Wednesday, January 23, 2013
SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER MOLON LABE Guns and Freedom by Andrew P. Napolitano
Guns and Freedom by Andrew P. Napolitano
SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER MOLON LABE
The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. And yet, the progressives in both political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the government to interfere with the exercise of that right by law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by some crazies in our midst.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have operated as a break on all governments that recognize them by enunciating the concept of natural rights.
As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government, and as our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural right is an area of individual human behavior – like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy – immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.
The essence of humanity is freedom. Government – whether voted in peacefully or thrust upon us by force – is essentially the negation of freedom. Throughout the history of the world, people have achieved freedom when those in power have begrudgingly given it up. From the assassination of Julius Caesar to King John’s forced signing of the Magna Carta, from the English Civil War to the triumph of the allies at the end of World War II, from the fall of Communism to the Arab Spring, governments have permitted so-called nobles and everyday folk to exercise more personal freedom as a result of their demands for it and their fighting for it. This constitutes power permitting liberty.
The American experience was the opposite. Here, each human being is sovereign, as the colonists were after the Revolution. Here, the delegation to the government of some sovereignty – the personal dominion over self – by each American permitted the government to have limited power in order to safeguard the liberties we retained. Stated differently, Americans gave up some limited personal freedom to the new government so it could have the authority and resources to protect the freedoms we retained. Individuals are sovereign in America, not the government. This constitutes liberty permitting power.
But we did not give up any natural rights; rather, we retained them. It is the choice of every individual whether to give them up. Neither our neighbors nor the government can make those choices for us, because we are all without the moral or legal authority to interfere with anyone else’s natural rights. Since the government derives all of its powers from the consent of the governed, and since we each lack the power to interfere with the natural rights of another, how could the government lawfully have that power? It doesn’t. Were this not so, our rights would not be natural; they would be subject to the government’s whims.
To assure that no government would infringe the natural rights of anyone here, the Founders incorporated Jefferson’s thesis underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and, with respect to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As recently as two years ago, the Supreme Court recognized this when it held that the right to keep and bear arms in one’s home is a pre-political individual right that only sovereign Americans can surrender and that the government cannot take from us, absent our individual waiver.
There have been practical historical reasons for the near universal historical acceptance of the individual possession of this right. The dictators and monsters of the 20th century – from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad – have disarmed their people, and only because some of those people resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the dictators for freedom. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes they won.
The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.
We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense. (Imagine the howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal sovereignties; they assure that a tyrant can more easily disarm and overcome us.
The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, thus, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.
Most people in government reject natural rights and personal sovereignty. Most people in government believe that the exercise of everyone’s rights is subject to the will of those in the government. Most people in government believe that they can write any law and regulate any behavior, not subject to the natural law, not subject to the sovereignty of individuals, not cognizant of history’s tyrants, but subject only to what they can get away with.
Did you empower the government to impair the freedom of us all because of the mania and terror of a few?
This brings us back to guns. The Constitution expressly prohibits all governments from infringing upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This permits us to defend ourselves when the police can’t or won’t, and it permits a residue of firepower in the hands of the people with which to stop any tyrant who might try to infringe upon our natural rights, and it will give second thoughts to anyone thinking about tyranny.
The country is ablaze with passionate debate about guns, and the government is determined to do something about it. Debate over public policy is good for freedom. But the progressives want to use the debate to justify the coercive power of the government to infringe upon the rights of law-abiding folks because of what some crazies among us have done. We must not permit this to happen.
The whole purpose of the Constitution is to insulate personal freedom from the lust for power of those in government and from the passions of the people who sent them there.
Reprinted with the author's permission.
SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER MOLON LABE
The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. And yet, the progressives in both political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the government to interfere with the exercise of that right by law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by some crazies in our midst.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have operated as a break on all governments that recognize them by enunciating the concept of natural rights.
As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government, and as our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural right is an area of individual human behavior – like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy – immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.
The essence of humanity is freedom. Government – whether voted in peacefully or thrust upon us by force – is essentially the negation of freedom. Throughout the history of the world, people have achieved freedom when those in power have begrudgingly given it up. From the assassination of Julius Caesar to King John’s forced signing of the Magna Carta, from the English Civil War to the triumph of the allies at the end of World War II, from the fall of Communism to the Arab Spring, governments have permitted so-called nobles and everyday folk to exercise more personal freedom as a result of their demands for it and their fighting for it. This constitutes power permitting liberty.
The American experience was the opposite. Here, each human being is sovereign, as the colonists were after the Revolution. Here, the delegation to the government of some sovereignty – the personal dominion over self – by each American permitted the government to have limited power in order to safeguard the liberties we retained. Stated differently, Americans gave up some limited personal freedom to the new government so it could have the authority and resources to protect the freedoms we retained. Individuals are sovereign in America, not the government. This constitutes liberty permitting power.
But we did not give up any natural rights; rather, we retained them. It is the choice of every individual whether to give them up. Neither our neighbors nor the government can make those choices for us, because we are all without the moral or legal authority to interfere with anyone else’s natural rights. Since the government derives all of its powers from the consent of the governed, and since we each lack the power to interfere with the natural rights of another, how could the government lawfully have that power? It doesn’t. Were this not so, our rights would not be natural; they would be subject to the government’s whims.
To assure that no government would infringe the natural rights of anyone here, the Founders incorporated Jefferson’s thesis underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and, with respect to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As recently as two years ago, the Supreme Court recognized this when it held that the right to keep and bear arms in one’s home is a pre-political individual right that only sovereign Americans can surrender and that the government cannot take from us, absent our individual waiver.
There have been practical historical reasons for the near universal historical acceptance of the individual possession of this right. The dictators and monsters of the 20th century – from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad – have disarmed their people, and only because some of those people resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the dictators for freedom. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes they won.
The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.
We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense. (Imagine the howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal sovereignties; they assure that a tyrant can more easily disarm and overcome us.
The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, thus, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.
Most people in government reject natural rights and personal sovereignty. Most people in government believe that the exercise of everyone’s rights is subject to the will of those in the government. Most people in government believe that they can write any law and regulate any behavior, not subject to the natural law, not subject to the sovereignty of individuals, not cognizant of history’s tyrants, but subject only to what they can get away with.
Did you empower the government to impair the freedom of us all because of the mania and terror of a few?
This brings us back to guns. The Constitution expressly prohibits all governments from infringing upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This permits us to defend ourselves when the police can’t or won’t, and it permits a residue of firepower in the hands of the people with which to stop any tyrant who might try to infringe upon our natural rights, and it will give second thoughts to anyone thinking about tyranny.
The country is ablaze with passionate debate about guns, and the government is determined to do something about it. Debate over public policy is good for freedom. But the progressives want to use the debate to justify the coercive power of the government to infringe upon the rights of law-abiding folks because of what some crazies among us have done. We must not permit this to happen.
The whole purpose of the Constitution is to insulate personal freedom from the lust for power of those in government and from the passions of the people who sent them there.
Reprinted with the author's permission.
Taking the Second Amendment Seriously by David Deming
Taking the Second Amendment Seriously by David Deming
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution reads "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
It's time to take the Second Amendment seriously. You should not need government permission to exercise a fundamental right. The prohibition on the sale of new automatic weapons must be repealed. Import restrictions on arms and ammunition should be lifted. The First Amendment prohibits the licensing and regulation of publishers and booksellers. Why should gun dealers need a license? If you don't need a background check to read or write a book, why should you need one to purchase a gun? How is it that the severe restrictions currently in place do not constitute "infringements?"
There should be no more compromise or capitulation on this issue! History offers no example of a people who obtained their rights by politely asking for them. We need to stop playing defense and demand unequivocally that our rights be respected and restored.
The common sense solution to gun violence is to have more guns in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens and fewer in the hands of criminals. People who misuse firearms should be prosecuted. There should be no "gun free" zones. Experience has shown that keeping guns out of schools only makes them stalking grounds for psychopaths.
We should not be cowed into surrendering our rights on the basis of hysterical emotionalism. Dianne Feinstein wants to ban semi-automatic rifles. Why? According to the FBI, in 2011 rifles of all types were used in 323 homicides. That same year, 1694 people were killed by knives and 726 by fists and feet. The UK essentially outlawed all private gun possession and it now has the highest rate of violent crime in Europe – a rate five times higher than the United States
Mass shootings publicized by the media remain rare. But defensive uses of firearms are commonplace and usually go unreported. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck has found that guns are used about 2.5 million times each year in the US to prevent crimes. More guns in the hands of responsible people results in less crime, not more. For the last twenty years, gun sales in the US have surged even as the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically. According to data from the ATF and FBI, between 1992 and 2010, the number of firearms manufactured in the US increased by 31 percent while the violent crime rate fell by 47 percent.
In 1995, the violent crime rate in my home state of Oklahoma was 664 per 100,000 people. The following year Oklahoma adopted a "shall issue" concealed-carry law. By 2011, the violent crime rate in Oklahoma had fallen to 455. People who keep guns in their homes even protect those who don't own guns by reducing the likelihood of home invasion.
Make no mistake about it. The people who hate guns will never quit until they confiscate every last one. They banned automatic rifles in 1986 and now they're back for the semi-automatic guns. A recent Bill proposed in the State of Illinois would have outlawed all modern firearms including pump-action shotguns. New York governor Andrew Cuomo has openly spoken of gun confiscation. President Obama has stated that he wants a national database of gun owners. What for, if not to go door-to-door and pick them up? In an infamous 1995 interview, Dianne Feinstein confessed "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them...I would have done it."
If you are a responsible and law-abiding person who does not own a firearm, you should buy one. No, buy ten. If you already own ten guns, buy ten more. For each semi-automatic rifle you own, purchase at least a dozen high-capacity magazines and a thousand rounds of ammunition.
If you want to see what happens to people who are unarmed, review the video of Reginald Denny being beaten during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Or read about the 1974 Hi Fi murders in Ogden, Utah. Defenseless people were tied up and tortured. A young woman was repeatedly raped. A man had a ballpoint pen kicked into his ear. The sadistic killers forced their victims to drink liquid drain cleaner. Criminals love it when people don't have guns. So do tyrants.
Of course if you don't mind being victimized by criminals, you don't need a gun. And many people around the world live without guns. An armed citizenry is only necessary in a "free State." People content to live in totalitarian slave States don't need guns.
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution reads "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
It's time to take the Second Amendment seriously. You should not need government permission to exercise a fundamental right. The prohibition on the sale of new automatic weapons must be repealed. Import restrictions on arms and ammunition should be lifted. The First Amendment prohibits the licensing and regulation of publishers and booksellers. Why should gun dealers need a license? If you don't need a background check to read or write a book, why should you need one to purchase a gun? How is it that the severe restrictions currently in place do not constitute "infringements?"
