Good For The Country.
Essays Bringing The Liberty Message Outside The Liberty Community.
H.R. 4547, Part III: For The Non-Gun Owners In America . . .
Well, you’ve probably heard all the arguments about the Second Amendment’s being a civil right and so forth, or that in a time of War as we are in now, preparedness and wariness (armed) is advisable.
And it’s worth noting that more and more states are loosening their latitude not about guns, but about how they are carried and how and when they are to be used. It's called the Standing Your Ground movement, and it imbues the doctrine with the concept of a presumption of innocence on the part of the defender. This is not new: it is something American all along and should be restored nationwide.
On the concealed carry / stand your ground debate in connection with H.R. 4547, introduced by Representative Cliff Stearns (R-Fla), the Bill that calls for Nationwide reciprocity of concealed carry permits, here’s one I bet few outside the Liberty Community have recognized:
All laws in America are backed by the threat of force: and our personal sovereignty is also backed by force. Our force, and by law.
If you believe in law enforcement as I do and as many officers do, understand that the law of personal authority is original with the declaration of the nation and that authority of officers is a delegated authority, delegated by the People, and not until the middle 1800's. Among the duties of Police, protection of individuals is not one of them: nowhere in the fifty states do police have a duty to protect individuals. This is one of the reasons H.R. 4547 of nationwide reciprocity is so important.
The evolution of gun control and police exclusivity in gun possession is a recent social development. It serves administrators and officials in terms of political gain in prestige, control of funds and more. In short, many officials forget who is really in charge. So do many households.
The idea of an organized police force did not develop until the middle 1800's. In the beginning, general law enforcement largely did not have weapons; many citizens, not all, did have weapons and for millennia. Marshals, Sheriffs and others had administrative authority, but an organized force wasn’t in existence in the U.K. and the U.S. until around 1845. Even the early FBI didn’t carry guns until they faced the reality of why they’d better carry guns. Hint: The same reason we all should.
Let us not forget that law enforcement is authorized by the People, and in so authorizing law enforcement, the People do not give up any authority of their own. That we do not surrender authority in order to grant it is important for the head of a household to weigh in planning household management in an encounter with violent crime.
Police weapons are not for the protection of citizens, but for the protection of the officers as they enforce the law on the authority we grant them.
In the decades that followed, crime was comparatively low, and the law was comparatively on the side of the citizen in righteous response to violence, a presumption of innocence you might say. As long as the citizen wasn’t the initiator of aggression, clean hands, so to speak, you could bet the law would side with the taxpayer. In short, you could trust the system. You could even carry a gun nearly anywhere as an honest citizen as late as the middle sixties.
But then, things changed. Drugs, present since the beginning of time, took hold in penetrating our society. Comedian Lenny Bruce died of a Heroin overdose; other entertainers followed. Then more civilians. The drug culture of tune in, turn on, drop out grew, and with it, violent rip-off crime as some sort of revenge against the Establishment. Angry children, runaways and Hippies disappointed with our system became dupes of a movement no one wanted to recognize: today, we see that it was so well connected to the direction of the country and gain of politicians.
Add to that the murder of John Kennedy in 1963; the Gun Control Act of 1968 began to punish everyone but the people who did the shooting. That made sense, didn't it?
In an effort to understand – and a great many policies involved trying to understand the afflicted – The War On Drugs pussyfooted around and even today accomplishes little, about as much as the War On Crime or the War On Poverty. In my surmise, the solution is simpler, as the two basically go nowhere and consume billions in revenues in a counterintuitive dissolution of personal sovereignty and self-respect. These are key to fomenting dependency.
Today, with tax collection and penalties to compel financing this reluctantly, with anti-household, anti-father laws to dissolve families even further, even with political correctness and an erasure of our history, few people have realized that all of these laws – in fact all of our nation’s laws – are backed by force. (Or maybe they have realized!!)
And more distressing is the idea that citizens are increasingly under suspicion from officials. This is the basis for RFID Chip stalking and National ID Cards, including the so-called Real ID Card. Everyone is under suspicion and sovereignty is dealt yet another blow on more and more false premises.
How do you stop a criminal who by definition will not be touched by any law you write?
Simple: you use your authority. And the force that protects sovereignty.
Sounds simplistic, but it’s actually fundamental: individual citizens already have the authority. Violent Crime is not fought by over-delegating this authority to agencies, but instance by instance in the use of personal authority, judgment, and superior force. Many American homes do not know this in planning their household management, and they surrender to the false premises of officials who want your dependency. Many states do know this, and thus, they increase the latitude of how that authority is to be an asset to the community and therefore unpunished. They have not regretted this, and no concealed carry law has been repealed.
