In analyzing the Virginia Tech Review Panel’s Report to the Governor since it came out, I have praise for the overall analysis. I have praise for the Police and EMS who responded with a well-organized response plan. It was a good report, but I have criticisms for Virginia Tech itself, of course, for her conclusions.

I have said for a very long time that one of the greatest fears of citizens in a free country is abuse of powers and the assumption of powers not granted. The Review is replete with mistaken assumptions, not in the reporting, but in conclusions, perhaps well-meaning, perhaps hostile, but in the end, immaterial, because it refuses to address one of the most effective and legal ways to meet the problem of school shooters — especially in Virginia.

In this edition of Good For The Country, I am critiquing in only general terms. A more specific analysis of this review as part of a Safe Streets treatment in a sixty-page monograph I am making available to organizations to buy in bulk for their attendees at their patriotic, spiritual, business and women’s events. The monograph is titled, Citizen Oversight, Safe Streets and the Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns. For that monograph in bulk, please go HERE.

The objection to the Panel’s conclusions is one of my chief complaints, which is of freezing the citizen out of the process of disaster preparedness, in this case, a mass shooting. Students die at the hands of shooters almost entirely due to freezing the citizen out of the planning. This has become a nationwide policy, with the exception of a few campuses who affirm and support armed students on campus contrary to the V-Tech conclusions.

In the Acknowledgments Section, the Panel cited who it consulted and thanked. It consulted attorneys, law enforcement, some community citizens, several psychologists and psychiatrists, and it consulted other Universities. Nowhere did it consult gun owners. This is the equivalent of CBS, NBC and ABC associating only with other newscasters in their sphere. Nothing new is ever learned this way (how could it be?), and old beliefs, erroneous assumptions, are reinforced. The Review reflects that same habit.

In general, the Review does a wonderful job of explicating the timeline, the response, the true pain of the incident, and the profile of the shooter, and even some instructions for the next time, but the conclusions accomplish little and can change little, because there will be a next time for someone following the same rules. In the section of what to do in the case of another shooter for that next time, students are well advised in what little they can do, and I have praise for the formula handed them, but one ingredient is missing in what could really be done: that ingredient is how to stop the shooter in the few moments he needs to wipe out student lives.

The entire review is reactive, and not proactive. It prepares to react, but does not prepare to respond. Instead, the entire policy is to do nothing but wait for police. This is, in fact, no preparedness at all. Nothing has changed.

I’ll say it again: no campus will stop the next shooter by beforehand psychoanalysis and profiling: the next shooter will be stopped by preparing his next target to be his last target.

In a nation of self-rule where police serve at the behest of the people and not the other way around, consulting law enforcement is only part of utilization of available resources. What irks many Americans is their exclusion from the process altogether. EMS and Police are referred to as Assets. Well, the University overlooks one tremendous Asset – the armed citizen. Such recommendations without consulting the armed citizen of some 80 million adults embody a philosophy of administration self-interest over the interests of the students they serve. Other Universities agree with the gun owner viewpoint and not Virginia Tech’s entirely. Utah is one example. They consulted gun owners. Utah is a right-to-carry state and they not only have worked with gun owners favorablyon campus, Utah has elected to go Open-carry of handguns in addition to concealed carry.

In excluding armed students as the review posts in specific paragraphs, the subject of armed students was sentenced in absentia, so to speak, banished on incorrect assumptions. Ignored. The Review’s authenticity and contribution could have been greatly enhanced if, as a University of welcoming all ideas, the armed student were consulted and their ideas welcomed. Without their input, the review is lacking. Instead, the Review is based entirely on input from other comfortable bureaucracies with some very mistaken notions about gun owners on campus. Some assumptions are not only ignorant, but outright incorrect.

Such bureaucracies in America have no more authority than we grant them, (something the lawyers consulted overlooked and forgot to mention?) and though they may be knowledgeable in their field, they do not have the ultimate authority which rightfully belongs to the people who were not consulted as much as all the people the University serves. They cannot speak for us as constituents, they must hear us as constituents. They speak only for themselves. Can you say Public Trust?

The Review can be downloaded from their website at http://www.vtreviewpanel.org/report/index.html

Citizen oversight of this review was specifically excluded. Citizen Oversight. Consulting law enforcement, profilers, lawyers, other schools and some local constituents friendly to a no-guns, victim disarmament policy was hardly an enlightening discussion.

What should begin the education and the report to the Governor is that Virginia state law does not exempt Virginia Tech from personal handguns. The Administration takes it upon itself to do that, one of the greatest fears of a free people: assumption of a power ot granted.

It is silly to build a report to the Governor around doing nothing while the shooter completes in a few short moments what he or she came to do.

The next shooter to visit murder upon innocent students will count on the minutes he or she needs to operate unstopped. The Review has as much as announced … no, promised.. that.
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See Citizen Oversight, Safe Streets and the Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns monograph HERE. Longenecker will be with George Noory on Coast To Coast AM January 9th at 11 pm to 2 am Pacific Time.

Americans don’t have guns for food, we have guns to block tricks and boondoggles where we as armed citizens can handle the immediate violent crime problem better than non-violence absentee policy can handle it. Individual personal authority in Independence is the best kept secret in the anti-gun movement. After all, citizens are there and first responders aren’t. Vigilante or citizen authority?

It’s Citizen Authority. Non-violence policy asks victims to do nothing until law enforcement gets there. This is called hiding the ball, where politicians and the bureaucrats and the hi-tech industries who support them obfuscate the most effective solution: Citizen authority to act and superior force within easy reach. The crime is in the form of obfuscating Citizen Authority—put another way, within every citizen, the law is already on scene.

In the middle of this is squabbling about who has this monopoly on force. Well, friends, the Militia has that monopoly.

And I can prove it.

When the Supreme Court looks at D.C. v. Heller, they will be looking at a concept called Original Intent. All of the issues they examine are viewed within the framework of what the Founding Fathers wanted, what they defeated, what they wrote as an expression of their intent, safeguards they wrote to protect the people, and how it is this which is the law of the land, and not current gun bans or regulations which may conflict with this.

Original Intent laws exist, but are hidden by current anti-gun laws which punish the protections the Founders put in place: having a gun within easy reach is one of those. It is more in the public interest to have a gun within easy reach than it is to ban guns.

At the focus is MILITIA. Alright: let’s look at Militia.

1. What is Militia appears throughout the writings of the Founders who show their work, you might say, on how they arrived at what they finally ratified. This is where you find the proof of what they really wanted for us.

If you think Bill Clinton loathed the military, you ought to read how the Founders loathed a standing army as nothing more than a centralization of power, and they weren’t going to return to what they had just defeated. Militia in the minds of the Founders – which is Original Intent – never meant Military. It, therefore, by law, cannot mean Military today.

2. Instead, what they wrote would be the law of the land in the new nation and forever, was that the Citizen is Supreme Authority. Never again would people be subject to abuses of power. At the time, Militia was every able-bodied person. What we know as the National Guard as anti-gun nuts claim excludes individual rights, was not even created until 130 years later, so twice we know they didn’t mean the Military.

What they meant [Original Intent] is everything to this debate, and they meant citizens armed with a gun within easy reach. Even today, as if no one has noticed, we are on our own.

In forming the new nation, the Founders realized that this Supreme Authority to resist boondoggles in power grabs must be backed by lethal force, and forever, so they wrote it to be absolute and not subject to due process short of another Amendment. That means, until another amendment, no rhetoric, no gun laws. In writing the Second Amendment – and the eighth, ninth, tenth and fourteenth which support it – they were not forgetful of guns of the future, they were quite mindful of abuses of power of the future. Anti-gun policy uses crime as an excuse to ban guns as one such boondoggle. Yet, citizen authority laws still exist, only hidden and discouraged. Boondoggle.

Three years ago, in December, 2004, the United States Department Of Justice published an answer to the U.S. Attorney General’s interrogatory on whether 2A was individual or collective. DOJ’s answer was that 2A is an individual right, and they showed how and where. Militia is addressed on Page 24 of that document. It can be found at http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/secondamendment2.pdf

The Founders had just defeated not only abuses of power, but they defeated the army which enforced such abuses. It doesn’t pass the test of reasonable expectation that they would write the new law of the land and defeat the British Army only to hand the monopoly on force over to another Army. Army is a wholly different issue addressed elsewhere in the Constitution and the people (militia) and Armed Forced are BOTH under civilian control. Militia is you and me.

The abuses of power the Founders foresaw live today as this disarmament rhetoric in the name of safe streets. Boondoggle. Militia in America means the individual citizens and not Military. It always did.

The Founders had their unsafe streets, too, and they wrote that the safest streets will always be where citizens are armed. Yes, the Militia. Armed citizens everywhere. As long as people understand that militia is the armed citizen and not military, it’s good for the country.

I’ll be with George Noory again on Coast To Coast AM this time January 9th, 2008 11pm to 2 am. Tune in to your Coast to Coast affiliate. Coast to Coast Members can visit CoastToCoastAm.com for the podcast of the first program aired December 10th, 2007.