There should be no more compromise or capitulation on this issue! History offers no example of a people who obtained their rights by politely asking for them. We need to stop playing defense and demand unequivocally that our rights be respected and restored.
The common sense solution to gun violence is to have more guns in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens and fewer in the hands of criminals. People who misuse firearms should be prosecuted. There should be no "gun free" zones. Experience has shown that keeping guns out of schools only makes them stalking grounds for psychopaths.
We should not be cowed into surrendering our rights on the basis of hysterical emotionalism. Dianne Feinstein wants to ban semi-automatic rifles. Why? According to the FBI, in 2011 rifles of all types were used in 323 homicides. That same year, 1694 people were killed by knives and 726 by fists and feet. The UK essentially outlawed all private gun possession and it now has the highest rate of violent crime in Europe – a rate five times higher than the United States
Mass shootings publicized by the media remain rare. But defensive uses of firearms are commonplace and usually go unreported. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck has found that guns are used about 2.5 million times each year in the US to prevent crimes. More guns in the hands of responsible people results in less crime, not more. For the last twenty years, gun sales in the US have surged even as the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically. According to data from the ATF and FBI, between 1992 and 2010, the number of firearms manufactured in the US increased by 31 percent while the violent crime rate fell by 47 percent.
In 1995, the violent crime rate in my home state of Oklahoma was 664 per 100,000 people. The following year Oklahoma adopted a "shall issue" concealed-carry law. By 2011, the violent crime rate in Oklahoma had fallen to 455. People who keep guns in their homes even protect those who don't own guns by reducing the likelihood of home invasion.
Make no mistake about it. The people who hate guns will never quit until they confiscate every last one. They banned automatic rifles in 1986 and now they're back for the semi-automatic guns. A recent Bill proposed in the State of Illinois would have outlawed all modern firearms including pump-action shotguns. New York governor Andrew Cuomo has openly spoken of gun confiscation. President Obama has stated that he wants a national database of gun owners. What for, if not to go door-to-door and pick them up? In an infamous 1995 interview, Dianne Feinstein confessed "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them...I would have done it."
If you are a responsible and law-abiding person who does not own a firearm, you should buy one. No, buy ten. If you already own ten guns, buy ten more. For each semi-automatic rifle you own, purchase at least a dozen high-capacity magazines and a thousand rounds of ammunition.
If you want to see what happens to people who are unarmed, review the video of Reginald Denny being beaten during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Or read about the 1974 Hi Fi murders in Ogden, Utah. Defenseless people were tied up and tortured. A young woman was repeatedly raped. A man had a ballpoint pen kicked into his ear. The sadistic killers forced their victims to drink liquid drain cleaner. Criminals love it when people don't have guns. So do tyrants.
Of course if you don't mind being victimized by criminals, you don't need a gun. And many people around the world live without guns. An armed citizenry is only necessary in a "free State." People content to live in totalitarian slave States don't need guns.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Two-thirds of U.S. weapons owners would 'defy' a federal gun ban - Washington Times
Two-thirds of U.S. weapons owners would 'defy' a federal gun ban - Washington Times
Gk Temujin
" Assault-rifle owners statewide are organizing a mass boycott of Gov. Cuomo’s new law mandating they register their weapons, daring officials to “come and take it away," ” The New York Post has learned. "Gun-range owners and gun-rights advocates are encouraging millions of gun owners to defy the law, saying it’d be the largest act of civil disobedience in state history. " I fear this outrageous unconstitutional power grab by the lame brain liberal elite has awakened a hibernating giant polar bear and filled him with a terrible resolve !!!
molon labe
Gk Temujin
" Assault-rifle owners statewide are organizing a mass boycott of Gov. Cuomo’s new law mandating they register their weapons, daring officials to “come and take it away," ” The New York Post has learned. "Gun-range owners and gun-rights advocates are encouraging millions of gun owners to defy the law, saying it’d be the largest act of civil disobedience in state history. " I fear this outrageous unconstitutional power grab by the lame brain liberal elite has awakened a hibernating giant polar bear and filled him with a terrible resolve !!!
molon labe
‘Violence’ not the real target of war on guns - Washington Times
‘Violence’ not the real target of war on guns - Washington Times
the common thread all them shootings gun free zones. Want to stop gun violence ??? Don't arm Democrats: Ft Hood Shooter - Registered Democrat. Columbine - both families were progressive liberal Democrats. Virginia Tech Shooter - Registered Democrat - Wrote hate mail to Bush. Connecticut School Shooter - Registered Democrat; Colorado Theater Shooter - progressive liberal Democrat; staff worker for the Obama campaign.
Hey how about a little common sense and some facts about the overwhelmingly vast majority of gun owners. Nation wide over 100 million …. At least 100 million gun owners . With a conservative estimate of at least 300 million guns in the a country of 315 million people one out of three . Over 3 million AR-15 semi-automatics in circulation alone. There for WAY more people are responsible and have access to weapons that they really should have. For those of you that don't know ( or remember) the greatest single mass murder by an individual in New York State was ---------March 25, 1990 Happy Land Disco, The Bronx NY. A jilted boyfriend tries to get into a nightclubs to continue stalking his ex. Thrown out, he finds and empty 1 gallon hydraulic oil container in the street, proceeds to a gas station and fills it with gas and gets a free book of matches. He returns to the building, douses the stairway with gas and torches the place. 87 dead, not a gun in sight. Did they out law gas ???
So politicians your living in a fantasy world that inanimate object are the problem. Quit the hysteria , stop the having a hissy fit , get a grip on reality.
How many people were killed in New York by rifles last year? 5. How many we're killed by hammers? 29. How many were killed by old people driving into buildings? 53. Why are we not outlawing hammers and old people driving? Explain? By Prince Andy’s Imperial court own estimation there are at least 4.75 million firearms and minimum of a million so called “ assault weapons ’’ in New York statewide. Erie county has over 75,000 pistol permit holders and Niagara has at least 27,000 . With a little over a million people living in the two counties, you do the math guns are not the problem. Even in Erie county. That is with the strictest gun control laws in the country. Sorry the guns aint being given up.Over 300 million people murder by governments in the last century out side of war. Those in favor of gun control …Hitler , Stalin , Mao , Pol Pot get ….get the picture ???That The Second Amendment is not outdated .But alive an well over 250 , 000 new members joined the already over 4 million real Americans belonging to the NRA in the last month alone.
MOLON LABE
the common thread all them shootings gun free zones. Want to stop gun violence ??? Don't arm Democrats: Ft Hood Shooter - Registered Democrat. Columbine - both families were progressive liberal Democrats. Virginia Tech Shooter - Registered Democrat - Wrote hate mail to Bush. Connecticut School Shooter - Registered Democrat; Colorado Theater Shooter - progressive liberal Democrat; staff worker for the Obama campaign.
Hey how about a little common sense and some facts about the overwhelmingly vast majority of gun owners. Nation wide over 100 million …. At least 100 million gun owners . With a conservative estimate of at least 300 million guns in the a country of 315 million people one out of three . Over 3 million AR-15 semi-automatics in circulation alone. There for WAY more people are responsible and have access to weapons that they really should have. For those of you that don't know ( or remember) the greatest single mass murder by an individual in New York State was ---------March 25, 1990 Happy Land Disco, The Bronx NY. A jilted boyfriend tries to get into a nightclubs to continue stalking his ex. Thrown out, he finds and empty 1 gallon hydraulic oil container in the street, proceeds to a gas station and fills it with gas and gets a free book of matches. He returns to the building, douses the stairway with gas and torches the place. 87 dead, not a gun in sight. Did they out law gas ???
So politicians your living in a fantasy world that inanimate object are the problem. Quit the hysteria , stop the having a hissy fit , get a grip on reality.
How many people were killed in New York by rifles last year? 5. How many we're killed by hammers? 29. How many were killed by old people driving into buildings? 53. Why are we not outlawing hammers and old people driving? Explain? By Prince Andy’s Imperial court own estimation there are at least 4.75 million firearms and minimum of a million so called “ assault weapons ’’ in New York statewide. Erie county has over 75,000 pistol permit holders and Niagara has at least 27,000 . With a little over a million people living in the two counties, you do the math guns are not the problem. Even in Erie county. That is with the strictest gun control laws in the country. Sorry the guns aint being given up.Over 300 million people murder by governments in the last century out side of war. Those in favor of gun control …Hitler , Stalin , Mao , Pol Pot get ….get the picture ???That The Second Amendment is not outdated .But alive an well over 250 , 000 new members joined the already over 4 million real Americans belonging to the NRA in the last month alone.
MOLON LABE
Lautenberg, McCarthy propose high-capacity clip ban - Washington Times
Lautenberg, McCarthy propose high-capacity clip ban - Washington Times
Gk Temujin • 20 minutes ago
−+
DeleteFlag as inappropriateHey the common thread all them shootings gun free zones. Hey how about a little common sense and some facts about the overwhelmingly vast majority of gun owners. Nation wide over 100 million …. At least 100 million gun owners . With a conservative estimate of at least 300 million guns in the a country of 315 million people one out of three . Over 3 million AR-15 semi-automatics in circulation alone. There for WAY more people are responsible and have access to weapons that they really should have.
So your living in fantasy world that inanimate object are the problem. Quit the hysteria , stop the having a hissy fit , get a grip on reality.
For those of you that don't know ( or remember)---------March 25, 1990 Happy Land Disco, The Bronx NY. A jilted boyfriend tries to get into a nightclubs(illegal) to continue stalking his ex. Thrown out, he finds and empty 1 gallon hydrualic oil container in the street, proceeds to a gas station and fills it with gas (Illegal container), and gets a free book of matches. He returns to the building, douses the stairway with gas and torches the place. 87 dead, not a gun in sight. No outlawed gas cans.
Hey McCarthy How many people were killed in New York by rifles last year? 5. How many we're killed by hammers? 29. How many were killed by old people driving into buildings? 53. Why are we not outlawing hammers and old people driving? Explain? By Prince Andy’s Imperial court own estimation there are at least 4.75 million firearms and minimum of a million so called “ assault weapons ’’ in New York statewide. Erie county has over 75,000 pistol permit holders and Niagara has at least 27,000 . With a little over a million people living in the two counties, you do the math guns are not the problem. Even in Erie county. That is with the strictest gun control laws in the country. Sorry the guns aint being given up.Over 300 million people murder by governments in the last century out side of war. Those in favor of gun control …Hitler , Stalin , Mao , Pol Pot get ….get the picture ???That The Second Amendment is not outdated .But alive an well over 250 , 000 new members joined the already over 4 million real Americans belonging to the NRA in the last month alone.
