Every day this week The Daily Caller is inviting you to relive two of our most compelling moments from 2012. These stories might have made you angry or gleeful, or maybe they led you to poke your spouse in the ribs and say, “See, I told you so!” (RELATED: Part 4: The ‘That’s Embarrassing!’ edition)
But however you reacted, they met our number-one test for publication: They were interesting. (RELATED: Part 3: The “Race Politics” edition)
Today we revisit a story that made Second Amendment advocates sit up and take notice, and one that changed the way we looked at the federal government’s push to hand out as many food-stamp benefits as humanly possible.
Marine faces 15 years behind bars for unknowingly violating gun law
It’s not every day that a business trip to the Big Apple turns into a nightmare on Riker’s Island, but a U.S. Marine found out the hard way that under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, even well-meaning servicemen and women can’t risk carrying a handgun in New York City.
Ryan Jerome had a licensed fireram in his native Indiana, and he believed his concealed-carry permit would be honored in the Empire State when he traveled there to sell $15,000 worth of jewelry. Criminals carry guns in New York City every day, but when this Marine asked a security officer at the Empire State Building where he should check his gun, the police came running and he spent the next two days in jail:
The 28-year-old with no criminal history now faces a mandatory minimum sentence of three and a half years in prison. If convicted, his sentence could be as high as fifteen years. …
“If he does get indicted, and they want to give him something less, then the legal minimum would be two years,” noted Mark Bederow, Jerome’s attorney. “They couldn’t even offer less if they wanted to.”
Jerome isn’t the first out-of-state visitor to volunteer that they had a gun, only to be put through the wringer. In December, Tennessee nurse Meredith Graves noticed a “no guns” sign at the World Trade Center site and asked where she could leave her weapon, only to face similar charges.
Also in December, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler was arrested after attempting to check a pistol — for which he has a California concealed carry permit — at a New York airport.
Ultimately, Jerome pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor weapons-possession crime instead of the felony he was facing. He agreed to pay a $1,000 fine and perform 10 hours of community service in Indiana.
“I definitely did not know it was illegal to bring a gun into New York City,” he told The New York Times after his sentencing.
“The law is not equipped to deal with these situations, and they happen all the time,” Bederow told TheDC in January.
USDA partnering with Mexico to boost food stamp participation
When we reported in July that the USDA was working with the Mexican government to boost the number of food-stamp recipients, most of our readers who weighed in were not amused. Many were unaware that non-citizens can receive these benefits.
But the federal government has long extended its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — what most people call food stamps — to foreign nationals who live in the United States. The aggressive push to enroll as many immigrants as possible began back in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.
The program, the USDA told TheDC, was not meant for illegal immigrants who don’t pay taxes. But some lawmakers were unconvinced that the results played out that way, since they can enroll their eligible children.
Some of the materials the USDA encourages the Mexican government to use to educate and promote the benefit programs are available free online for order and download. A partial list of materials include English and Spanish brochures titled “Five Easy Steps To Snap Benefits,” “How To Get Food Help — A Consumer’s Guide to FNCS Programs,” “Ending Hunger Improving Nutrition Combating Obesity,” and posters with slogans like “Food Stamps Make America Stronger.” …
“It’s a very disturbing policy, gone on for some years, and it raises very serious questions about American immigration policy as well as fiscal policy,” Sen. Jeff Session told TheDC. “Let’s get back to the fundamentals. What happened with the ‘96 welfare reform was to say that if want to you come to America you come legally, you assert you’re not coming for welfare benefits but you’re coming to work or otherwise be independent. There is no logic behind an immigration policy that would encourage immigrants who can’t successfully operate within this society.”
According to Sessions, immigrants who come to America should be able to operate successfully without the aid of government.
“An immigration policy should seek to bring people to the United States who will be able to function independently without government subsidies,” he explained. “We’ve got millions of people that want to come here, millions of people who would be able to perform without a subsidy, so we need to be selecting those people.”
Mexico is the only country with which USDA has a partnership to push nutrition assistance to non-U.S. citizens.