as if they were? What other aspects of "innocent until proven guilty" should we do away with? Even violent drug dealers represent a philosophical problem. Practically I don't think I'm willing to support letting them out of prison, but rationally I have some sympathy for some of them. Their involvement in the drug market shouldn't be a crime, and the violence in that profession is almost always due to the fact that it's a black market, with extremely high profit to be made and no legal protection against getting ripped off. Their aggressive violence is not something to be condoned or accepted in society, but neither are laws that establish black markets that lead to such violence. Drug criminalization advocates claim all sorts of reasons why they're not at fault, from drug dealers being inherently evil due to bad parenting or genetics or whatever, to proximity to the criminal act and free will (no doubt legislators are further removed from the crime than the drug dealer who pulls the trigger). But who's really more at fault? The socially marginalized drug dealer from a relatively poor background who probably had poor schooling, who gets caught up in drug dealing, and who kills someone because his drug organization needs him to? Or a legislator with (supposedly) much more wisdom, who nevertheless votes to create a black market that leads to conditions where violence is commonplace? I'm not condoning the violence. I simply think the root cause is not the drugs or the guns, or even the drug dealers themselves. Scapegoating gun-carrying drug dealers for the violence is just that... scapegoating. I think it's ultimately unproductive if we want to fix the problem.