MOLON LABE
Gk Temujin • 20 minutes ago
−+
DeleteFlag as inappropriateHey the common thread all them shootings gun free zones. Hey how about a little common sense and some facts about the overwhelmingly vast majority of gun owners. Nation wide over 100 million …. At least 100 million gun owners . With a conservative estimate of at least 300 million guns in the a country of 315 million people one out of three . Over 3 million AR-15 semi-automatics in circulation alone. There for WAY more people are responsible and have access to weapons that they really should have.
So your living in fantasy world that inanimate object are the problem. Quit the hysteria , stop the having a hissy fit , get a grip on reality.
For those of you that don't know ( or remember)---------March 25, 1990 Happy Land Disco, The Bronx NY. A jilted boyfriend tries to get into a nightclubs(illegal) to continue stalking his ex. Thrown out, he finds and empty 1 gallon hydrualic oil container in the street, proceeds to a gas station and fills it with gas (Illegal container), and gets a free book of matches. He returns to the building, douses the stairway with gas and torches the place. 87 dead, not a gun in sight. No outlawed gas cans.
Hey McCarthy How many people were killed in New York by rifles last year? 5. How many we're killed by hammers? 29. How many were killed by old people driving into buildings? 53. Why are we not outlawing hammers and old people driving? Explain? By Prince Andy’s Imperial court own estimation there are at least 4.75 million firearms and minimum of a million so called “ assault weapons ’’ in New York statewide. Erie county has over 75,000 pistol permit holders and Niagara has at least 27,000 . With a little over a million people living in the two counties, you do the math guns are not the problem. Even in Erie county. That is with the strictest gun control laws in the country. Sorry the guns aint being given up.Over 300 million people murder by governments in the last century out side of war. Those in favor of gun control …Hitler , Stalin , Mao , Pol Pot get ….get the picture ???That The Second Amendment is not outdated .But alive an well over 250 , 000 new members joined the already over 4 million real Americans belonging to the NRA in the last month alone.
MOLON LABE
Monday, January 21, 2013
The Institutionalization of Tyranny by Paul Craig Roberts
The Institutionalization of Tyranny by Paul Craig Roberts
Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.
Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for big government to initiate wars without a declaration of war or even Congress’ assent, and to murder with drones citizens of countries with which Washington is not at war. Republicans do not mind that federal “security” agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call, and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored.
But heaven forbid that big government should do anything for a poor person.
Republicans have been fighting Social Security ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law in the 1930s, and they have been fighting Medicare ever since President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in 1965 as part of the Great Society initiatives.
Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.
Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for big government to initiate wars without a declaration of war or even Congress’ assent, and to murder with drones citizens of countries with which Washington is not at war. Republicans do not mind that federal “security” agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call, and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored.
But heaven forbid that big government should do anything for a poor person.
Republicans have been fighting Social Security ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law in the 1930s, and they have been fighting Medicare ever since President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in 1965 as part of the Great Society initiatives.
Napolitino vs. Napolitano on Gun Control by Gary North
Napolitino vs. Napolitano on Gun Control by Gary North
Judge Andrew Napolitano.
The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.
Judge Andrew Napolitano.
The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.
Malum Prohibitum: The Evil Legal Language of Progressivism by William L. Anderson
Malum Prohibitum: The Evil Legal Language of Progressivism by William L. Anderson
Let me give an example that I believe will explain my position. Many of the same people who are outraged that Ortiz and Heymann could drive a brilliant young man to his death by converting what essentially was a small violation based upon Malum Prohibitum into a series of "crimes" punishable by up to half a century in prison no doubt fully support that Gov. Andrew Cuomo was able to do in the State of New York this past week.
To the lavish praise of the ultra-Progressive New York Times, Cuomo got the state legislature to pass sweeping gun laws that turned legal possessions into illegal contraband. In the future – with the full support of Progressives everywhere – SWAT teams will violently invade the homes of many gun owners to confiscate weapons that pose no danger to anyone and whose law-abiding owners either will be killed or arrested and become treated as though they were dangerous murderers. We know these things will happen, and I would even surmise that Greenwald and nearly every mourner at Aaron Swartz’s funeral would agree that New York authorities would be legally and morally correct.
When a man who has owned a gun – say a World War II vintage M-1 Garand – for many years but fails to register it with the authorities in New York, even if that gun is locked in a safe and is unloaded and has not been fired in a generation, the police can and will swoop into his house armed to the teeth. If the man or any member of his family is gunned down in the SWAT melee, at very best Progressives will see it as unfortunate "collateral damage" in the enforcement of a "good law." Yet, that man and his family will have posed no greater threat to society than did Aaron Swartz and an army of his "hacker" friends, but the response of the Progressive "community" will be poles apart.
I say this not to condemn Greenwald – certainly one of the greatest living champions of human rights – or anyone associated with Aaron Swartz, nor do I accuse them of being hypocrites. What we have to understand is that the very essence of Progressivism is the belief that the State and its agents must decide what is right and what is wrong, and that Malum Prohibitum carry the same moral and legal weight as the ancient legal doctrine of Malum in Se. All Progressives – Right or Left – believe these things and cannot imagine a world without such doctrines.
The idea of Malum in Se is that some things are unlawful in and of themselves, and that everyone recognizes the wrongness in the acts. Murders, theft, assault, robbery, rape, lying in a legal proceeding, and other such actions have been illegal throughout history in almost every culture. That people have managed to avoid capture and punishment or that people given State privilege are able to do these things and not be sanctioned does not make them "legal" in the minds of most people, but serves as a cause of outrage.
Unfortunately, Malum Prohibitum has replaced Malum in Se as the guiding legal force in American criminal law. The vast majority of the two-million-plus people in American prisons, both state and federal, and the many millions more in the criminal justice system, are there because they allegedly violated "laws" based upon Malum Prohibitum, and we have to understand that the laws and punishments that flow from that doctrine are severe and arbitrary and have turned this country’s "justice" system into a maw of injustice.
Even though at least one "mainstream" U.S. law professor has said that the draconian punishments that Ortiz and Heymann were seeking involved a "fair reading of the law," people naturally are outraged that an original act that in itself was more symbolic that really did not impose harm on others could be legally interpreted as the legal (and moral) equivalent of terrorism with some of the harshest punishments this side of execution being dangled before Swartz. I will go even further: This entire legal episode was based totally upon Malum Prohibitum and that Swartz did not engage in real harm, but simply broke a set of rules that arbitrarily were imposed.
The legal essence of the True American Revolution of Progressivism was the imposition of rules that essentially criminalized actions that before the Progressive Era were legal. Certainly the "crown jewel" of the Progressive Movement of the early 20th Century was alcohol prohibition, but despite the utter failure of Prohibition, American politicians – with full support from the voters who supposedly are the "essence" of democracy – have expanded the doctrines of Prohibition not only to include drugs, but firearms, speech, and some forms of pornography.
Criminal law in the USA, both state and federal, has seen explosive growth in recent decades and almost all of it is based upon doctrines of Malum Prohibitum. Government authorities determine what is "bad," and then they outlaw it with the idea that a submissive populace eagerly will obey the next set of rules politicians and bureaucrats send down the pike. As the Progressive mainstream media fuels the next "crisis," government agents swoop in and "solve" the problem by imposing a new set of rules that the media and their academic allies then declare to be Holy Writ.
Let me give an example that I believe will explain my position. Many of the same people who are outraged that Ortiz and Heymann could drive a brilliant young man to his death by converting what essentially was a small violation based upon Malum Prohibitum into a series of "crimes" punishable by up to half a century in prison no doubt fully support that Gov. Andrew Cuomo was able to do in the State of New York this past week.
To the lavish praise of the ultra-Progressive New York Times, Cuomo got the state legislature to pass sweeping gun laws that turned legal possessions into illegal contraband. In the future – with the full support of Progressives everywhere – SWAT teams will violently invade the homes of many gun owners to confiscate weapons that pose no danger to anyone and whose law-abiding owners either will be killed or arrested and become treated as though they were dangerous murderers. We know these things will happen, and I would even surmise that Greenwald and nearly every mourner at Aaron Swartz’s funeral would agree that New York authorities would be legally and morally correct.
When a man who has owned a gun – say a World War II vintage M-1 Garand – for many years but fails to register it with the authorities in New York, even if that gun is locked in a safe and is unloaded and has not been fired in a generation, the police can and will swoop into his house armed to the teeth. If the man or any member of his family is gunned down in the SWAT melee, at very best Progressives will see it as unfortunate "collateral damage" in the enforcement of a "good law." Yet, that man and his family will have posed no greater threat to society than did Aaron Swartz and an army of his "hacker" friends, but the response of the Progressive "community" will be poles apart.
I say this not to condemn Greenwald – certainly one of the greatest living champions of human rights – or anyone associated with Aaron Swartz, nor do I accuse them of being hypocrites. What we have to understand is that the very essence of Progressivism is the belief that the State and its agents must decide what is right and what is wrong, and that Malum Prohibitum carry the same moral and legal weight as the ancient legal doctrine of Malum in Se. All Progressives – Right or Left – believe these things and cannot imagine a world without such doctrines.
The idea of Malum in Se is that some things are unlawful in and of themselves, and that everyone recognizes the wrongness in the acts. Murders, theft, assault, robbery, rape, lying in a legal proceeding, and other such actions have been illegal throughout history in almost every culture. That people have managed to avoid capture and punishment or that people given State privilege are able to do these things and not be sanctioned does not make them "legal" in the minds of most people, but serves as a cause of outrage.
Unfortunately, Malum Prohibitum has replaced Malum in Se as the guiding legal force in American criminal law. The vast majority of the two-million-plus people in American prisons, both state and federal, and the many millions more in the criminal justice system, are there because they allegedly violated "laws" based upon Malum Prohibitum, and we have to understand that the laws and punishments that flow from that doctrine are severe and arbitrary and have turned this country’s "justice" system into a maw of injustice.
Even though at least one "mainstream" U.S. law professor has said that the draconian punishments that Ortiz and Heymann were seeking involved a "fair reading of the law," people naturally are outraged that an original act that in itself was more symbolic that really did not impose harm on others could be legally interpreted as the legal (and moral) equivalent of terrorism with some of the harshest punishments this side of execution being dangled before Swartz. I will go even further: This entire legal episode was based totally upon Malum Prohibitum and that Swartz did not engage in real harm, but simply broke a set of rules that arbitrarily were imposed.