The Supreme Court has decided to hear D.C. v. Heller and already the disinformation spin machine is revving up and spouting exhaust.

One of the most obnoxious and objectionable utterances in the gun ban question is the overall attitude of Hizzoner Adrian Fenty, Mayor of D.C. expressed as disinformation. — after being handed down an adverse ruling that his city’s Gun Ban is unconstitutional.

This week, the Mayor said to radio news microphones that guns in the home make shooting a loved one twenty-two times more likely. D.C.’s gun ban bans weapons in the home. That hissing sound is the sound of doubt for the case, the hissing coming out as Wind.

This figure, of course, has been disproved for a while. Let’s revisit one powerful source by linking to a quick note furnished by our colleague, Howard Nemerov, who is one of our organization’s Board of Advisors. See his brief analysis, Right-To-Carry: Discredited fantasy?

As the case comes forward, there could be expected some important adversities and important opportunities.

DISINFORMATION will be present as has been sent up by the Mayor along with other officials opposed to Liberty. Gun bans are the foe of independent authority of the People, and are the foe of safety, because they obfuscate citizen authority to act. At the nation’s inception, the Founding Fathers knew citizen authority had to be backed by force, and forever, if the new nation was to survive, and gun owners have been very good caretakers of that authority. It’s not the 80 million gun owners in America committing the 10,177 gun-related homicides here, but the 2.5 million de-escalations of violence without even firing their weapon.

Translation: it is the conspicuous absence of self-defense shootings across America that tells the story. Because, 2.5 million times a year, it’s a crime that did not happen, because the armed citizen de-escalated the aggression without firing their weapon.

Not only is it wiser to ban the gun bans, but to repeal a great deal of the anti-gun policy, such as making brandishing a weapon a crime.

For instance, at what point does one’s brandishing a weapon morph into a purposeful act of self-defense by drawing the weapon in preparing to respond with lethal force, but finding at the very last second that showing the weapon has been sufficient to stop the violence?

The result is not only de-escalation of a violent act, and prevention of a serious act of violence, but a non-shooting.

And this happens 2.5 million times a year. Within this large and under-reported number, the target is the first line of defense; it takes the lead with citizen authority and superior force, fully prepared to shoot to stop grave danger without hesitation — only to read correctly and quickly that drawing down with a loaded weapon was sufficient, and no one gets hurt.

Discipline, training, courage and purpose. This is gun control.

AT-ISSUE: What is at issue will be decided by the Court. For Americans, the question could be a matter of government’s assuming powers not granted [as in D.C.] versus Liberty in the hands of the supreme authority of the nation where it belongs nationwide; with the Citizens, with lethal force to back that authority. This could be what is really at issue.

And finally, GOOD WILL. Gun owners are not only the most civil and self-restrained of Americans with such power as a handgun, but gun owners are also the very best good will ambassadors of the entire Bill Of Rights.

It is not the gun owners who commit the violence, it is the criminal, and gun bans have no such discernment. This has to stop.

The D.C. Circuit, which ruled the ban as unconstitutional, also rejected D.C.’s claim that the Second Amendment does not apply to the District of Columbia because D.C. is not a state.

There is more at issue – more at stake – than a gun ban: the entire nation’s solution to crime and violence is now within our reach.

The Founders knew that abuse of process – such as a gun ban, and the utter defiance of an Appeals Court ruling the subject ban unconstitutional – would occur in any age, in any era, in any administration. The civil right to be armed with our anywhere/anytime, instance-by-instance personal authority and the lethal force which backs it was good for the country then, and it’s good for the country now.

And it always will be good for the country.
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John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns.

The Supreme Court Of the United States may soon decide whether to hear District Of Columbia v. Heller, a case about gun bans and frustration of a civil right in high crime areas. In these areas, the right is needed most, and in these areas, it is vexed and frustrated the most. How does blocking a civil right operate in the public interest?

D.C. v. Heller, if the Supremes elect to hear the case, can have a profound impact on the country’s gun control policy, and thus an effect on individual liberty and on how crime is met. Gun bans do not work, and where the Second Amendment is affirmed, crime doesn’t seem to be a problem. You might say that government burden has been lifted a bit, as — even with more than 2 million gun owners carrying their weapon – none of the dire predictions of shootings has come true, and armed citizens are demonstrated to play an important role in crime control.

In this country, there are about 300 million guns in the hands of some 80 million gun owners, and most of the shootings are criminal in nature. Out of 11,000 annual shooting deaths, nearly all are criminal in nature, while armed citizens use their gun to de-escalate a crime more than 2.5 million times every year, almost exclusively without even firing their weapon. [Source: www.FBI.gov, Uniform Crime Report.] Look at this again: Compared to 11,000 criminal shootings each year, these are 2.5 million non-shootings, or put another way, 2.5 million crime that didn’t happen. What doctors, activists and officials point to in trauma is not responsible or irresponsible gun use, but Crime. What they are seeing is not carelessness of gun owners and it is not enough to call it Violence — it is Crime. It is one-sided aggression. What they will never see is the 2.5 million acts of crime which are stopped by an armed citizen. As I said, right-to-carry states don’t seem to have the same high-violence, high crime problem nor the government burden. Some forty states seem to like it that way.

But what is 2A really all about? National Guard? Private ownership? How does 1776 thinking relate to 2008 and beyond? This is old hat for liberty nuts, but probably new to the non-gun owners.

Let’s review in a nutshell, since the Supremes will do what they do best: interpret the Constitution, which means the thinking of Original Intent of the Founders.

In a nutshell, the Founding Fathers, in defeating the Crown of England, defeated abuses of due process, and in founding the new nation, in preventing this from ever happening again, they declared the Citizen as Supreme Authority, Point #1.

Through education content, media, entertainment and outright activism, this Authority is being buried deeper and deeper from public view. For instance, many Americans do not know that their police have no duty to protect them. [Castle Rock v. Gonzales, U.S. Supreme Court, 2005: No constitutional right to police protection.] For some heads of household, this comes as a big surprise.

Point #2 is that 2A was not written for you and me, it was written for officials, like most of the Document. It recognizes a small bundle of rights as pre-existing and creator-given, and places a wide scope of limits on officials. 2A is a limit on officials.

Point #3 is that the Founders did not imagine weapons of the future to be a threat to the new nation – what they did fear as a threat was future abuses of due process as likely to recur in any age, in any administration including state or local, so they said in their debates, in their writings and in the final ratification that the citizen authority of the future must be backed by lethal force, and for all time, or the new nation would perish at any time.

Armed citizens are in the public interest for many reasons, and vexing and disarming citizens is against the public interest whatever the reason. The 11,000 homicides by criminals is not reason enough to disarm the 2.5 million who de-escalate crime for themselves and on behalf of their communities.

2A is as absolute as the Emancipation Proclamation is. In this country, you cannot own and trade in human beings, not even a little. Neither can one legally write laws which disarm the supreme authority of the nation, not even a little. Notwithstanding another amendment, 2A is absolute because it backs citizen authority forever, and without another amendment, there can be no such thing as a sensible gun law to interfere with that authority.

Point #4 is that Militia of 1776 must be what guides today’s interpretation of 2A, which is that Militia meant the Everyman. The National Guard did not come into existence for another 130 years after the signing of the Constitution – they couldn’t have meant that.

We must be guided by the Original Intent of the Founders and their perspective in what they defeated and how they wanted to prevent its recurring in the new nation: their solution was to prevent future abuses of the law by declaring the citizen as supreme authority and to back that authority with force. The Original Intent of the Founders was not for only their time, but for survival of the nation for all time.

Today, the exquisite example of abuse of due process is in the use of Crime as an excuse to further and further disarm all via gun control policy, and this cannot stand. Any effort to disarm Americans is to disarm the supreme authority of the nation, which is the People, not public servant executives. Gun control policy is adverse to public interest because it obfuscates citizen authority to act when facing grave danger alone, and cultivates dependency on those executives for increased government burden.

Independence in supreme authority impeaches gun control policy and many anti-crime policies which have acted only to the detriment of the American people.

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© 2007 – John Longenecker – All Rights Reserved John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns, available worldwide. He is CEO of the Good For The Country Foundation, a patriotic think tank examining policies adverse to the public interest.

See www.GoodForTheCountry.org/agenda.html

The entire anti-violence movement should know by now that disarming citizens cannot prevent violence. The anti-violence movement is a boondoggle.

October 26th was the week for the Empty Handgun Holster Protest , where college students wore their empty holsters to college campus to demonstrate several highlights about armed self-defense as the optimal answer to school shootings.

The Empty Holster protest showed: i) the person you see wearing the holster is a fellow student, law-abiding, and not an aggressor, with or without a waepon of any kind; ii) students probably around often enough in large enough numbers on campus to stop a shooter, a useful presence; iii) that person has satisfied state requirements, and; iv) that person has a civil right to be armed wherever he/she goes, and no one else really has anything to say about it, least of all vexing organizations seeking to dismantle a civil right.

