“When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly …. When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.” – Comrade Bill Clinton
Happy New Year.
I often hear my collectivist friends on both the left and right either complain about the absence of weapons laws or the lack of compliance at some satrap level below the Federal government to enforce the nonsense already on the books.
The lion’s share of all laws on the books in the West are malum prohibitum laws which benefit the state and its umbilicaled corporate clients.
I’ve written on the rule of law before and the very notion that its existence is always compromised by the state’s monopoly as the sole interlocutor.
I once worked as a firearms instructor in north Idaho and the proprietor of the establishment I contracted to had a sign at the front of his gun store and range that read “no loaded firearms in store”; the sign served the dual purpose of erasing liability for firearms malpractice on the part of any customers and another charge to stack on anyone who ended up charged with something else.
The prosecutor complex in America stacks charges like hotcakes on the unwitting victims of the “just-us” system in the USSA. The majority of all crimes in the US find that the state is the sole victim especially in the Federal system where over 90% of cases are pled and the juries convict over 90% of the defendants who have the temerity to request a jury trial.
The state has a natural inclination to criminalize anything that interferes with its presumed right to rule.
Like drunk driving laws, weapons charges are a preferment created out of whole cloth to stack charges, conduct pre-crime sweeps and most importantly, demonize the private ownership of weapons.
You’ll note you will not find a single local to national disarmament entity in the US that voices concerns over the government ownership of small arms. The NRA, the nation’s most powerful gun control lobby, routinely coddles and fellates the state when they try to impose any restrictions or prohibitions on the private ownership of small arms.
The NRA has never sponsored a single proposal to limit the government ownership of weapons but has done so to infringe private small arms ownership again and again.
The Grand Old Politburo has fought this same fight against private ownership that the Democrats have. Since that essay was published we have seen the GOP fail to pass suppressor deregulation and endorse the nonsensical notion of banning bump stocks, among other things.
And no, a Federal national reciprocity law for discreet carry is not in the interest of private small arms ownership. Even the JPFO is getting this wrong.
No law is. Ever.
There are a variety of reasons all states despise the private ownership of small arms. [I employ the term small arms to include all weapons that can be employed to include shoulder-fired munitions, grenades and other destructive devices].
Many government supremacists are simply uncomfortable with the notion of human self-defense at the atomistic level absent state permission to do so. Like the government school system, learned helplessness creates permanent statist clients. We see this in everything from the lowest economic strata to the corporate boardroom.
Conservatives tend to be instinctive “rule of law” sycophants who are a curious hybrid of Romans 13 idolaters and Constitutional fetishists who believe that no parchment can be indecorous enough to enable larger government. They put ostriches to shame.
Criminals break laws for a living and in the two-tier “just-us” system in the US, the nomenklatura has special dispensation to quite literally get away with mass corruption and murder, witness the Clinton kakocratic crime cabal and its FBI satraps.
The edifice of “pre-crime law” in America has a storied past and sordid results for all who care to examine it.
Weapons no more deter criminals of every stripe than any of the other laws on the books. The more economically disadvantaged the “criminal” ensnared in the gulag system the more likely it will end up in dire straits. Even the JFA Institute, an anti-incarceration advocacy group, estimates 3 percent of violent or property crimes offenders end up in prison. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), in 2004 only 1.6 percent of burglars were in prison.
So if the coproach has no duty to protect the individual, isn’t a prohibition or restriction on private small arms ownership a Catch-22 proposition? The state steps in and indemnifies its uniformed thugs against any obligation to protect the Helots it exsanguinates to pay for the protection and then strips the subjects of most means of effective self-protection?
And now we see case after case where the American coproach will shoot anyone on sight who either has gun or presumes to have a weapon.
Think about that; in the land of the free, your possession of a weapon in hand when answering the door to your house can be a death penalty imposed by the government agent at the door. The ease with which the state thug can deal maiming and death with not so much as a day in a cage is at severe odds with any non-badged American who dares to defend themselves in a genuine life or death situation.
And the death of a cop as far as a case closure rate far exceeds the 3% mentioned above. Even if the alleged malefactor is innocent.
So my point is elegantly simple, the next time you hear a government supremacist claim not only should there be a law but there should be a prohibition, remember the violence this individual is visiting upon you.
There is no body of legitimate weapons law that recognizes a concomitant absolute private ownership standard. Remember that the usual suspects are always looking for the magic bullet through legislation, administrative fiat or judicial usurpation to limit or eliminate private weapons ownership.
Parity with the governing body’s ability to employ small arms should not be less in the private sector.
If you give a dime to any “gun rights” organization doing special pleading with the owners of the tax plantation and they help craft legislation and not eliminate laws and statutes, they are the king’s men and don’t give a rat’s ass about individual and private small arms ownership.
Exhibit A is the 1934 NFA, 1938 FFA, 1939 US v. Miller, 1967 Mulford Act (CA), 1968 OCC & SSA and GCA, 1986 FOPA, Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990), Brady Act (1993), AWB (1994), on and on and on.
Every one of these infringements is legally stamped and approved by the Federal government tentacled agencies and robed government employees.
Every one of these infringements is an abridgement of your de jour and de facto right to defend you and yours.
Every one of these would have been a sufficient causus belli for the festivities at Lexington Green on 19 April 1775 and every one of these is a violation of the intent and spirit of the Declaration of Independence for which the Constitution was the tombstone.
All of them.
“The Declaration of Independence, whether penned by Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, is as elegant a jeremiad against tyranny as has been written. The relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution is the same as the one between the crucifix and the vampire. One cannot be consonant with the other because their aspirations are antithetical to the opposing aspirant. As the brilliant Lysander Spooner would opine: “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
Resist, Rinse. Repeat.
“The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements …. They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.”
– Benito Mussolini
“Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”
– Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC
“I don’t believe people should to be able to own guns.”
– Barack Obama (during conversation with economist and author John Lott Jr. at the University of Chicago Law School in the 1990s)
"We (government) need to do a lot less, a lot sooner" ~Ron Paul