The legal essence of the True American Revolution of Progressivism was the imposition of rules that essentially criminalized actions that before the Progressive Era were legal. Certainly the "crown jewel" of the Progressive Movement of the early 20th Century was alcohol prohibition, but despite the utter failure of Prohibition, American politicians – with full support from the voters who supposedly are the "essence" of democracy – have expanded the doctrines of Prohibition not only to include drugs, but firearms, speech, and some forms of pornography.
Criminal law in the USA, both state and federal, has seen explosive growth in recent decades and almost all of it is based upon doctrines of Malum Prohibitum. Government authorities determine what is "bad," and then they outlaw it with the idea that a submissive populace eagerly will obey the next set of rules politicians and bureaucrats send down the pike. As the Progressive mainstream media fuels the next "crisis," government agents swoop in and "solve" the problem by imposing a new set of rules that the media and their academic allies then declare to be Holy Writ.
Malum Prohibitum: The Evil Legal Language of Progressivism by William L. Anderson
Malum Prohibitum: The Evil Legal Language of Progressivism by William L. Anderson
The outrage over the prosecutor-inducted suicide of Aaron Swartz continues, and well it should. Glenn Greenwald’s recent column barely contains the rage of a principled civil libertarian who despite his deep Progressive-Left outlook still can understand government-induced evil when its ugly face is revealed.
Indeed, Progressives from Massachusetts to California are outraged at what they correctly see as a relatively minor legal transgression by an honorable activist turned into a "crime" for which punishment would be imposed that would be greater than that experienced by convicted murderers and rapists. Yet – and I despair of my own inability to make this point so that Progressives can comprehend – what these people seem incapable of understanding is that their own legal/political theology is the problem.
Yes, a lot of outrage properly is directed at U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, a Barack Obama-appointed political animal who apparently had her eyes set upon the governorship of that state. Both she and her assistant, Stephen Heymann, who also has a reputation for being politically-ambitious, are now targeted in petitions to the White House to fire both of them, and because the petitions have more than 25,000 signatures apiece, the Obama administration now is legally-obligated to respond to them. (It will be interesting to see if Obama and his equally-culpable U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose own hands are washed in blood of innocent people, will throw Ortiz and Heymann overboard or if they will try to ride out what could be a difficult political storm.)
The outrage over the prosecutor-inducted suicide of Aaron Swartz continues, and well it should. Glenn Greenwald’s recent column barely contains the rage of a principled civil libertarian who despite his deep Progressive-Left outlook still can understand government-induced evil when its ugly face is revealed.
Indeed, Progressives from Massachusetts to California are outraged at what they correctly see as a relatively minor legal transgression by an honorable activist turned into a "crime" for which punishment would be imposed that would be greater than that experienced by convicted murderers and rapists. Yet – and I despair of my own inability to make this point so that Progressives can comprehend – what these people seem incapable of understanding is that their own legal/political theology is the problem.
Yes, a lot of outrage properly is directed at U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, a Barack Obama-appointed political animal who apparently had her eyes set upon the governorship of that state. Both she and her assistant, Stephen Heymann, who also has a reputation for being politically-ambitious, are now targeted in petitions to the White House to fire both of them, and because the petitions have more than 25,000 signatures apiece, the Obama administration now is legally-obligated to respond to them. (It will be interesting to see if Obama and his equally-culpable U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose own hands are washed in blood of innocent people, will throw Ortiz and Heymann overboard or if they will try to ride out what could be a difficult political storm.)
Red Alert: Nationwide Plan for Gun Confiscation Exposed by Alex Thomas
Red Alert: Nationwide Plan for Gun Confiscation Exposed by Alex Thomas
Red Alert: Nationwide Plan for Gun Confiscation Exposed
by Alex Thomas
The Daily Sheeple
In the last month we have seen what can only be described as the largest attack on 2nd Amendment in the history of the United States.
Within hours of the horrific mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, elements of the corporate controlled media, in conjunction with a majority of politicians in a position of power, launched an all out propaganda blitz to convince the American people to accept not only a severely limited 2nd Amendment, but possibly a total gun ban.
Whether it be by Senator Dianne Feinstein, billionaire eugenicist Michael Bloomberg orPresident Obama himself, calls for and plans to limit private firearm ownership in America have been outlined and, in some cases, already put into law.
During the propaganda blitz that has accompanied President Obama’s task force and subsequent executive orders, each and every proponent of stricter gun control has claimed that they support the 2nd Amendment and do not want any sort of all out ban or confiscation.
Sadly, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Despite public claims from Obama and the corporate media that anyone who says the government is coming for their guns is nothing more than a right wing conspiracy theorist, the reality of the situation is that many different politicians and proponents of gun control have openly revealed their actual intentions for gun confiscation.
Multiple different statements that have either been made recently or surfaced and gone viral in the past month paint a clear picture as to what the powers that be actually want and are possibly planning to do.
On top of that, a bill introduced into the House of Representatives also pushes citizens to voluntarily turn in their guns in yet another move towards confiscation. Remember, the government doesn’t have to go door to door confiscating firearms, they can easily use a series of laws that when combined would essentially equal confiscation for millions of Americans. (Although many will never turn them in.
New York – Epicenter of Confiscation
A little over a week after the Sandy Hook Shooting, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told an Albany radio show that gun confiscation is an option being considered.
“Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option — keep your gun but permit it.”
Although this open call for illegal gun confiscation was downplayed after it was reportedthat the state might not even be able to pay for it, the fact remains that this admission by Cuomo shows that all out gun confiscation IS his eventual goal.
More recently, New York actually did pass what can be considered the most draconian gun law in the country.
Yesterday, the New York State Senate passed a law prohibiting assault rifles and limiting magazines to 7 rounds. The law will go in front of the State Assembly today, where it is expected to pass easily.
Notably, the bill contains no grandfather clause for people who already own these weapons.
Now, in the wake of the passing of the above noted bill, a video of New York State Assemblyman Republican Steven F. McLaughlin revealing the startling fact that a version of the bill favored by Democrats did indeed contain a provision for outright gun confiscation has surfaced.
The short clip below is almost unbelievable. McLaughlin is basically told to shut his mouth, he then states that alright, he will not go there and then proceeds to smile while saying that yes gun confiscation would indeed damper a compromise.
As if the evidence above wasn’t enough, in a stunning and open admission, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch recently revealed his belief that ALL guns should be banned throughout the country.
“I belief for example that when Washington DC passed a law that nobody could have a gun except law enforcement and it was strict down by the United States Supreme Court that we should overrule the United States Supreme Court with a Constitutional Amendment.
I don’t belief in our society we should have guns.”
This short interview with the former Mayor of New York City of perfectly illustrates the mindset of the gun grabbers as they push to take away the ability for individual Americans to protect themselves in favor of a group think collectivist mentality of depending on authorities for your every need.
Dianne Feinstein – Career Gun Grabber
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the woman behind the incoming semi automatic gun ban, has been a gun grabber from the onset who has herself publicly stated that her actual goal is the confiscation of all guns throughout the country, a literal full-scale ban.
“I hope and trust that in the next session of Congress there will be sustained and thoughtful debate about America’s gun culture and our responsibility to prevent more loss of life,” Feinstein said after the Sandy Hook Shooting.
“I will do another assault weapons ban.”
“The legislation is open-ended and includes provisions to re-registerfirearms and submit the fingerprints of law-abiding Americans as if they’re sex offenders.
Feinstein’s bill will also include a buy-back provision that will allow the government to confiscate all firearms. Both Feinstein and New York governor Andrew Cuomo have said that is their plan.”
Despite her repeated claims (and what can now be confirmed as lies) that she supports the 2nd Amendment and only wants to protect children, the reality is that one of her goals during her entire career is the disarming of the American people.
In a clip taken from a 1995 episode of 60 Minutes, Feinstein is seen and heard making the startling declaration that the only reason she didn’t pass a full-scale gun ban is because the votes in Congress simply weren’t there.
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for anoutright ban, picking up every one of them…. Mr. and Mrs. American turn em all in. I would have done it.”
A report by Aaron Dykes that detailed Feinstein’s statements ended with an important quote from then President Bill Clinton that once again brings the mindset of the gun grabbers to center stage.
“When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly….
[However, now] there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much freedom.
When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”
House Resolution 226 – “Surrender Your Weapons”
In yet another end around gun confiscation type move since the Sandy Hook Shootings, Rep. Rosa DeLauro introduced H.R. 226 to the House of Representatives on January 13.
The bill, full of startlingly direct wording, would give Americans a tax credit if they “surrender” their weapons.
H. R. 226
To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow a credit against tax for surrendering to authorities certain assault weapons.
(a) Allowance of Credit.–
“(1) In general.–In the case of an individual who surrenders a specified assault weapon to the United States or a State or local government (or political subdivision thereof) as part of a Federal, State, or local public safety program to reduce the number of privately owned weapons, on the election of the taxpayer there shall be allowed as a credit against the tax imposed by this chapter an amount equal to $2,000.
The timing of the bill perfectly coincides with the corporate medias all out push to convince the American people that the only way to do their part in honoring the dead children is to support gun control and really do just about anything the authorities tell them is necessary to protect the children.
Establishment Mockingbird Media
From the onset of the news that there had been a shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut, the corporate establishment media initiated a coordinated, all out propaganda blitz on private gun ownership in America.
Actual cable news anchors, countless “experts,” and celebrity guests called for everything from semi auto bans to an across the board ban.
Perhaps the most prominent and disgusting pro confiscation establishment media hack, Piers Morgan has gone on a personal quest to broadcast propaganda piece after propaganda piece, doing everything he possibly can to paint him on the side of the children and pro 2nd Amendment activists on the side of death.
Just minutes after the news broke that a shooter in his 20?s had opened fire at an elementary school in Connecticut, Morgan, a CNN primetime host, began tweeting calls for stricter gun control.
As most of the country set glued to their TV or computer screen watching the horror unfold on TV, Morgan began posting a series of tweets that, among other things, implied the need for an across the board handgun ban.
This is America’s Dunblane. We banned handguns in Britain after that appalling tragedy. What will the U.S. do? Inaction not an option.— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) December 14, 2012
Not wanting to stop after calling for what would amount to the end of the Second Amendment, Morgan, showing his complete disdain for everything American, then published a series of tweets that challenged Obama and others to EXPLOIT this tragedy to implement gun control.
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan – White House spokesman Jay Carney’s right – today’s not the day to debate gun control. YESTERDAY was the day to debate it.
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan – Don’t just mourn these poor dead children America – get angry and do something to stop these senseless shootings happening.
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan -Last 2yrs: movie theatres, shopping malls, temples, a congresswoman, now an elementary school – when will America deal with its gun madness?
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan - Another day, another horrific shooting – this time at an elementary school in Connecticut. America’s gun culture has to change.