In an invective response, Hamm is reported by FOX News to have said, “You don’t like the fact that you can’t have a gun on your college campus? Drop out of school.”

Hamm showcases the very ugly face of the entire anti-violence movement which, along with campuses, is itself becoming menacing: i) its activists defy the law, get anti-law laws passed which they got backed with unjust force, and ii) they force our kids to sue to get a ruling, only to defy the win the kids obtained from the court!!

BULLIES do this in an abuse of the law; it discredits their message and reduces them to gutter belligerents. It is time to understand that they are not anti-violence after all when their policies contribute to violence.

The anti-violence movement has developed what experts call A Pattern: initial belligerent defiance of the law, (state law in many cases) even when it’s affirmed and handed down just for them (as in the Washington D.C. and New Orleans rulings); in ignoring case history (what Al Gore calls controlling authority), forcing plaintiffs to sue to get a ruling (Virginia Tech Panel and elsewhere), only to defy it. This smug abuse is bad for the country.

Now this is important for the non-gun owner households to know: This is the kind of abuse the Founders anticipated when they wrote 2A, not to meet greivance with violence, but to meet Crime and thus prevent politicians from using continuing crime as an excuse for policies they want to introduce.

The Pattern is to obfuscate citizen authority to act when facing grave danger; violence grows for lack of self-defense; officials point to violent crime and escalate anti-self-defense policies: result is increased dependencyon officials who cannot protect constituents.

Simple. Some call this Progressive. The fact of the matter is that if students could carry weapons, the campus would be safer from shooters, and this would spoil the political picnic of presiding over never-ending crisis.

Yes, friends, this is quite an education our kids are getting.

There is a third very ugly thing we dislike intensely in this, and it is what makes the issue completely non-partisan. After all, Liberty and citizen authority are non-partisan. That ugliness emanating from campus administrations is the un-American practice of punishing the student for opposing ideas. Retaliation. Silencing people by official intimidation.

It is what you didn’t see in the Empty Holster Protest that is newsworthy: students who have asked administrations to consider concealed carry of weapons by adult students with CCW permits are reported in weeks prior to the protest to be punished by way of suspension, by psychological counseling, or by expulsion. Reports show that students were warned in writing not even to bring it up — warned with an ‘or-else’ tone — and when one student or another became brave enough to ask why, or if they elected to exercise their student rights (not to mention civil rights), they were ordered suspended and ordered into counseling. Or worse.

‘Worse’ is this: students fear administrative action more than they do the murderers who may come onto campus. Though many did not fear administrative action following this protest, enough did. We know how many CCW students there are, and it seems they sat this one out. Fearing officials more than fearing thugs is a bad sign for this country. Gun bans demonstrate that constituents fear their officials more than they fear murderers. This intimidation affects all students. This is how anti-liberty policy affects non gun owners.

Who’s the aggressor here?

Gun Control policy against crime fails because it obfuscates citizen authority to act in self-defense by painting gun owners as extreme. On the other hand, Gun Control for politics succeeds in breeding unarmed dependency on agencies.

A White Paper (see below) presents the issue clearly and objectively for the inquiring student or 2008 Candidate, policy writer, physician or academician who wants to look at the solution intentionally not put on the table.

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The White Paper – How American Gun Control Policy Is Adverse To The Public Interest - is available at www.goodforthecountry.org/whitepaper.html

The agenda is to clean house of corruption. I have praised Bobby Jindal in my book – Transfer of Wealth – and I am so very pleased at his win. Congratulations, again, Bobby.

I addressed the aftermath of Katrina, pointing to the utter disgrace of how the Dems had run things to the point of undermining the American way of life. I had pointed to several disgraces during and post-Katrina, and shown how Jindal’s courage has served successfully to begin to turn things around for his state.

His dignifying the people then and now is most encouraging, and what Americans love in any candidate is to know they are respected. This, no doubt, will be part of his plan for Louisiana, and it is this which makes news in whether his win can signal other wins around the nation.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed not only whole communities, but its wind blew the roof off the smoke-filled rooms of abuse of due process. The poverty there — forty years of it — is described by most of the media as a failure of Government, but this is very misleading. It is a failure of Democrat policies.

The insistence of the Dems instituted one horribly wrong policy, among others; in such largess, it substituted the Democrat Demagoguery for Spirit, and committed the second most objectionable and foreseeable form of cleansing – the prevention of whole families from being born – in breeding generations of Hopelessness. Dependency and Hopelessness. The prevention of families from being born.

Largess is one of the ugliest compounds in the formulary of demagoguery as it masquerades as compassion. It breaks personal spirit, it discourages self-respect, it breeds anger, and it substitutes dependency for faith. Dependency is the ankle shackle of chains.

This is an exquisite example of how disrespectful one party is of its constituents, the formula for success being Jindal’s view of his constituents.

From Page 36 of Transfer Of Wealth…

In 2006, the law-abiding won another victory in Louisiana in the passage of HR 5013, otherwise known as The Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act, sponsored by Bobby Jindal (R-La). The Act bars Federal officials from takings of lawfully owned firearms during emergencies or disasters. It passed 322-99.

Jindal added: “In time of disaster, you cannot throw out the amendment that guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Following Hurricane Katrina … confiscations and prohibitions .. deprived law-abiding citizens of their rights to personal security, personal liberty and private property, all in violation of the Constitution of the United States.”

The Second Amendment Foundation and the NRA joined in suing New Orleans Mare Nifong .. I’m sorry, Nagin, Mayor Nagin .. To return weapons confiscated illegally. The plaintiffs prevailed, and the Mare refused to comply. New Orleans is now on the record as being in contempt of court. Now what? Officials break the law, then defy constituents to sue, only to break the law further by defiance of the court order constituents win.

Bobby Jindal’s predecessor, Governor Kathleen Blanco, did nothing to protect the interests of the people of Louisiana on this account, and instead put “Boots on the ground” of National Guardsmen who were “..fresh from Iraq with orders to shoot to kill.” This while citizens are disarmed and while prisoners are let out of jail ‘for their safety’.

Gun confiscations bring dependency now to include not only the poor, but the rest of the state, disarming them while thugs roam. This dependency – compelled dependency and defiance – has to stop.

Bobby Jindal is more than a breath of fresh air, he is an utter inspiration.

I wonder if the Governor-elect will be glad to carry his respect for his constituents one step further. Where rights of citizens are recognized by state law, support for personal carry of weapons is spotty throughout. There are many reports – too many reports – of police detaining persons and confiscations of personal weapons throughout the state. Gun control and outright disarmament has been a large part of the movement to breed dependency on various levels. Can a Governor repeal all gun control by executive order, and begin to break the grip of dependency?

There is suspicion that gun confiscations are a trial balloon to see how the public will handle it, along with other issues the people protest. In a condition where officials have too long ignored due process, the people respond by invoking due process.

Congratulations again. Congratulations to us all.

Bobby Jindal’s win is good for the country.
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John Longenecker is CEO of Good For The Country, Inc., an emerging non-profit think tank. The Foundation has issued a White Paper on Gun Control Policy viewable at www.GoodForTheCountry.org/whitepaper.html

This week, Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the Microstamping bill on the reason that it will help police trace criminal shooters. This is not possible, of course. It is too easy to substitute, plant or to (ahem) police up one’s brass at a scene such that the trail is worse than cold, it can become tragically misleading. If brass can even be found – it could too easily become a trap for innocent gun owners should the technology even operate correctly, and there are many doubts about this at this hour. How are non-compliant guns safe today, but unsafe in 2010? This is a gun ban.

There are more than 300 million guns legally in the hands of 80 million adults in this country, and adult constituents are going to remember this bill at the polls as being most resentful, ineffectual in fighting crime, and belligerent to the American way of life. This may have national repercussions as citizens nationwide notice how Californians fear officials more than they fear criminals.

In 2010, criminals can easily switch to revolvers; or to brute force, or multiple assailants, or sawed off shotguns, or older guns, or drive-by shootings as they usually do anyway, thereby furnishing police with no more leads than before. This is more likely, actually, to be more of a dead-end as the net result is more of wiping out sales of new semi-automatic handguns. How does this trace crime when no one buys the things? With no guns bought, there are none to be stolen from owners. This is gun control without crime control.

Interdiction won’t work, either, if there is no criminal demand in trafficking for those guns and probably little manufacture of them, anyway.

Does this law apply to officer-issued semi-automatics? There are plenty of officer-involved shooting cases where such a tracing tool would have been most useful, and more to come this year to make good use of the new tool. Why not? It would be unreasonable not to impose this on officer weapons. No doubt the technology for officers would be as exculpatory as it can be indicting in the interest of justice. Or safety.

This week the Governor vetoed a health bill he said shouldn’t be decided by lawmakers, but by the People. California could very easily put all gun laws to the vote. The People might be most delighted to discover beyond question what the People want instead of what lawmakers want. Why not find out together? Stop hiding the ball.