38 states of the union advocate concealed carry of weapons, and their greater latitude in the news lately recognizes what came earlier than police forces and earlier than suspicion of citizens: from the beginning of our nation, it was declared that all of our sovereignty is also backed by force. Our force.
The force of officials is authorized by the People, it can be legally withdrawn; the force of the People is authorized by the Constitution as inalienable, as we are the ultimate authority, and it can’t be taken away.
..or can it?
The People can be talked out of their own sovereignty. The People can be bluffed.
In the remaining states who do not advocate concealed carry of weapons, the move is on to dissolve that declared authority one way or another, including lay pressure from within (the anti-gun crowd) so-called safety policies (gun control) and, of course, permitting crime to fester as a justification for further frustration of ownership in the form of bans, ridiculous ammunition restrictions, frustrated concealed carry terms and more, all aimed at the citizen and which will never – ever – reach the criminal. All of these neutralize personal resistance, both to violence and to social engineering which could ordinarily be stopped by better citizen involvement.
Remember that since the declaration of the nation (1776) and recent formation of an organized police force (1845), the concept of gun control and police exclusivity of weapons (1970's-1980's) is relatively new.
[Especially since Marxist thought was published.
Also in Marxist thought – and elsewhere among other so-called world philosophers – is the idea of permitting adverse social conditions to fester, to do nothing about them until cries and demands for change are shouted and then, and only then, to do something extreme that even worsens the situation, placing it even more in favor of the officials’ ultimate objectives. It is a trap, of course. The love of self in officials and the wish to help (unwelcome or not) is an intentional interference with our way of life as it freezes the self out of self-governance.
It is a clash not in genuine opinions, but in core values, as these individuals take office with values opposite to those for which they were elected.
Understand that insistent leftist officials probably do not even really believe in Marxism... it’s just a tool. But they do use Marxist ideas as a formulary. To Hell with Marx, the man: his ideas work, if you’re in the business of control against the will of the people through chicanery.
Permitting conditions to deteriorate, playing on so-called social injustice, hating capitalism and profit and all the rest – it’s all there. The clue is the fact that such policies never seem to work. Oh, but they do work, if your objectives are different from those of constituents. They perform just fine.]
Gun control and police exclusivity of weapons possession are incompatible with a free state because they promote dependency on government and punish or discourage dependency on self. Under threat of force. Never forget this.
And never forget that our sovereignty is also protected by force, a force officials are trying to talk us out of.
Two examples of this kind of game-playing with our lives are violent crime and the eminent domain newly adjudicated in 2005. I’ve written on this throughout much of last year.
In places such as New Jersey and Louisiana, it’s my observation that conditions that could be considered blighted were permitted to worsen over decades, doing nothing right about correcting them in a timely fashion, e.g. honest and respected police force, improvements, responsive officials, you get the idea. All missing conspicuously. The temptation of subsidy and of discouraging of marriage has its hand on the throat of the People.
Official indolence today plays an important role decades later in their self-serving interests over the interests of those they took an oath to serve.
This is the looting of America. Through bluff and discouraging and punishing the Spirit of our nation.
Laws of confiscation of private property have to be repealed for the good of the nation. And now.
Laws which seek to confiscate the ability and sovereign authority to resist violent crime must be repealed to relieve the individual from being an unwilling partner in the continuing decay of society for the gain of a few.
The looting of America – a hundred different ways – has to stop. For the Spirit that is America.
It begins with appreciating how socio-political decay is no accident; it is to farm a field to cultivate dependency and to persuade the People of futility.
Irrespective of however tempting some policies may be in social justice, citizens need to trust their instincts and stop going against their better judgment. The desire to cooperate in so-called compassion has made go-nowhere policies play us for fools. It begins by understanding how we’ve been played.
It begins by understanding today that our individual sovereignty was recognized upon the declaration of our nation and the constitutional assurance that it is we who are backed by force, and that it is we who will legally decide whether force of officials is even to be used at all.
Toward this recapturing of our nation, we need to recognize first that any move by the servant to disarm the citizen is always a move against our sovereignty. In any age.
"The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting...it's about our right to be able to protect ourselves from all of you guys up there." – Dr. Suzanna Gratia Hupp, appearing before Representative Charles Schumer's committee hearings on the assault weapons ban. Dr. Hupp later became U. S. Representative of Texas.
John Longenecker is author of Transfer Of Wealth, available worldwide. His website is www.TransferOfWealth.net
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