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan -This is now President Obama’s biggest test – will he have the courage to stand up to the American gun lobby?
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan -No more weasly words of ‘comfort’ Mr President. This is the latest, and worst, gun outrage on your watch. Time to act. #GunControl
After the above initial tweets, Morgan has and continues to broadcast nightly attacks on the 2nd Amendment. On one particular night, he actually had on Alex Jones and was utterly destroyed.
Morgan is far from the only establishment media hack to attack the 2nd Amendment in the month since the shooting. From numerous celebrities in a video funded by globalist gun grabber and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Michael Moore and various CNN and MSNBC news anchors, the so called elitist dinosaur media has been anything but unbiased.
Shortly after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, MSNBC host Ed Schultz tweeted his belief that all semi automatic weapons should be forcefully confiscated.
Just days later, Newsbuster documented CNN anchor Don Lemon calling for a similar form of outright confiscation.
“We need to get guns and bullets and automatic weapons off the streets.They should only be available to police officers and to hunt al-Qaeda and the Taliban and not hunt elementary school children,” an emotional Lemon appealed.
The tweets and on air rants cited here are only a small section of the literal hundreds, if not thousands, of calls for various forms of gun control, including confiscation, that have echoed throughout the corporate media.
Gun Control Against Your Political Enemies
In a now infamous 2007 speech, former White House Chief of Staffer and then member of the House of Representatives Rahm Emmanuel called for restricting the gun rights of American citizens who are on the suspected terrorist no fly list.
The problem? The suspected terrorist list is known to have at least 400,000 names on it and is growing at an alarming rate.
The fact of the matter is the government can easily put their critics on the list which would in turn disarm them completely outside of law.
The American people and our right to private firearm ownership is literally on the brink of destruction.
As the corporate media continues to tell you that there is nothing to worry about, those in power continue to make statements and actions that show the exact opposite.
The time to live in reality is now. We must stand up as a free thinking country and DENY any infringement on our 2nd Amendment, no matter how many times the media tells you that the majority of Americans support it. (which in itself is a complete lie)
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
Red Alert: Nationwide Plan for Gun Confiscation Exposed
by Alex Thomas
The Daily Sheeple
In the last month we have seen what can only be described as the largest attack on 2nd Amendment in the history of the United States.
Within hours of the horrific mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, elements of the corporate controlled media, in conjunction with a majority of politicians in a position of power, launched an all out propaganda blitz to convince the American people to accept not only a severely limited 2nd Amendment, but possibly a total gun ban.
Whether it be by Senator Dianne Feinstein, billionaire eugenicist Michael Bloomberg orPresident Obama himself, calls for and plans to limit private firearm ownership in America have been outlined and, in some cases, already put into law.
During the propaganda blitz that has accompanied President Obama’s task force and subsequent executive orders, each and every proponent of stricter gun control has claimed that they support the 2nd Amendment and do not want any sort of all out ban or confiscation.
Sadly, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Despite public claims from Obama and the corporate media that anyone who says the government is coming for their guns is nothing more than a right wing conspiracy theorist, the reality of the situation is that many different politicians and proponents of gun control have openly revealed their actual intentions for gun confiscation.
Multiple different statements that have either been made recently or surfaced and gone viral in the past month paint a clear picture as to what the powers that be actually want and are possibly planning to do.
On top of that, a bill introduced into the House of Representatives also pushes citizens to voluntarily turn in their guns in yet another move towards confiscation. Remember, the government doesn’t have to go door to door confiscating firearms, they can easily use a series of laws that when combined would essentially equal confiscation for millions of Americans. (Although many will never turn them in.
New York – Epicenter of Confiscation
A little over a week after the Sandy Hook Shooting, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told an Albany radio show that gun confiscation is an option being considered.
“Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option — keep your gun but permit it.”
Although this open call for illegal gun confiscation was downplayed after it was reportedthat the state might not even be able to pay for it, the fact remains that this admission by Cuomo shows that all out gun confiscation IS his eventual goal.
More recently, New York actually did pass what can be considered the most draconian gun law in the country.
Yesterday, the New York State Senate passed a law prohibiting assault rifles and limiting magazines to 7 rounds. The law will go in front of the State Assembly today, where it is expected to pass easily.
Notably, the bill contains no grandfather clause for people who already own these weapons.
Now, in the wake of the passing of the above noted bill, a video of New York State Assemblyman Republican Steven F. McLaughlin revealing the startling fact that a version of the bill favored by Democrats did indeed contain a provision for outright gun confiscation has surfaced.
The short clip below is almost unbelievable. McLaughlin is basically told to shut his mouth, he then states that alright, he will not go there and then proceeds to smile while saying that yes gun confiscation would indeed damper a compromise.
As if the evidence above wasn’t enough, in a stunning and open admission, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch recently revealed his belief that ALL guns should be banned throughout the country.
“I belief for example that when Washington DC passed a law that nobody could have a gun except law enforcement and it was strict down by the United States Supreme Court that we should overrule the United States Supreme Court with a Constitutional Amendment.
I don’t belief in our society we should have guns.”
This short interview with the former Mayor of New York City of perfectly illustrates the mindset of the gun grabbers as they push to take away the ability for individual Americans to protect themselves in favor of a group think collectivist mentality of depending on authorities for your every need.
Dianne Feinstein – Career Gun Grabber
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the woman behind the incoming semi automatic gun ban, has been a gun grabber from the onset who has herself publicly stated that her actual goal is the confiscation of all guns throughout the country, a literal full-scale ban.
“I hope and trust that in the next session of Congress there will be sustained and thoughtful debate about America’s gun culture and our responsibility to prevent more loss of life,” Feinstein said after the Sandy Hook Shooting.
“I will do another assault weapons ban.”
“The legislation is open-ended and includes provisions to re-registerfirearms and submit the fingerprints of law-abiding Americans as if they’re sex offenders.
Feinstein’s bill will also include a buy-back provision that will allow the government to confiscate all firearms. Both Feinstein and New York governor Andrew Cuomo have said that is their plan.”
Despite her repeated claims (and what can now be confirmed as lies) that she supports the 2nd Amendment and only wants to protect children, the reality is that one of her goals during her entire career is the disarming of the American people.
In a clip taken from a 1995 episode of 60 Minutes, Feinstein is seen and heard making the startling declaration that the only reason she didn’t pass a full-scale gun ban is because the votes in Congress simply weren’t there.
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for anoutright ban, picking up every one of them…. Mr. and Mrs. American turn em all in. I would have done it.”
A report by Aaron Dykes that detailed Feinstein’s statements ended with an important quote from then President Bill Clinton that once again brings the mindset of the gun grabbers to center stage.
“When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly….
[However, now] there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much freedom.
When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”
House Resolution 226 – “Surrender Your Weapons”
In yet another end around gun confiscation type move since the Sandy Hook Shootings, Rep. Rosa DeLauro introduced H.R. 226 to the House of Representatives on January 13.
The bill, full of startlingly direct wording, would give Americans a tax credit if they “surrender” their weapons.
H. R. 226
To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow a credit against tax for surrendering to authorities certain assault weapons.
(a) Allowance of Credit.–
“(1) In general.–In the case of an individual who surrenders a specified assault weapon to the United States or a State or local government (or political subdivision thereof) as part of a Federal, State, or local public safety program to reduce the number of privately owned weapons, on the election of the taxpayer there shall be allowed as a credit against the tax imposed by this chapter an amount equal to $2,000.
The timing of the bill perfectly coincides with the corporate medias all out push to convince the American people that the only way to do their part in honoring the dead children is to support gun control and really do just about anything the authorities tell them is necessary to protect the children.
Establishment Mockingbird Media
From the onset of the news that there had been a shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut, the corporate establishment media initiated a coordinated, all out propaganda blitz on private gun ownership in America.
Actual cable news anchors, countless “experts,” and celebrity guests called for everything from semi auto bans to an across the board ban.
Perhaps the most prominent and disgusting pro confiscation establishment media hack, Piers Morgan has gone on a personal quest to broadcast propaganda piece after propaganda piece, doing everything he possibly can to paint him on the side of the children and pro 2nd Amendment activists on the side of death.
Just minutes after the news broke that a shooter in his 20?s had opened fire at an elementary school in Connecticut, Morgan, a CNN primetime host, began tweeting calls for stricter gun control.
As most of the country set glued to their TV or computer screen watching the horror unfold on TV, Morgan began posting a series of tweets that, among other things, implied the need for an across the board handgun ban.
This is America’s Dunblane. We banned handguns in Britain after that appalling tragedy. What will the U.S. do? Inaction not an option.— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) December 14, 2012
Not wanting to stop after calling for what would amount to the end of the Second Amendment, Morgan, showing his complete disdain for everything American, then published a series of tweets that challenged Obama and others to EXPLOIT this tragedy to implement gun control.
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan – White House spokesman Jay Carney’s right – today’s not the day to debate gun control. YESTERDAY was the day to debate it.
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan – Don’t just mourn these poor dead children America – get angry and do something to stop these senseless shootings happening.
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan -Last 2yrs: movie theatres, shopping malls, temples, a congresswoman, now an elementary school – when will America deal with its gun madness?
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan - Another day, another horrific shooting – this time at an elementary school in Connecticut. America’s gun culture has to change.
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan -This is now President Obama’s biggest test – will he have the courage to stand up to the American gun lobby?
Piers Morgan ?@piersmorgan -No more weasly words of ‘comfort’ Mr President. This is the latest, and worst, gun outrage on your watch. Time to act. #GunControl
After the above initial tweets, Morgan has and continues to broadcast nightly attacks on the 2nd Amendment. On one particular night, he actually had on Alex Jones and was utterly destroyed.
Morgan is far from the only establishment media hack to attack the 2nd Amendment in the month since the shooting. From numerous celebrities in a video funded by globalist gun grabber and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Michael Moore and various CNN and MSNBC news anchors, the so called elitist dinosaur media has been anything but unbiased.
Shortly after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, MSNBC host Ed Schultz tweeted his belief that all semi automatic weapons should be forcefully confiscated.
Just days later, Newsbuster documented CNN anchor Don Lemon calling for a similar form of outright confiscation.
“We need to get guns and bullets and automatic weapons off the streets.They should only be available to police officers and to hunt al-Qaeda and the Taliban and not hunt elementary school children,” an emotional Lemon appealed.
The tweets and on air rants cited here are only a small section of the literal hundreds, if not thousands, of calls for various forms of gun control, including confiscation, that have echoed throughout the corporate media.
Gun Control Against Your Political Enemies
In a now infamous 2007 speech, former White House Chief of Staffer and then member of the House of Representatives Rahm Emmanuel called for restricting the gun rights of American citizens who are on the suspected terrorist no fly list.