Gun control is not where crime is fought: crime is fought instance-by-instance by the people most qualified to meet it as-it-happens: the target, the people with legal authority over police policy and over officials, and certainly with authority to stop a crime. Yes, the victim, the person in individual legal authority to act in self-defense with up to lethal force, and who is without first responders. Without that lethal force in hand — the lethal force secured by law — the constituent is a sitting duck. Since individuals have no constitutional right to police protection [Castle Rock v. Gonzales, Supreme Court, 2005 and before], we are entirely on our own, especially during the moments of the crime itself.

This is where gun control does nothing for crime and challenges citizen authority which has oversight of officials.

It is likely Microstamping will be challenged as unconstitutional. More and more officials are being handed down adverse decisions for their gun bans. And more defy those court orders, as in Ohio, in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans where courts havd found that gun bans and confiscations are held to be illegal, and have ordered that weapons are to be returned. This is why constituents will resent this. This official defiance of law is frightening.

Now – or in 2010 – is not a good time to disarm Americans. It’s never a good time to challenge and vex citizen authority, to deny a constituent vote on the question. It’s never a good time to force citizens to sue for something already secured in law, especially where the history has next been to further vex the people by defiance of court order. (more…)

In previous editions of Good For The Country, I mentioned how wrongful death lawsuits may play an important role in reclaiming the sovereignty of the adult students murdered on a campus which had no power to stop a shooter and which frustrates the target from acting in self-defense. Yes, adult students submit to the rules of the campus or go elsewhere, I know, but this involves a reasonable expectation of a high degree of trust that the administration not only has student interests at heart, but also knows what in the world they are doing.

When the students know more about the solution than the administration does, and then an administration won’t be reasonable, the entire United States has a problem.

In the case of guns – or, more specifically of safety or of citizen authority since the nation’s inception – many, many Non-Gun Owners don’t know what they are doing. For Educators, they have forgotten what citizen authority is viz-a-viz themselves as public servants.

When any appointed or elected official becomes stubborn and will not hear the obvious because they sense it will undermine one’s authority – even a little – one has stopped acting in the interests of the people he/she is sworn to serve and begins to vex them. In the case of Mike Nifong, many were vexed. In the case of campus shootings, many are killed for such very similar vexings. The cost of this luxury of hiding the ball is far too high, and there is positively no difference between school officials hiding the ball of citizen authority and state law and Mike Nifong’s hiding the ball.

This sort of vexing of the people officials are to serve – this bad faith hiding the ball – is on the increase. Official stubbornness and defiance of law is becoming indecent now. Nifong is one example, but when the law is to be shown administrators – adult citizen authority, for instance or state law – the school policy of banning personal weapons is impeached. or should be, one would think. Enter the slippery argument of going to court or other corner of bureaucracy for a ‘ruling’ on the question the administration should already know.

This is the indecency. Pretending that one is dealing in good faith with students by seeking a ruling. This is as disingenuous as asking for another toss of the coin, then best three out of five, then best seven out of ten.

A school has no such authority to waive a civil right, especially one which acts in the public interest when the ban on personal weapons which is affirmed by state law operates against the public interest. Consulting others for a ruling is a stalling tactic. It is bad faith.

In the final analysis, a campus Administration is an aggregate of public servants, and does not get the last word: the people get the last word, and the people spoke three centuries ago. Called ratification, it is not something subject to majority rule or sway in 2007 – It is inalienable. They’ve already had this debate. No need to seek a ruling from another bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, armed slef-defense is proven to be a great Safeguard of our Liberty. It’s a Safeguard for students. It is good for the country.

_____________________________

John Longenecker is CEO of the Good For The Country Foundation, a 501(c)(3) education organization. See www.GoodForTheCountry.org/agenda.html

As most of my readers know, I do not write for gun owners, but specifically for the Non-gun owners. What do 80 million gun owners know that non-gun owners don’t know? Primarily, that self-defense is not an opinion of any one group, it is a life skill for all – a totally non-partisan survival skill. It is also the authority of the citizen over the objections of administrators who have taken an oath to serve the very people they vex. It is this citizen authority which is deliberately ignored by officials on their political campus say-so which they back by force.

Let me say this again: Though a household may plan for root canal, unemployment, illness or car accident – how the household will meet and even survive criminal violence is the most neglected area of household management. This, of course, extends to family members away from home, as in workplace or school campus. You do not check your citizen authority at the Admissions Office or Human Resources.

When will they learn? Workplace or campus bans of personal weapons gives the shooter an enormous tactical striking advantage, and and bans act to the detriment of the students and workers this way.

Why a policy so adverse to the interests of the student? Because Citizens play a vital role in crime control, and excluding citizens from the process is dangerous on so many levels. It keeps crisis alive. Personal Independence (independence in authority on various levels) discredits the very need for such disarming, controlling policies, and dissolves the Dependency officials love so much. This compelled Dependency on others to the detriment of student safety is very resentful, and this is the source of the indignation of even non-students who have an interest in such policies.

Disarming willing students is to force all to choose between felony or funeral. Virginia Tech chose funeral for 32 of its students. Delaware State is a late arrival. Other shootings have occured within the last few days purely on the shoter’s knowledge that his target is a Victim Disarmament Zone. Citizen Authority prevails, or it should. Why does a University hide this? Why quarrel with constituents? Why punish legal self-defense with expulsion? Why ocnsult other bureaucrats and stack the deck of input?

To hide the secret that citizen authority not only prevails, but rather capably impeaches the very need for such dangerous anti-violence policies.

Do you understand now how officials cannot teach until they learn? It’s a credibility issue represented as a safety issue to hide who is really in Authority: Citizens, and that includes students and visitors. ALL GUN CONTROL OBFUSCATES CITIZEN AUTHORITY TO ACT. It punishes it, too.

Campuses have to learn that they are in charge only so far as the people authorize them – this means that student [citizen] authority trumps that of the servants who serve us. Recast, repeal or rewrite that delegated authority and you begin to solve your campus shooter problem.

Gun control and gun bans affect non-gun owners when all constituents begin to fear their public servants more than they fear murderous criminals. The student is then held hostage by both. Very American. We’re all held hostage this way.

Isn’t this what it comes down to? Felony or funeral (or expulsion)?

The education is that our Independence and individual authority can protect students better than Administrators can. Criminals fear armed citizens more than they fear police.

Remember that if you think the cost of a good education is expensive, try the cost of ignorance.
It is paid for in lives.

It’s time for officials to be much more faithful to the students and to their oath — even if it has to be litigated.

It would be good for the country.
____________________

John Longenecker is President and CEO of the Good For The Country Foundation, a patriotic education non-profit at www.GoodForTheCountry.org

In arguing that weapons applies only to militias, the District fails to understand that Militia as defined by United States Code applies to civilians as much as it does military. Civilians were the first Militia. See U.S. Code Title 10 herewhere we still are Militia.

It is also important to note they did not mean National Guard in those days: National Guard was not conceived and organized for another 130 years.

But that’s only the beginning.

If it please the Court, I would cite five authorities emanating from writings of the Founders in Original Intent and decisions since the nation’s inception. I have other authorities, but time before the Court is limited.

1. The Founders had revolted against, above all else, abuses of the law, and in writings, in debate and ratifications, they wrote words of art that abuse of due process be forbidden. This is especially evident in the second amendment: first, the modern question of whether the right is collective or individual is without meaning, because the second amendment was not written for citizens, but written for government – that is, written directly to government, like most of the Constitution is.

Second, the second amendment was not written about guns, per se, but about abuse of the law. The Founders did not need to imagine weapons of the future – they did not view weapons as a threat to the new nation, but an asset. They had just defeated the Crown and its cruelty in abuse of its own law; the second amendment was written to forbid future self-dealing abuses of due process as an ever-present threat in any age, any era, any government. (Any government does not mean sovereign states outside the U.S., but all levels of government within the U.S., including federal government, states, counties and cities.)

Declaring the citizen as supreme authority, the Founders knew that citizen authority must be backed by lethal force, and forever. To perfect the concept that any regulation, interference or infringement of this force is unreasonable, the amendment which protects that force is made absolute in the words of art, ‘shall not be infringed’.

2. But rather than any Government Troops versus Citizens shoot-outs, violent crime as an instrument of demagoguery is used to sway the public to disarm, and in so doing, to surrender the force which backs its authority. The net effect of this is, of course, higher numbers of injured victims of crime where constituents fear a fate of prosecution more than thuggery, and this becomes self-fulfilling for the demagogue who claims that crime is intractable. It is not. For those communities, gun control is the exquisite abuse of state or local government power, the kind foreseen and forbidden by the Founders.

3. The second amendment can also lift burdens of government, always a worthwhile endeavor, as opposed to the ever-increasing official desire for the taking up of burdens in demagoguery. Unanswered with citizen authority, crime makes more work, more unreasonable law, more hirings, more purchases, restricting reasonable resistance in order to grow crime in order to grow government. More government burden.

