More "Common Sense" gun control laws

This one is about the "felons should lose their right to possess firearms" bit. Eugene Volokh finds teh crazy in the Michigan state law code:

The statute, Michigan Penal Code § 750.532, provides,

Any man who shall seduce and debauch any unmarried woman shall be guilty of a felony, punishable by imprisonment in the state prison not more than 5 years or by fine of not more than 2,500 dollars ....

On a snarky note, I thought it was southern rednecks who were supposed to be the bluenoses, but I digress. Volokh points out how this law is currently used (roughly 20 convictions in the last 10 years), and the problem with this:

One story on the subject, John Schneider, It’s a Crime, Lansing State Journal, Feb. 15, 2000, at 1B, reports that,

[A]ssistant Ingham County Prosecutor Sam Smith ... explained that in the case that appeared in the newspaper, simple seduction wasn’t the original charge. The man was charged with a more serious offense. The seduction plea became, as Smith put it, the “resolution” to the case. That’s most often how it’s employed, Smith said — as a “reasonable resolution.”
Smith stopped short of saying that consensual sex between consenting unmarried adults would never be prosecuted as a crime, but admitted it would be rare. Of course if one of the parties is married, the crime becomes adultery, but that’s rarely prosecuted, either, Smith said.

But this still strikes me as wrong. Say someone refuses to accept such a “reasonable resolution” and pleads not guilty, perhaps because he claims the sex was consensual and that he shouldn’t have to go to jail for it. Nothing in the law keeps the prosecutor from charging the person both with the more serious offense (presumably rape) and with seduction, so that even if the jurors accept the man’s story, they’ll still convict him of seduction.
I don’t think we should put our trust in the noblesse oblige of prosecutors when it comes to sex crimes any more than when it comes to speech crimes. Seduction shouldn’t be criminal just so that prosecutors find it easier to reach plea bargains in rape cases.

Make enough behaviors into felonies, and you can take away people's rights. A convenient transfer of power to the government here: not only does this make their job easier, but it makes everyone defer to government officials; after all, who wants to call attention to yourself that could result in a felony prosecution for a trivial act, based on the prosecutor's discretion?

It seems that in a less degraded age of the Republic, the response would have been tar and feathers.