The problem? The suspected terrorist list is known to have at least 400,000 names on it and is growing at an alarming rate.
The fact of the matter is the government can easily put their critics on the list which would in turn disarm them completely outside of law.
The American people and our right to private firearm ownership is literally on the brink of destruction.
As the corporate media continues to tell you that there is nothing to worry about, those in power continue to make statements and actions that show the exact opposite.
The time to live in reality is now. We must stand up as a free thinking country and DENY any infringement on our 2nd Amendment, no matter how many times the media tells you that the majority of Americans support it. (which in itself is a complete lie)
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
Disarming Peasants by Chris Sullivan
Disarming Peasants by Chris Sullivan
Every time there is a shooting at a school, shopping center, city council meeting or other location where innocent people are shot or killed by a private citizen and not a government employee, the Left immediately calls for civilian disarmament, maybe not all at once, but certainly by degrees.
What is odd about this is that not a day goes by that MoveOn.Org doesn't send out some kind of alert about banksters or corporate bogeymen who are up to no good. They probably are, but these people never see any danger from omnipotent government, only private cabals that operate for gain, but have no arrest or taxing power and no history of setting up gulags and murdering people en masse.
It's as though they have upended Jefferson's admonition, " in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution." Instead of mistrust of government officials they have mistrust of the citizen and instead of binding down the government they want to free the government and bind the citizen. They don't trust John Q. Public, but they do trust Obama, Bloomberg, Stalin, Hitler, Castro or Robespierre. Even if we had virtuous men currently in office, which we don't, it would be pure folly to expect that always to be the case. Carroll Quigley, who has the distinction of being mentioned approvingly by Bill Clinton, says in his magnum opus Tragedy & Hope that when the citizen can have the same weapons or nearly the same as the government, it favors popular government, but when the government has superior weaponry it favors authoritarian government.
All the arguments I have seen on both sides of the question are utilitarian arguments. I have not seen anybody take up an intransigent position of principle and contend that even if it could be shown that private ownership of weapons causes higher rates of violence it would not be justification for controlling weapons for the simple reason that owning weapons is an inalienable right and isn't susceptible to statistical arguments.
We don't have free speech because it can be shown that it's a good thing, but because it is a right, not a privilege. It doesn't make any difference that many people tell lies or make inflammatory comments; when a right is abused it does not negate it for others. For years the NRA has prattled on about "firearms freedoms" as though a freedom is the same thing as a right – it isn't. Your neighbor may have the freedom to come into your house at will, but not the right to. The latest bit of claptrap is that we're having a "conversation" about gun violence or protecting children or some other focus group-think. Formerly the correct term was "dialogue," but that has fallen into desuetude.
It seems that most of the "conversation" is directed at people's feelings, not thoughts. This is very much on display with the Charlatan-in-Chief surrounding himself with children and acting as though he cares what they think. As long as he has their attention, maybe he should ask their opinion of drone strikes against innocent people or saddling future generations with oppressive debt. They're probably too young to form an opinion about such things.
Under our system of government – theoretically – the citizen is the sovereign and the government is the agent or instrument. How can the agent have rights that the sovereign doesn't have? No one can give what he does not have. If the sovereign has no right to possess arms, certainly his agent cannot have such a right.
It isn't violence that the government objects to so much as it is private ownership of guns. When Julio Gonzalez burned 87 people to death at the Happy Land disco in New York, nobody called for stopping the sale of gasoline in cans. That would have been absurd and would not have furthered the cause of civilian disarmament.
Back in the '70s, the angle of attack on gun ownership was the "Saturday Night Special," a term that no gun enthusiast used, but was thought to be useful by the forces of control. For the past 15 years or so, it's been "assault weapons," another made up term with no definition. It sounds really menacing so it's likely to be around for quite a while. It seems to be derived from the term "assault rifle" which was supposedly coined by Hitler (it probably wasn't) to describe a selective fire (i.e. capable of both semi-automatic and automatic or "fully automatic" fire) rifle that fired a low-powered rifle cartridge.
These rifles had more power than the submachine guns, which fired pistol cartridges, but less than a regular infantry arm of the day, such as an M1, Lee Enfield, Mauser, Springfield, etc.
Some advocates of disarmament have resurrected the claim that the Second Amendment refers to ownership of muskets. The founders were aware that technology is not static and had they thought nobody should ever have anything more advanced than a musket they could have said so, but had they done so the Constitution would probably not have been ratified. A musket was comparable to anything the army of the day had, so by that reasoning the citizen should now have sophisticated military equipment.
The founders wanted to guard against "combinations of ambitious men," but the disarmament lobby puts unlimited faith in such men and views the common man warily. It's as though the Bolsheviks can be trusted, but the peasants can't be.
Reprinted with permission from Different Bugle.
Every time there is a shooting at a school, shopping center, city council meeting or other location where innocent people are shot or killed by a private citizen and not a government employee, the Left immediately calls for civilian disarmament, maybe not all at once, but certainly by degrees.
What is odd about this is that not a day goes by that MoveOn.Org doesn't send out some kind of alert about banksters or corporate bogeymen who are up to no good. They probably are, but these people never see any danger from omnipotent government, only private cabals that operate for gain, but have no arrest or taxing power and no history of setting up gulags and murdering people en masse.
It's as though they have upended Jefferson's admonition, " in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution." Instead of mistrust of government officials they have mistrust of the citizen and instead of binding down the government they want to free the government and bind the citizen. They don't trust John Q. Public, but they do trust Obama, Bloomberg, Stalin, Hitler, Castro or Robespierre. Even if we had virtuous men currently in office, which we don't, it would be pure folly to expect that always to be the case. Carroll Quigley, who has the distinction of being mentioned approvingly by Bill Clinton, says in his magnum opus Tragedy & Hope that when the citizen can have the same weapons or nearly the same as the government, it favors popular government, but when the government has superior weaponry it favors authoritarian government.
All the arguments I have seen on both sides of the question are utilitarian arguments. I have not seen anybody take up an intransigent position of principle and contend that even if it could be shown that private ownership of weapons causes higher rates of violence it would not be justification for controlling weapons for the simple reason that owning weapons is an inalienable right and isn't susceptible to statistical arguments.
We don't have free speech because it can be shown that it's a good thing, but because it is a right, not a privilege. It doesn't make any difference that many people tell lies or make inflammatory comments; when a right is abused it does not negate it for others. For years the NRA has prattled on about "firearms freedoms" as though a freedom is the same thing as a right – it isn't. Your neighbor may have the freedom to come into your house at will, but not the right to. The latest bit of claptrap is that we're having a "conversation" about gun violence or protecting children or some other focus group-think. Formerly the correct term was "dialogue," but that has fallen into desuetude.
It seems that most of the "conversation" is directed at people's feelings, not thoughts. This is very much on display with the Charlatan-in-Chief surrounding himself with children and acting as though he cares what they think. As long as he has their attention, maybe he should ask their opinion of drone strikes against innocent people or saddling future generations with oppressive debt. They're probably too young to form an opinion about such things.
Under our system of government – theoretically – the citizen is the sovereign and the government is the agent or instrument. How can the agent have rights that the sovereign doesn't have? No one can give what he does not have. If the sovereign has no right to possess arms, certainly his agent cannot have such a right.
It isn't violence that the government objects to so much as it is private ownership of guns. When Julio Gonzalez burned 87 people to death at the Happy Land disco in New York, nobody called for stopping the sale of gasoline in cans. That would have been absurd and would not have furthered the cause of civilian disarmament.
Back in the '70s, the angle of attack on gun ownership was the "Saturday Night Special," a term that no gun enthusiast used, but was thought to be useful by the forces of control. For the past 15 years or so, it's been "assault weapons," another made up term with no definition. It sounds really menacing so it's likely to be around for quite a while. It seems to be derived from the term "assault rifle" which was supposedly coined by Hitler (it probably wasn't) to describe a selective fire (i.e. capable of both semi-automatic and automatic or "fully automatic" fire) rifle that fired a low-powered rifle cartridge.
These rifles had more power than the submachine guns, which fired pistol cartridges, but less than a regular infantry arm of the day, such as an M1, Lee Enfield, Mauser, Springfield, etc.
Some advocates of disarmament have resurrected the claim that the Second Amendment refers to ownership of muskets. The founders were aware that technology is not static and had they thought nobody should ever have anything more advanced than a musket they could have said so, but had they done so the Constitution would probably not have been ratified. A musket was comparable to anything the army of the day had, so by that reasoning the citizen should now have sophisticated military equipment.
The founders wanted to guard against "combinations of ambitious men," but the disarmament lobby puts unlimited faith in such men and views the common man warily. It's as though the Bolsheviks can be trusted, but the peasants can't be.
Reprinted with permission from Different Bugle.
Gunning for No Change: Thousands of Armed Protesters Gather at State Capitols in Pro-Assault Rifle Rallies Across the Country
Gunning for No Change: Thousands of Armed Protesters Gather at State Capitols in Pro-Assault Rifle Rallies Across the Country
Thousands of gun advocates gathered peacefully Saturday at state capitals around the U.S. to rally against stricter limits on firearms, with demonstrators carrying rifles and pistols in some places while those elsewhere settled for waving hand-scrawled signs or screaming themselves hoarse.
The size of crowds at each location varied - from dozens of people in South Dakota to 2,000 in New York. Large crowds also turned out in Connecticut, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Washington state.
Some demonstrators in Olympia, Wash., Phoenix, Salem, Ore., and Salt Lake City came with holstered handguns or rifles on their backs. At the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort, attendees gave a special round of applause for 'the ladies that are packin'.
Activists promoted the 'Guns Across America' rallies primarily through social media. They were being held just days after President Barack Obama unveiled a sweeping package of federal gun-control proposals.
The crowd swelled to more than 800 amid balmy temperatures on the steps of the pink-hued Capitol in Austin, where speakers took the microphone under a giant Texas flag with 'Independent' stamped across it. Homemade placards read 'An Armed Society is a Polite Society,' 'The Second Amendment Comes from God' and 'Hey King O., I'm keeping my guns and my religion.'
'The thing that so angers me, and I think so angers you, is that this president is using children as a human shield to advance a very liberal agenda that will do nothing to protect them,' said state Rep. Steve Toth, referencing last month's elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn.
Toth, a first-term Republican lawmaker from The Woodlands outside Houston, has introduced legislation banning within Texas any future federal limits on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines, though such a measure would violate the U.S. Constitution.
Rallies at statehouses nationwide were organized by Eric Reed, an airline captain from the Houston area who in November started a group called 'More Gun Control (equals) More Crime.' Its Facebook page has been 'liked' by more than 17,000 people.
