ROLLING HILLS, OHIO — State Representative Tom Tompaulsen (R) recently held a press conference in the wake of both the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs and the San Bernardino shooting spree that the FBI is currently treating as a terrorism investigation in which he announce he has hired convicted criminal Henry Erickson to advise Thompaulsen on which gun laws he could help pass through the Ohio state legislature that Erickson and his fellow criminals would actually follow.
“We gun loving Republicans and conservatives are always very quick to point out that criminals don’t follow gun laws,” Thompaulsen said during the presser, “but this got me to wondering if there was in fact any law that we could pass that a criminal would follow.” So, Thompaulsen said, he reached out to the Ohio penal system and got the names of a few candidates to serve as consultants, ultimately landing on Erickson because “he just seemed like the kind of criminal who’d be honest about which laws he’d respect enough to follow.”
“Honestly, I’m a criminal,” Erickson told our reporter in a separate interview conducted at one of Ohio’s minimum security prisons, “By the very definition of my job title, I disobey laws. Like if there’s any law I want to break, I’m pretty much going to break it regardless.” Erickson said he couldn’t figure out why Thompaulsen, or any politician for that matter would “consult [him] on which laws [he] would or wouldn’t follow.”
Mr. Erickson asked our reporter rhetorically, “Since when does anyone ask a criminal for advice on whether he or she would follow a law they were considering drafting,” answering himself by declaring that legislators “write laws to address problems, with or without the blessing of those who may break them down the line.” He said while he was “happy to help out” he remained “absolutely stunned that anyone would even care about whether criminals would break laws before they passed them.”
“Laws are about accountability and determent,” Erickson said, “but for Republicans, I guess they’re only ever effective if people follow them 100% of the time, instead of you know, them getting broken every now and again by people who break laws in the first place.”
Rep. Thompaulsen dismissed Erickson’s confusion as “the kind of things liberals, you know criminals in other words, can’t understand.” He said that in his mind the partnership with Erickson is going so well, he plans to expand his work to other criminals, such as those against rape and murder” so that he can “identify other laws that are no longer necessary since criminals would chose to break them.”