4. Since the inception of an organized police force in the United States, it has never been a duty of law enforcement to protect individuals. From the earliest rulings to the most recent – Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 2005, U.S. Supreme Court – the rulings have been the same: no constitutional right to police protection.

This leaves a tremendous void in the logic of disarming citizens who face grave danger alone by the hundreds of thousands each year in crimes which never even used a gun.

What about 300 million guns in the hands of 80 million citizens? In America, about 29,000 persons are shot to death each year according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (mostly crime-on-crime shootings), and that same report demonstrates that armed citizens in fact de-escalate violent crime on the order of more than 2.5 million times each year.

Why such a disparity? It is 86 to 1.

Because guns are not the major commonality among all violence. By the numbers of all violent crime, violence in grave danger or great bodlly harm is easily perpetrated without a gun – in beatings, multiple assailants, knifings, strongarm assaults, rapes, robberies gone bad, and abductions. Regulation of guns does not foil crime, it enhances it. 2.5 million gun defenses each year to de-escalate violence is not guns against guns, but armed citizens on the record 2.5 million times a year of de-escalating all manner of violent acts from completion.

5. Public policy and interest. EMS teaches CPR, First-aid and the Heimlich Maneuver to citizens because Advanced Life Support cannot always arrive with a life-saving response time. This is also true of law enforcement. Citizen intervention has been held to be in established public policy and interest. Our system recognizes the average reasonable person doctrine, the presumption of intent in reasonable apprehension of grave danger, the doctrine of standing in the shoes of the victim, citizen authority, citizen arrest, assisting law enforcement, volunteerism and other doctrines, reflecting a spirit of helpfulness and self-rule which must not be discouraged or punished. In time of violence, no one – no police or policy – can take the place of the citizen as the first line of defense. Armed citizens are the most reasonable and responsible of all.

It is this marriage of liberty and personal responsibility which together outshine the hysterical forecasts and hyperbole of gun control and intentional interference by even the slightest gun regulation. The genius of Original Intent Independence and its responsibility are together illegally obscured and frustrated purely because of Liberty’s ability to shine as the ultimate authority as it was intended in a nation of self-rule. Crime cannot any longer be used as a tool for the ambitious who cite violence as a cause to disarm that ultimate authority.

No body of Government at any level has any legal authority to interfere with the force which backs citizen supreme authority, but it can affirm it in respecting Original Intent of the Founders who knew abuse of due process in any time, any era, any government.
___________

John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns, available worldwide. See www.TransferOfWealth.net

According to Las Vegas News 3 and LasVegasNow.com, Nevada colleges are acknowledging not only how serious school shootings are, but are looking at arming faculty. This is entirely the wrong direction for several reasons.

1. Many Nevadans are already well trained, qualified and background-checked. Nevada is a right-to-carry state, and concealed carry of weapons is common there. If these men and women are reasonable and safe enough to carry on the street, why not on campus?

Personal safety is not checked at the Admissions Office in reliance on others, and the idea of self-defense being allowed or not allowed is unAmerican, unreasonable, and very resentful to a qualified taxpayer who instructs administrators and not the other way around. The idea that officials can overrule citizens and to their detriment as the victim disarmament zones have been is one of the major defects in official thinking. It’s not surprising that the bureaucracy is offering a bureaucratic solution, consistently one of self-interest over genuine public safety and authority.

Arming faculty is to make the very same mistake many trustees are making: freezing the citizen out of the equation in a “Don’t do anything until we get there!” bureaucratic mind-set. This is too self-dealing.

2. Arming only delegated persons isn’t going to cut it. With the firepower in the hands of a person who could be so easily known to a shooter, all the shooter needs to do is wait for the individual to go off campus, and bingo. Brilliant. The entire strategy behind concealed carry throughout Nevada is that the aggressor is never certain who is carrying and who will return fire. Or how many will answer and hold him for police as armed students have in the past. [For the model of what to do in Virginia, look to the Appalachian Law School incident of January 16th, 2002 where two armed law students there held the shooter at gunpoint long before police could arrive. Keyword: Appalachian law school shootings.]

3. News reports treat the Nevada question well, and some interviewed say they prefer to leave it to the professionals. This could make sense, but for one thing: school shootings are completed well before the police are notified, much less on scene. As we have seen, shootings move fast in taking what they really want, then the shooter commits suicide for the purpose of evading justice – itself an offense.

4. In Nevada as in the other states, police have no duty to protect individuals. Keyword: police have no duty to protect.

Friends, if we’re talking about student safety, colleges and other institutions need to accept the facts for any serious-minded approach:

1. Students and visitors are already possessed of all legal authority to stop a crime in progress, may come to the aid of another, and are within established public policy and interest throughout the rest of the state, are they not? Yes, they are. No yes, but about it.

2. Armed students are already on scene. They are immediately available in large numbers. It’s like teaching first-aid and CPR to citizens. The most critical response time is then immediately, and with that legal authority, the law is already on scene.

3. It doesn’t take 21 weeks of training to take such a situation in hand. According to the FBI, based on reports handed in by police nationwide, armed citizens de-escalate violence more than 2.5 million times a year. And that’s key: de-escalating the situation. And they use their legal authority.

Now that’s the way to student safety.

Where carrying a gun on campus is a Class E felony – even in a right-to-carry state – it’s obviously time now to de-criminalize personal decisions which serve the public interest as armed citizens do. It’s against public policy and interest to force an adult student or visitor to choose between felony and funeral. Ban the ban on handguns.

The bottom line is that in time of emergency, the target is the first line of defense, and with full legal authority to act. This authority can no longer be obfuscated or punished by officials who believe their authority trumps that of the people they serve.

When facing grave danger alone as students must, no matter what officials promise, no one can take your place as the first line of defense.

__________________________
John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry, available worldwide. See www.TransferOfWealth.net

Question: is it more in the public interest to see students carrying weapons than to see them unarmed and vulnerable? Is it in the public interest to question citizen authority to act and to characterize liberty individuals as anti-social, and to disarm them? Is it in the public interest to be alone and defenseless, or alone and armed not only with the personal weapon, but also with their legal authority?

Legal authority is key to the discussion.

Let’s examine at a few issues which factor into the question and which gun control nuts do not mention.

1. Praise to those institutions opening the issue. As I report often, it is wonderful to see colleges consulting constituents and no longer freezing them out of directing their own best interests. Consulting exclusively other officials denies constituent input, and I praise those officials who are open to deeper understanding of what personal weapons are really all about. Praise.

2. Within the article is the mention… “However, Clemson University and several other South Carolina colleges’ and universities’ police departments have come out strongly against the new bill.” [armed students] Excuse me, but the Founders did not consult the very people they hire and limit, and they wrote words of art to avoid the same thing in any era, including 2007. The second amendment was not written about guns, it was written to forbid abuses of due process, and consulting officials falls back into that trap. In fact, gun control itself is the exquisite example of abuse of due process. ‘Coming out strongly against the new bill’ is to oppose the lethal force which backs citizen authority.

Of course, you don’t consult your servants on how much authority you have, or on what you are allowed or not allowed. You tell them. If they quarrel, you are not challenging their authority, it is they who are challenging yours. And this is what personal weapons is all about in this country: the force which backs that authority, forever, or in other words, ‘..shall not be infringed.’ Otherwise, elements, such as violent crime, can become a perfect excuse to disarm people.

All gun control fails because it obfuscates, discourages and outright punishes that citizen authority to act when facing grave danger. Crime grows. Police may not legally interfere with the right to self-defense, especially politically and when they are not around. Free people don’t need permission from their hired officials, they tell them. Is their knowledge so esoteric that it is beyond our instruction?

3. Individual citizens have not only the civil right to carry a handgun on their person, but they also have the authority to use up to lethal force when – in their reasonable surmise – they are facing grave danger alone. It is this authority which is being pushed aside – as in consulting police instead of constituents, or in listening to anti-gun organizations, again freezing the consituent out.

4. In this country, Police have no duty to protect individuals, and there is no promise they could arrive in time, anyway.

5. Finally, where there is much quandary, when in doubt, we take a look to what is a preponderance of public policy and interest. Will it be public policy to see reasonable, armed students with existing legal authority, or will it be public policy to compel them to come to class defenseless and frustrate that lawful authority, putting them at a risk we know well by now? How is a known victim disarmament zone in public policy and interest?

It’s about time schools, churches, shopping malls, airports and civil aircraft, and public buildings take a close look at these elements of the issue, and take the side of the students and visitors. Disarming constituents under penalty of law is not being on their side.

As I say, we won’t prevent the next shooting by psychoanalyzing or profiling the next shooter, but by preparing their next victims and respecting their citizen authority, an authority which is not checked at the Admissions Office.

Students don’t die because they fought back, their lives are ruined because they didn’t. And when individuals are possessed of all legal authority to act, how does a city or any official body have an interest in obfuscating, blocking and punishing the exercise of that authority?

Officially recognizing that personal authority wherever one has a right to be is to act in the public interest.