Texas law allows concealed handgun license-holders to carry firearms anywhere, but Reed said rally-goers shouldn't expose their weapons: 'I don't want anyone to get arrested.'
A man who identified himself only as 'Texas Mob Father' carried a camouflaged assault rifle strapped to his back during the Austin rally, but he was believed to be the only one to display a gun. Radio personality Alan LaFrance told the crowd he brought a Glock 19, but he kept it out of sight.
At the New York state Capitol in Albany, about 2,000 people turned out for a chilly rally, where they chanted 'We the People,' 'USA,' and 'Freedom.' Many carried American flags and 'Don't Tread On Me' banners.
Thousands of gun advocates gathered peacefully Saturday at state capitals around the U.S. to rally against stricter limits on firearms, with demonstrators carrying rifles and pistols in some places while those elsewhere settled for waving hand-scrawled signs or screaming themselves hoarse.
The size of crowds at each location varied - from dozens of people in South Dakota to 2,000 in New York. Large crowds also turned out in Connecticut, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Washington state.
Some demonstrators in Olympia, Wash., Phoenix, Salem, Ore., and Salt Lake City came with holstered handguns or rifles on their backs. At the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort, attendees gave a special round of applause for 'the ladies that are packin'.
Activists promoted the 'Guns Across America' rallies primarily through social media. They were being held just days after President Barack Obama unveiled a sweeping package of federal gun-control proposals.
The crowd swelled to more than 800 amid balmy temperatures on the steps of the pink-hued Capitol in Austin, where speakers took the microphone under a giant Texas flag with 'Independent' stamped across it. Homemade placards read 'An Armed Society is a Polite Society,' 'The Second Amendment Comes from God' and 'Hey King O., I'm keeping my guns and my religion.'
'The thing that so angers me, and I think so angers you, is that this president is using children as a human shield to advance a very liberal agenda that will do nothing to protect them,' said state Rep. Steve Toth, referencing last month's elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn.
Toth, a first-term Republican lawmaker from The Woodlands outside Houston, has introduced legislation banning within Texas any future federal limits on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines, though such a measure would violate the U.S. Constitution.
Rallies at statehouses nationwide were organized by Eric Reed, an airline captain from the Houston area who in November started a group called 'More Gun Control (equals) More Crime.' Its Facebook page has been 'liked' by more than 17,000 people.
Texas law allows concealed handgun license-holders to carry firearms anywhere, but Reed said rally-goers shouldn't expose their weapons: 'I don't want anyone to get arrested.'
A man who identified himself only as 'Texas Mob Father' carried a camouflaged assault rifle strapped to his back during the Austin rally, but he was believed to be the only one to display a gun. Radio personality Alan LaFrance told the crowd he brought a Glock 19, but he kept it out of sight.
At the New York state Capitol in Albany, about 2,000 people turned out for a chilly rally, where they chanted 'We the People,' 'USA,' and 'Freedom.' Many carried American flags and 'Don't Tread On Me' banners.
Friday, January 18, 2013
TEMUJIN SAYS LETS GET THIS BAD GUY HAS THE GUNs IN TO A REAL COURT OF LAW !!!
Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice have asked a federal court to indefinitely delay a lawsuit brought by watchdog group Judicial Watch. The lawsuit seeks the enforcement of open records requests relating to Operation Fast and Furious, as required by law.
Judicial Watch had filed, on June 22, 2012, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious and “specifically [a]ll records subject to the claim of executive privilege invoked by President Barack Obama on or about June 20, 2012.”
The administration has refused to comply with Judicial Watch’s FOIA request, and in mid-September the group filed a lawsuit challenging Holder’s denial. That lawsuit remains ongoing but within the past week President Barack Obama’s administration filed what’s called a “motion to stay” the suit. Such a motion is something that if granted would delay the lawsuit indefinitely.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that Holder’s and Obama’s desire to continually hide these Fast and Furious documents is “ironic” now that they’re so gung-ho on gun control. “It is beyond ironic that the Obama administration has initiated an anti-gun violence push as it seeking to keep secret key documents about its very own Fast and Furious gun walking scandal,” Fitton said in a statement. “Getting beyond the Obama administration’s smokescreen, this lawsuit is about a very simple principle: the public’s right to know the full truth about an egregious political scandal that led to the death of at least one American and countless others in Mexico. The American people are sick and tired of the Obama administration trying to rewrite FOIA law to protect this president and his appointees. Americans want answers about Fast and Furious killings and lies.”
The only justification Holder uses to ask the court to indefinitely delay Judicial Watch’s suit is that there’s another lawsuit ongoing for the same documents – one filed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Judicial Watch has filed a brief opposing the DOJ’s motion to stay.
As the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was voting Holder into contempt of Congress for his refusal to cooperate with congressional investigators by failing to turn over tens of thousands of pages of Fast and Furious documents, Obama asserted the executive privilege over them. The full House of Representatives soon after voted on a bipartisan basis to hold Holder in contempt.
There were two parts of the contempt resolution. Holder was, and still is, in both civil and criminal contempt of Congress. The criminal resolution was forwarded to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ronald Machen–who works for Holder–for prosecution. Despite being technically required by law to bring forth criminal charges against Holder, under orders from Holder’s Department of Justice Machen chose to ignore the resolution.
The second part of the contempt resolution–civil contempt of Congress–allowed House Republicans to hire legal staff to challenge President Obama’s assertion of the executive privilege. That lawsuit remains ongoing despite Holder’s and the DOJ’s attempt to dismiss it and settle it.
It’s unclear what’s in the documents Obama asserted privilege over, but the president’s use of the extraordinary power appears weak. There are two types of presidential executive privilege: the presidential communications privilege and the deliberative process privilege. Use of the presidential communications privilege would require that the president himself or his senior-most advisers were involved in the discussions.
Since the president and his cabinet-level officials continually claim they had no knowledge of Operation Fast and Furious until early 2011 when the information became public–and Holder claims he didn’t read the briefing documents he was sent that outlined the scandal and how guns were walking while the operation was ongoing–Obama says he’s using the less powerful deliberative process privilege.
The reason why Obama’s assertion of that deliberative process privilege over these documents is weak at best is because the Supreme Court has held that such a privilege assertion is invalidated by even the suspicion of government wrongdoing. Obama, Holder, the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and virtually everyone else involved in this scandal have admitted that government wrongdoing actually took place in Operation Fast and Furious.
In Fast and Furious, the ATF “walked” about 2,000 firearms into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels. That means through straw purchasers they allowed sales to happen and didn’t stop the guns from being trafficked even though they had the legal authority to do so and were fully capable of doing so.
Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexican citizens–estimates put it around at least 300–were killed with these firearms.
Note: As I remember that brief period when this subject was actually mentioned in MSM, there was more yelling and propaganda about “American guns flooding Mexico and in the hands of drug cartels” I remember hilarious klintler talking it up and it was obvious that it was to be the next crisis to be “handled” with attacks on the bill of rights and the second in particular.
http://goldtent.org/
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/17/Holder-begs-court-to-indefinitely-delay-group-s-lawsuit-fighting-for-release-of-Obama-s-executive-privilege-Fast-and-Furious-documents
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Guns Protect Honest People – Catherine Austin Fitts by Greg Hunter
Guns Protect Honest People – Catherine Austin Fitts by Greg Hunter
Why doesn't Cuomo call for life without parole for murdering ANYONE, not just first responders ???? If the shooter in Webster had been sentenced to life without parole for murdering his grandmother, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to kill anyone else would he ??? Or better yet, REINSTATE THE DEATH PENALTY AND DO AWAY WITH THE YEARS AND YEARS OF APPEALS AND THIN THE MURDERING HERD !!!! Some real COMMON SENSE ANDY YOU CREEP !!!
Financial expert, Catherine Austin Fitts, says the sudden turn to gun control in the face of mounting financial problems is no accident. Fitts contends, “Guns protect honest people. It’s a little scary, the timing of this, and I think a little bit obvious. Gun control is a way to take away the financial assets of the honest hard working people.” She goes on to say, “I think there is a real risk here that they’re going to awake the sleeping giant.” Fitts says we are not necessarily going to get a “new” currency, but it is definitely going digital. Fitts warns, “Once we are in a spot where the currency can be entirely digital, then we’re in a new state of very invasive control. . . . One of the reasons I love gold and silver is that it allows me not to be digital” Fitts says the real fight over the fiscal cliff is how we are going to pay for the mess. Fitts thinks, “Politicians have already committed to inflation.” Fitts predicts, “The chances of another financial collapse are very small because every time we come up to a moment where a financial collapse starts to be a real risk, what happens? We get war.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com.
Why doesn't Cuomo call for life without parole for murdering ANYONE, not just first responders ???? If the shooter in Webster had been sentenced to life without parole for murdering his grandmother, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to kill anyone else would he ??? Or better yet, REINSTATE THE DEATH PENALTY AND DO AWAY WITH THE YEARS AND YEARS OF APPEALS AND THIN THE MURDERING HERD !!!! Some real COMMON SENSE ANDY YOU CREEP !!!
Financial expert, Catherine Austin Fitts, says the sudden turn to gun control in the face of mounting financial problems is no accident. Fitts contends, “Guns protect honest people. It’s a little scary, the timing of this, and I think a little bit obvious. Gun control is a way to take away the financial assets of the honest hard working people.” She goes on to say, “I think there is a real risk here that they’re going to awake the sleeping giant.” Fitts says we are not necessarily going to get a “new” currency, but it is definitely going digital. Fitts warns, “Once we are in a spot where the currency can be entirely digital, then we’re in a new state of very invasive control. . . . One of the reasons I love gold and silver is that it allows me not to be digital” Fitts says the real fight over the fiscal cliff is how we are going to pay for the mess. Fitts thinks, “Politicians have already committed to inflation.” Fitts predicts, “The chances of another financial collapse are very small because every time we come up to a moment where a financial collapse starts to be a real risk, what happens? We get war.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Gun Groups Are Asking You to Support ‘Gun Appreciation Day’ on Jan. 19 by S.H. Blannelberry
Gun Groups Are Asking You to Support ‘Gun Appreciation Day’ on Jan. 19 by S.H. Blannelberry
PreviousNext Piers Morgan Fact CHECKED (VIDEO) Jerry Miculek answers fan questions (14 VIDEOS) Police Departments Unable to Stock Ammunition (VIDEO) Exploding snowmen! (VIDEO) The right to keep and arm bears Boberg XR9-L spotted in the wild (Photos + VIDEO) EDITORIAL: Gawker Publishes Names of CCW Permit Holders in NYC…
Gun Groups Are Asking You to Support ‘Gun Appreciation Day’ on Jan. 19
1/08/13
by S.H. Blannelberry
51 878
As pro-gun control forces in and around Washington begin to mobilize their base to support various bills that will severely restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners, a broad coalition of organizations including the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are fighting back.