And that would be good for the country.
_____________________________________

John Longenecker’s second edition of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns is available worldwide. See www.TransferOfWealth.net

What a free people fear most is the assumption of powers not granted, compounded by indifference to our way of life and backing that indifference with official force. Even worse, the deliberate deteriorization of conditions to usher in self-dealing solutions even more adverse to our way of life.

Free people have a reasonable apprehension now of a complete disregard for our Authority.

Three recent anti-liberty newsmakers are exquisite examples of this kind of obnoxious and often illegal political defiance of the people who bring their grievances forward in asserting their rights in protection of their communities. Officials who oppose these ideas oppose citizen rule and community protection.

Let’s start with the critique of the Virginia Tech Massacre. I had urged all citizens concerned to insist on participating in the critique of the shooting, as I recommend with all shootings. It is imperative that the citizens have control over the direction of such disaster planning. I’d said on talkradio and in my column that psychoanalysis and divining rod prognostications are useless because forecasting is useless. The better direction is not in profiling the next shooter, but in preparedness in the next victim. The ugly truth is that administrations ignore the most straightforward of the legal solutions — citizen authority. The ugly truth is that citizen authority would work wonderfully.

The emphasis, as I have said, is not on guns per se, but on citizen authority to act with up to lethal force when facing grave danger. That authority comes into play when one is alone, most often when police aren’t even yet notified. As liberty nuts say, when seconds count, police are moments away. That’s all the time a Cho needs to kill as much as he likes. And it’s all the time the next one will need, too.

What a waste of sovereignty. What a waste of assets, namely citizen authority.

Again, praise to South Carolina and Utah for recognizing that individual citizen authority and for taking a pro-active position on student safety and way of life.

The present critique of the Virginia Tech shooting is the exquisite example of what we feared would come true — the panel examining the shooting is freezing out the parents of the murdered children. The panel promises other avenues of input, but it’s still freezing the parents out. I urge the parents and other concerned citizens as well to demand a place on the panel and in other critique venues, and I demand of the panel that they cooperate and furnish a seat for them.

Another example is more long-standing. Those officials in New Orleans are still in contempt of court where a judge has ordered the return of firearms confiscated during Hurricane Katrina. The Mare also released criminals from jails for their safety, remember? Another example of abuse of authority, this time found by a court to be wrongful.

Third, I received a bulletin and appeal from the Citizens Committee for The Right To Keep And Bear Arms, a patriotic organization acting not only in the interests of gun owners, but in everyone’s public interest. Protecting a right for one protects the rights of all, and this appeal is to fight a handful of unpatriotic officials in Washington who recently stated aloud taking your authority from you. Not just my authority, but yours, too. Enter CCRKBA as a search-term alert keyword.

The bottom line is this, friends: each of these is not about guns, it’s about the force which backs your citizen authority against boondoggles which, themselves, talk you out of your authority. Violent Crime is an element of such boondoggles where violence seems to be intractable, but for the fact that your Independence can meet grave danger better than police or policies can.

When it comes to protection, you’re on your own. Discouraging this authority on various levels is unAmerican, and any official against your authority to act is unpatriotic. It’s not their call to do that.

This obfuscation of your authority is part of every boondoggle of continuing violent crime. This is where gun rights groups are not about guns, but Independence; of backing your authority. You may not see how you need it today, but you use it every hour of every day, don’t you?

In all three of these, when it comes to exercising some of that legal authority in civic participation in self-rule, the citizen is becoming increasingly squeezed out of the process, and the takings of weapons, hiding authority and the freezing out of citizens in the preparedness and planning process are closely related.

Lot of that going around lately.

Gun control fails because it excludes citizen authority to act. All policies which exclude citizen authority to act will fail. That includes Panels.

The practice of stubbornly obfuscating this authority lies to the people. Officials who freeze the people out of the process of critique and planning join in this most unpatriotic movement.

Stop excluding the people. Stop profiling the next shooter, and develop preparedness in the next victims to use their authority.

It’s good for the country.

_______________________

John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry. See www.TransferOfWealth.net

There is little question that non-profits here effect social change, and for the kind of change you’d like to see, simply locate the foundation which interests you and support it. As part of that change, there is a healthy measure of protecting the public interest as some foundations give grants to those in need of assistance as part of their mission. They help people.

This is as it should be.

As President and Founder of the Good For the Country Foundation, I feel the sting of some disturbing news: How do you feel about a civil right being labeled as bad taste? How do you feel about patriotic foundations, publishers and certain groups being classified as X-rated and that your Internet search term brings you to a warning page that you must be 18 to view the site you’re looking for?

This may be rectified soon, since some have brought it to the attention of the search engine holding company, but Dogpile, the search engine, categorizes keywords such as Guns or Gun Control as Adult Content.

What’s the big deal?

It’s my opinion that this is defamatory. Blocking or even warning visitors that your search term is to be found only after a warning that the topic is alongside X-rated websites is a political maneuver that is very unpatriotic in nature. It’s not mere opinion, it is technically unpatriotic because it reflects values incompatible with our national interest and it could be that the case could be made that it is defamatory.

This is classic abuse of the First Amendment in disparaging by association. One may not defame another and claim freedom of speech, any more than one may falsely advertise, commit mail fraud or lie under oath and hide behind the first amendment. The first amendment is not absolute, but the second amendment is, and to warn visitors that the search terms of Guns and Gun Control are taking you to a category of XXX content is to disparage those patriotic organizations named among the search results.

Try it for yourself: Visit Dogpile and enter search terms Guns, and see what happens. Now enter Violence as a search term and notice no such warning. How is this unpatriotic? Let’s review.

For the impartial or anti-gun, here is something you should know. The Founding Fathers had just won the War for Independence, and that independence was to be free from abuse of due process. This is where the Crown (or government) gets to say what is illegal, and the subjects have no say-so. In this country, the citizen is the supreme authority, and it is the government which has little or no say-so. Like it so far?

Well, if you do, you need to understand that the Founders did, too, and they wrote the Constitution to put limits on government, and they back that document with legal force, force in the hands of the supreme authority, the citizen.

Now when the Second Amendment was written, the Founders knew they didn’t have to fear guns in any age, then and now, but they did fear abuses of due process (then and now), so they wrote 2A not for citizens like you and me, but for government, and said to government, ‘shall not be infringed’. The Founders anticipated that due process would be used to disarm the honest. It is. Gun laws do nothing to stop crime, and associating liberty organizations with websites of bad taste by way of an adult content warning is no accident of good intentions.

Weapons are the legal and lethal force which backs citizen authority, and government cannot legally make moves to regulate the force which backs that authority. Get it? The Founders wrote that such infringements are not permitted, and, of course, it is the citizen who gets the final say in this. Other citizens of a differing opinion may speak, but cannot be patriotic if they dissuade you from a civil right.

Search engines, then, which join the anti-authority rhetoric and groups making it harder to find information are not operating in the public interest when they defame for the purpose of discouraging learning more about that sovereign authority as part of our way of life here.

Freud said that all knowledge is good. He knew that knowledge, like any other thing, can be weaponized, and that its use depends entirely on the hand that operates it.

This is certainly true of the Internet. A Warning may seem helpful at first, but it is more than that: it is a branding that the search results are among the purveyors of bad taste.

The free access of information is becoming a political football to silence patriotic views, views which are in the public interest. Access to information must be unfettered.

It would be good for the country.

______________________________

John Longenecker is President of the Good For The Country Foundation at www.GoodForTheCountry.org

With all the school shootings recently, investigators, media and others need to be sure to include citizens in the critique and recovery process. Officials – armed officials, by the way — have a very bad record of freezing constituents out of the planning and recovery process.

Meanwhile, let us not forget that some campus administrators are getting it, as in South Carolina and Utah. Praise to you and your patriotic values in recognizing citizen authority. Praise. What do they know others refuse to hear? They know that citizen authority isn’t checked at the admissions office, and they know that it is wrong to fully understand individual citizen authority and to hide it from students or utterly defy that authority.

President Reagan said to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit: “Mr. Gorbachev, let me tell you why it is we distrust you.” Washington, you are getting very much to look and act like Gorbachev.
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]]> http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/24/guns-turn-em-in-officials/feed/ 3 http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/05/answering-brady-center-again-academic-freedom-and-guns-do-mix/ http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/05/answering-brady-center-again-academic-freedom-and-guns-do-mix/#comments Sat, 05 May 2007 18:35:44 +0000 John Longenecker http://goodforthecountry.mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/05/answering-brady-center-again-academic-freedom-and-guns-do-mix/ Because Freedom and Guns mix.

Speaking of academic, the non-profit Brady Center hasn’t learned about Freedom, if their May 3rd, 2007 release is any indication. The Center interferes with American Freedom as it claims to operate in the public interest making the argument against Freedom.

Mentioning in its press releases that the Center is a non-profit, so-called Reports from that organization have amounted, in my opinion anyway, to what the IRS Exempt Organizations publications refer to as unsupported opinion in requirement of non-profits; the Service discourages propaganda for EO’s claiming to educate in the public interest.

The Center’s May 3rd ‘Report’ said that academic freedom and guns don’t mix, and described the NRA’s efforts to decriminalize carrying weapons on campus and in workplace as forcing people. Ladies and gentlemen of America: look who’s talking.

Talk about forcing people, anti-gun tax exempt organizations have succeeded in persuading officials to disarm students, workers and visitors – forcing them to disarm – to the point that mass murderers get the message as to which locales are entirely defenseless. Murderers find them to be as advertised.

The Brady Center has no compunction about forcing people to choose to carry under pain of punishment or to risk dying at the hands of some nut who shares their philosophy of disarmament and defenselessness.

Students are forced to choose between felony or funeral. Emphasis on forced. The Brady center and the officials who cooperate are perfect examples of one-sided force in the wrong hands.

Brady’s ‘Report’ offers reasons why guns must be banned: Drugs and alcohol on campus, suicide and mental health problems, and gun theft. Sounds reasonable at first, doesn’t it? But it lacks support, in more ways than one.

Many gun owners understand that they are Good Will Ambassadors for the Bill Of Rights. In policing themselves, they agree that some people should not own weapons. Rosie O’Donnell, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, Mare Bloomberg, Ted Kennedy, any Kennedy, Mare Fenty, Mare Nagin, George Soros.. Yes, some should not own weapons.

The bottom line is, of course, student safety and the students’ civil rights, rights secured by law. How does an organization work against a civil right secured by law?

Irrespective of such arguments against the right and the wisdom of being armed, forcing students to be defenseless is an unrighteous use of force in this country.

But academic freedom and guns do mix. It’s first and foremost the law of the land, a law which every official must protect instead of obfuscate. Talk about freedom… Talk about education . . Obfuscating both is certainly not in the public interest.

John Stossel’s report of his own handed in to ABC’s 20/20 airing Friday May 3rd, pointed to would-have-been school shootings but for armed students who intervened and held the shooter for police. Armed student intervention is one of the most under-reported types of incident, often the more mis-reported type of incident, which is why Stossel placed it in his Mythbuster series, dispelling the myth of gun control based on his book, Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity.

Gun control doesn’t work. It is a lie and it is downright stupid. Armed students do work and in the public interest a lot more than anti-gun organizations do. In those instances of armed student intervention, many more would have been killed but for the intervention of those armed students present and alert long before police could have been notified, much less arrive.

But for carries a lot of weight in legal persuasion, and it’s a lot more than unsupported opinion.

2008 Candidates: it’s time to consider personal safety and citizen authority as a plank on your platform. It begins with knowing that the rights secured by law have been obfuscated to the advantage of officials who gain from heartbreak and crisis. It’s time to unwind this adverse influence on our society and to respect the sovereign authority of the people, including students and workers.

Your constituents as students and visitors to campus and workplace do not check their civil rights and their authority at the admissions office only to become easy prey for both killers and stubborn officials in known locations.

It’s time to put a stop to marketing personal safety as a commodity to be traded on the open market of political profit-taking as if individual authority didn’t even exist.

It does exist, and that citizen authority trumps the silly inflated unsupported opinion of campus officials.

Repeal all Victim Disarmament Zones.

Repeal all gun laws.
__________________________

John Longenecker is author of the Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry. Visit www.TransferOfWealth.net

Next Talkradio appearance is May 10th, Dr. Jack Stockwell Show, 7 a.m. MST
KTKK, AM 630 Salt Lake City, Utah.

]]> http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/05/answering-brady-center-again-academic-freedom-and-guns-do-mix/feed/ 0 http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/02/gun-control-virginia-tech-and-answering-brady-campaigns-helmke-stop-hiding-the-ball-on-citizen-authority/ http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/02/gun-control-virginia-tech-and-answering-brady-campaigns-helmke-stop-hiding-the-ball-on-citizen-authority/#comments Wed, 02 May 2007 17:30:47 +0000 John Longenecker http://goodforthecountry.mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/02/gun-control-virginia-tech-and-answering-brady-campaigns-helmke-stop-hiding-the-ball-on-citizen-authority/ In a May 1st announcement, The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence pronounced a gun violence epidemic in this country (again), and vows to hold officials accountable for not enacting more severe restrictions on a civil right.

Every year, many more extensive numbers are hurt by knifings, rapes, robberies, beatings, chokings, multi-assailant attacks and, of course, heartbreaking child abductions. All of these continue without guns on the part of the thug or the victim. For all of Helmke’s efforts, he will never succeed in writing a law that stops handgun violence as his non-profit’s purpose, since many crimes are . . well, gunless, and because many gun crimes are crime-on-crime.

Gun control takes more than the gun from the law-abiding taxpayer: it interferes with constituent legal authority to act in self-defense when facing grave danger alone when seconds count. It worked that way at Virginia Tech as well as it works in other campuses and postal workplaces, and certainly as well over the years in the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Australia and other nations where their criminals don’t observe the law any more than ours do. Proven to be against the public interest, in fact, this purpose decidedly isn’t good for a non-profit entity advocating it.

Helmke’s May 1st statement says that we should be ashamed that we allowed this to happen. What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemosabe?

It is not good for individuals to be forced to choose between felony and funeral, and this is where Helmke’s purpose leads: the choice of being armed and illegally so versus being disarmed and dead… as in school shootings.

But voters will also hold candidates accountable for disarmament laws which leave them helpless at home as much as on campus or workplace. Felony or funeral?

Gun control today discourages and even punishes your current citizen authority. Where the head of a household wishes to make his/her best informed decision always on how to plan household safety, the Brady ilk hides the ball. It withholds the facts that police have no duty to protect you, that police are allies with honest gun owners, that police appreciate the individual as the first line of defense, and that nobody can take your place as that first line of defense.

This hiding the ball has to stop as long as an entity claims to operate in the public interest, and that includes the public trust of a university. It is not in the interest of the public to disarm the honest, to interfere wholesale with personal safety of the student body, to interfere with a civil right on top of that, and to talk people out of their authority to act when facing grave danger alone. Zero-tolerance: brilliant, huh?

Taxpayers don’t find violence, it finds us, and to demand we disarm is to stand for the insult that we are the troublemakers in society. It really says that universities can’t tell the difference.

Time for a history Lesson for the universities: The second amendment wasn’t written about guns: the founders could care less that the future would have nuclear weapons, AK-47’s, acoustic suppressors or automatic weapons: all the founders were concerned with was what they had enough of — abuse of due process — and which they could certainly foresee in any age, any era, in any government, including their own. Get it, now? The second amendment is absolute not on guns, but on the subject of abuse of due process of taking the guns when it says shall not be infringed.

Furthermore, the second amendment is absolute because it is the lawful force which backs citizen authority, which must be absolute if it to resist abuses of process as the founders endured. That means student and visitor interests and even employee interests prevail over the dictates of the Chancellor or Regents, and are not subject to official interpretation, but interpretation of the citizens. Another history lesson. Put another way, if students want to carry weapons, students get to carry weapons.

It is unpatriotic to expect the sovereign authority of the nation — the citizen, the student and others — to surrender to its own servants under threat of force the very lawful force which ensures and backs our sovereign authority over those dopey servants and their ‘sensible’ abuses of due process.

Hiding the ball is to conceal the better solution put in place precisely for the public interest: it is to lie to people and deal with students in bad faith. Too many adverse social policies exist because good people forget that their personal authority is superior to anything conceived in the mind of officials, and that laws written against that authority are, themselves, illegal.

Concealing that Independence, not teaching it, re-writing U.S. History, and punishing Independence is to hide the ball.

2008 candidates: Repeal all gun laws as good for the country.
__________________________________________

John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry. His website is www.TransferOfWealth.net

]]> http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/02/gun-control-virginia-tech-and-answering-brady-campaigns-helmke-stop-hiding-the-ball-on-citizen-authority/feed/ 1 http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/24/victim-disarmament-zones-part-iii-anti-gun-is-just-decerebrate/ http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/24/victim-disarmament-zones-part-iii-anti-gun-is-just-decerebrate/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:59:19 +0000 John Longenecker http://goodforthecountry.mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/24/victim-disarmament-zones-part-iii-anti-gun-is-just-decerebrate/ Who in this country need Leaders who are so stubborn? Who in this country need leaders at all? We don’t have leaders here, we have executives.

Americans tolerate a lot if they believe it will help a crisis, and many good-natured helpful can be fooled and talked out of their authority in liberty by rhetoric which appears to be reasonable at first, but goes against a civil right. School shootings can be met so very easily if activists and officials stop being so bull-headed. Understand that carrying personal weapons is not an offensive action, it is a defensive action, and it is being frustrated illegally. It is being frustrated immorally.

Understand that the officials and activists are not standing up to the liberty lobby, the liberty lobby is standing up to the officials and the activists who interfere with household and other values in our country. Let’s not lose perspective.

I could mention that our right is inalienable, but what perhaps carries more meaning to every household is one’s legal authority to act in self-defense and defense of another. This legal authority is being frustrated illegally – and with use of official force. You can’t legally make rules that obscure, discourage and punish citizen authority and call it public interest. You can’t hide the values and laws that recognize the right and one’s individual citizen authority to act and still claim you’re faithful to the People in public policy.

Why not recognize the authority of the citizen over that of officials? Some officials just don’t see it that way: it would perhaps prove how unneeded they really are. Entertaining anti-gun activist influence is to depart from their of oath of office. It’s just as wrong even hearing activists who would introduce the idea of people owning other people. It’s against a civil right put there for a reason.

Fortunately, not all of Congress believes as the Schumers and the Feinsteins do. Gun control has backfired into a disaster for the United States, killing our kids and other innocents, and now is not the time to disarm people, but to summon them. If we summon officials to their duty, we’d better get ready to summon ourselves, too, not to war, but to participation in self-governance. Our country is going to Hell purely for our lack of supervising our officials. Instead of supervising them, we have become supervised, now with high-tech surveillance and more use of force on the belief that Americans must be suspicioned for our own good. Nothing could be more decerebrate. Because it’s not true: it’s a bluff, and it’s gotten to the point where officials believe they have all the authority. Now they want all the force, and school shootings are just the excuse to disarm the ultimate authority in this nation, you. Name one gun law that has worked, just one, please. Now think of who obeys those laws. You do.

I don’t care what you believe, you may not legally disarm your neighbors who want to carry their weapons to be free to act in self-defense when facing grave danger. And grave danger is what it’s all about – not road rage, not insults, not kids on your lawn, not lover shootings, but facing grave danger alone. Or didn’t the activists mention that? The liberty enthusiasts are demanding their weapons for use only in facing grave danger, and hiding and discouraging that anywhere-anytime, instance-by-instance legal authority is decerebrate.

It’s time to stop hiding the ball. It’s wrong to disarm people whose independence can impeach the dangerous polices — you have the right to self-defense, but not on campus, airports or churches – and decerebrate to think that being defenseless is reasonable and somehow acceptable. It is not.

The problem is that this official position is not mere opinion, it is a stand backed by force. It’s a felony to carry a weapon on campus, in an airport, etc. Why? Why, indeed.

2008 candidates: repeal all gun laws. Repeal the ban of weapons on campus, in airports, public buildings and churches. The students and visitors are average reasonable persons, after all, your constituents, not people to be forced to study and work in victim disarmament zones against their community interests.

2008 candidates need to understand that we’re getting very, very tired of fearing official punishment more than armed murderers. Constituents in a nation of self-rule — heads of household and child alike – are getting very tired of having to choose between felony and funeral.

Repeal all gun laws and respect citizen authority in time of facing grave danger. The rest will take care of itself.

That would be very good for the country.

_____________________

John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry. See www.TransferOfWealth.net

]]> http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/24/victim-disarmament-zones-part-iii-anti-gun-is-just-decerebrate/feed/ 1 http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/18/virginia-tech-victim-disarmament-zone-part-ii-what-do-we-do-about-it/ http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/18/virginia-tech-victim-disarmament-zone-part-ii-what-do-we-do-about-it/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:12:52 +0000 John Longenecker http://goodforthecountry.mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/18/virginia-tech-victim-disarmament-zone-part-ii-what-do-we-do-about-it/ Good For The Country as a syndicated feature isn’t for gun owners; the feature is written for the non-gun owner and heads of household n identifying adversity to our way of life here, this time in an analysis of the Virginia Tech Massacre, Part II. This may sound harsh, but precisely how to optimize any real serious-minded solution to avert the very next school shooting some may be hearing for the very first time.

I’m not talking about guns – I’m talking about citizen authority and hiding the ball.

First, locales that have become announced Victim Disarmament Zones by federal law that you and I cannot carry a weapon within 1,000 feet of a school is an invitation to murderers who simply do it. These campuses, churches and public buildings are no longer immune on grounds of decency. We may sanctify them, but criminals sanctify nothing, and spit on our decency in the most hurt ways possible. It’s time to understand this.

What to do about this indecency of violating what is precious to us is to recognize civilian authority.

One of my greatest apprehensions – and observations in the past – has been the official reaction to first consult law enforcement and to freeze constituents out of the process entirely. One example of the lip service officials give to such events is New Orleans. For all the Internet advisory on civil preparedness, as many governments do, it all went out the window with other plans already in place, plans which very obviously excluded citizens.

New Orleans is under court order to return weapons illegally confiscated. They are now in contempt and still have not obeyed the order. So much for citizen input in disaster preparedness.

Closer to home, in the case of Victim Disarmament Zones around the nation, the message of freezing the citizen out of the equation is clear: “Don’t do anything until we get there.”

Don’t think for a minute that Cho didn’t take this into account. They all do. The Citizen believes he or she has to somehow get permission or wait and Cho gets the message that he has plenty of time to shoot and then commit suicide.

Violent crime is not fought by chasing it, it is not fought by policy and it is not fought by psychoanalysis of the next murderer in queue – violence is fought my meeting it instance by instance, by facing it where the target refuses to be a victim.

Violent Crime is not fought by doing nothing until we get there, by waiting for assets, nor by debating on which teams should be organized — crime is fought with citizen authority and personal superior force. It is this authority which is being hidden, discouraged and outrightly punished against the interests of the students and the interests of the United States herself.

It’s time to muster the guts to admit it. The rest ought to take care of itself because freedom can take care of itself. Virginia Tech is an exquisite example of what not to do.

My second fear is the failure of heads of household to realize their own citizen authority in planning how they will meet and manage an encounter with violence. In my surmise as an observer, I see a tragic values shift in America to discourage Independence and to cultivate dependency on agencies. Disarming people is one example of this and at what a price.

Independence can shine and discredit many social policies, so gun control is imposed to hide the ball such that many people never have the opportunity to act in good judgement.

Individuals are more afraid of the legal system than the thugs.

This pre-emptive policy – don’t do anything until we get there – hides the ball as to how the situation can be best met, not by taking the law into one’s own hands, but by taking the situation in hand – and with full legal authority to do so. One of the best kept secrets is that thugs aren’t afraid of police nearly as much as they fear an armed citizen.

Individuals have not only a right, but the authority to act in self-defense with up to lethal force. We have the authority to act in defense of another. That authority is the law of the land, and cannot in good faith be hidden by officials who still claim to act in the public interest.

Why discourage this authority on campuses? Why do you check your citizen authority at the door? Why, indeed?

So, do we arm everyone with guns?

If necessary.

But it wouldn’t be.

All that’s needed is the recognition of citizen authority, and individuals will elect or not elect to carry their personal handgun. Hiding the ball means obfuscating individual authority and discouraging action as if it were a matter of opinion or legal question. Citizen authority is beyond question. Ever hear of citizen’s arrest? Even after this, some will still believe that someone else will protect them.

The solution is a combination of things: abandoning the dangerous old paradigm of disarming the target in the stupid name of being anti-violence, and replacing it with a belief system of citizen authority. Understand that when an armed citizen is on scene, the law is then legally on scene. We are the law. Such individuals who act within this law and who are armed are possessed of all legal and moral authority, many of whom have already satisfied the training requirement of the state, and are possessed of good judgment to act in self-defense and in defense of another. Understand that no one can take their place as the first line of defense in such matters as in the first moments. Not police, not policy, no one. Anything else kills students and stalls this solution for political gain.

Drop the idea of doing nothing until someone else gets there. The law is already on scene in the armed citizen. When we delagate authority to law enforcement, we never gave up any of our own.

In a nation of laws, it’s time for schools to stop interfering with the law.

_____________________

John Longenecker is President of the Good For The Country Foundation, a patriotic non-profit education organization at www.GoodForTheCountry.org

]]> http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/18/virginia-tech-victim-disarmament-zone-part-ii-what-do-we-do-about-it/feed/ 0 http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/17/good-for-the-country-launches-as-a-non-profit-foundation/ http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/17/good-for-the-country-launches-as-a-non-profit-foundation/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:01:04 +0000 John Longenecker http://goodforthecountry.mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/17/good-for-the-country-launches-as-a-non-profit-foundation/ Beginning my third year at MENS NEWS DAILY is quite a milestone for me.

I have written about many adversities to our way of life, primarily threats to the American Household, and I’m glad for the opportunity here to speak to these issues.

I am also very pleased to announce the launch of the charity and education organization, The Good For The Country Foundation, a California non-profit corporation in the public interest.

The link to that website is www.GoodForTheCountry.org.

Please drop by our 2007 to 2010 Project Page and see just how we propose to inspire personal sovereign authority and power with respect to specific issues in our country.

Thanks to Mike LaSalle who brought me aboard two years ago last March.

Let’s get to work.

________________

John Longenecker is President and Chairman of the Good For The Country Foundation at www.GoodForTheCountry.org

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