With the launch of the first national ‘Gun Appreciation Day’ on Jan. 19, a grass roots effort designed to protest the draconian gun laws being discussed in Washington (‘assault weapons ban,’ national handgun registry, ban on online ammo sales and high-capacity magazines, among others), organizers are hoping to show the White House that the American people will not sit by idly as the government attempts to radically alter the Second Amendment.
Piers Morgan Gun Meme
“We need to ban politicians who assault our rights,” said Alan Gottlieb, the SAF’s executive vice president, in a press release, “not firearms that are used thousands of times a day to protect lives and property from criminal attack.”
“The Obama administration has shown that it is more than willing to trample the Constitution to impose its dictates upon the American people,” added Gun Appreciation Day chairman Larry Ward, president of Political Media, Inc. “If the American people don’t fight back now, Obama will do the Second Amendment what he has already done to the First with Obamacare – gut it without a moment’s thought to our basic constitutional rights.”
Gun Appreciation Day is on Jan. 19, exactly two days before President Obama is sworn in for his second term on Jan. 21. Organizers said this was intentional, the close proximity to Obama’s inauguration provides for maximum visibility.
“We want the president and his allies on Capitol Hill to understand their new push will result in a shove back from the people,” Gottlieb exclaimed. “Millions of law-abiding firearms owners are not about to be penalized for the unconscionable act of a madman. We will not all be judged by the conduct of a single crazy person.”
“Our intent is to telegraph a message to Congress and state legislatures around the country that trampling our rights is not an acceptable solution to violent crimes committed by people who don’t care about laws, much less the lives of the people they harm,” he added.
So, what can you do to be a part of Gun Appreciation Day?
Dictators Gun Meme
Well, organizers say you should turn out in droves at gun stores, gun counters, gun shows, and gun ranges on Jan 19. In lieu of participating in person, via social media, you can share (Facebook ‘like’ or Tweet, etc.) different pro-gun memes with your friends.
Also, you can sign the ‘Petition to Defend Gun Rights,’ which includes many important facts and axioms, among them, “George Mason, the Father of the Bill of Rights, summed it up best when he said, ‘To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.’”
You can read more about Gun Appreciation Day and what it entails by visiting the website: http://gunappreciationday.com/.
As the battle over gun rights heats up, we’re going to need more initiatives like Gun Appreciation Day to ensure our message reaches lawmakers in Washington and the non-gun owning public that doesn’t have a dog in the fight (i.e. the unbiased public). We must continue to win hearts and minds via social action. Gun Appreciation Day seems like a great way to get the ball rolling – your thoughts?
PreviousNext Piers Morgan Fact CHECKED (VIDEO) Jerry Miculek answers fan questions (14 VIDEOS) Police Departments Unable to Stock Ammunition (VIDEO) Exploding snowmen! (VIDEO) The right to keep and arm bears Boberg XR9-L spotted in the wild (Photos + VIDEO) EDITORIAL: Gawker Publishes Names of CCW Permit Holders in NYC…
Gun Groups Are Asking You to Support ‘Gun Appreciation Day’ on Jan. 19
1/08/13
by S.H. Blannelberry
51 878
As pro-gun control forces in and around Washington begin to mobilize their base to support various bills that will severely restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners, a broad coalition of organizations including the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are fighting back.
With the launch of the first national ‘Gun Appreciation Day’ on Jan. 19, a grass roots effort designed to protest the draconian gun laws being discussed in Washington (‘assault weapons ban,’ national handgun registry, ban on online ammo sales and high-capacity magazines, among others), organizers are hoping to show the White House that the American people will not sit by idly as the government attempts to radically alter the Second Amendment.
Piers Morgan Gun Meme
“We need to ban politicians who assault our rights,” said Alan Gottlieb, the SAF’s executive vice president, in a press release, “not firearms that are used thousands of times a day to protect lives and property from criminal attack.”
“The Obama administration has shown that it is more than willing to trample the Constitution to impose its dictates upon the American people,” added Gun Appreciation Day chairman Larry Ward, president of Political Media, Inc. “If the American people don’t fight back now, Obama will do the Second Amendment what he has already done to the First with Obamacare – gut it without a moment’s thought to our basic constitutional rights.”
Gun Appreciation Day is on Jan. 19, exactly two days before President Obama is sworn in for his second term on Jan. 21. Organizers said this was intentional, the close proximity to Obama’s inauguration provides for maximum visibility.
“We want the president and his allies on Capitol Hill to understand their new push will result in a shove back from the people,” Gottlieb exclaimed. “Millions of law-abiding firearms owners are not about to be penalized for the unconscionable act of a madman. We will not all be judged by the conduct of a single crazy person.”
“Our intent is to telegraph a message to Congress and state legislatures around the country that trampling our rights is not an acceptable solution to violent crimes committed by people who don’t care about laws, much less the lives of the people they harm,” he added.
So, what can you do to be a part of Gun Appreciation Day?
Dictators Gun Meme
Well, organizers say you should turn out in droves at gun stores, gun counters, gun shows, and gun ranges on Jan 19. In lieu of participating in person, via social media, you can share (Facebook ‘like’ or Tweet, etc.) different pro-gun memes with your friends.
Also, you can sign the ‘Petition to Defend Gun Rights,’ which includes many important facts and axioms, among them, “George Mason, the Father of the Bill of Rights, summed it up best when he said, ‘To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.’”
You can read more about Gun Appreciation Day and what it entails by visiting the website: http://gunappreciationday.com/.
As the battle over gun rights heats up, we’re going to need more initiatives like Gun Appreciation Day to ensure our message reaches lawmakers in Washington and the non-gun owning public that doesn’t have a dog in the fight (i.e. the unbiased public). We must continue to win hearts and minds via social action. Gun Appreciation Day seems like a great way to get the ball rolling – your thoughts?
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Jerrold Nadler: Gun-Grabbing Leninist by William Norman Grigg
Jerrold Nadler: Gun-Grabbing Leninist by William Norman Grigg
During a recent Capitol Hill press conference, Rep. Nadler urged his colleagues to support confiscation of high-capacity ammo clips legally obtained by American citizens. When a reporter asked if the military should be allowed to keep its high capacity magazines, Nadler decanted a reply that was pure, unfiltered Leninism:
"One of the definitions of a nation state is that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. And the state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence…. If the premise of your question is that people are going to resist a tyrannical government by shooting machine guns at American troops, that’s insane."
The unexamined premise of Nadler’s reply is that it is perfectly sane and rational for the segment of society most deeply implicated in the violent deaths of innocent people to have a monopoly on "legitimate" violence. Embedded within that premise is the assumption that the same government that monopolizes violence will have the exclusive privilege of defining "legitimacy," as well. For him, as for totalitarians of all varieties, that which the government does is innately legitimate, and those whom the government decides to kill have an inescapable duty to die.
Nadler’s reply was a more verbose rendition of Lenin’s definition of government: "Power without limit, resting directly on force." The distinction he drew between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" violence brings to mind comments made by Dear Leader Emeritus Bill Clinton in an interview published by Foreign Policy magazine, in which he defined terrorism as "killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders."
The Second Amendment is actually a much worthier document than the Constitution itself. That Amendment served two indispensable purposes. One was to forbid (in concept, if not in execution) the federal government from disarming the state militias, which would (and did) lead to a deadly concentration of power. The second, and more important, purpose of that amendment was to recognize, unambiguously, the individual right to armed self-defense. That right exists independent of government, and cannot be infringed by it. Most importantly, it establishes a critical threshold at which the government relinquishes any claim to legitimacy (at least among those who are willing to grant it such). Any government that seeks to disarm the people is one that can and must be resisted through force of arms. Tax-devouring, ambulatory obscenities like Jerrold Nadler serve a useful function by making vivid and tangible the otherwise abstract evil connoted by the word "government." The reason we have guns is to prevent the likes of Nadler from working their will upon us unopposed.
During a recent Capitol Hill press conference, Rep. Nadler urged his colleagues to support confiscation of high-capacity ammo clips legally obtained by American citizens. When a reporter asked if the military should be allowed to keep its high capacity magazines, Nadler decanted a reply that was pure, unfiltered Leninism:
"One of the definitions of a nation state is that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. And the state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence…. If the premise of your question is that people are going to resist a tyrannical government by shooting machine guns at American troops, that’s insane."
The unexamined premise of Nadler’s reply is that it is perfectly sane and rational for the segment of society most deeply implicated in the violent deaths of innocent people to have a monopoly on "legitimate" violence. Embedded within that premise is the assumption that the same government that monopolizes violence will have the exclusive privilege of defining "legitimacy," as well. For him, as for totalitarians of all varieties, that which the government does is innately legitimate, and those whom the government decides to kill have an inescapable duty to die.
Nadler’s reply was a more verbose rendition of Lenin’s definition of government: "Power without limit, resting directly on force." The distinction he drew between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" violence brings to mind comments made by Dear Leader Emeritus Bill Clinton in an interview published by Foreign Policy magazine, in which he defined terrorism as "killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders."
The Second Amendment is actually a much worthier document than the Constitution itself. That Amendment served two indispensable purposes. One was to forbid (in concept, if not in execution) the federal government from disarming the state militias, which would (and did) lead to a deadly concentration of power. The second, and more important, purpose of that amendment was to recognize, unambiguously, the individual right to armed self-defense. That right exists independent of government, and cannot be infringed by it. Most importantly, it establishes a critical threshold at which the government relinquishes any claim to legitimacy (at least among those who are willing to grant it such). Any government that seeks to disarm the people is one that can and must be resisted through force of arms. Tax-devouring, ambulatory obscenities like Jerrold Nadler serve a useful function by making vivid and tangible the otherwise abstract evil connoted by the word "government." The reason we have guns is to prevent the likes of Nadler from working their will upon us unopposed.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Why the 2nd Amendment by Walter E. Williams
Why the 2nd Amendment by Walter E. Williams
why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants.
Alexander Hamilton: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed," adding later, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government." By the way, Hamilton is referring to what institution when he says "the representatives of the people"?
James Madison: "(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
Thomas Jefferson: "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, which inspired our Constitution's Bill of Rights, said, "To disarm the people – that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants.
Alexander Hamilton: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed," adding later, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government." By the way, Hamilton is referring to what institution when he says "the representatives of the people"?
James Madison: "(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
Thomas Jefferson: "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, which inspired our Constitution's Bill of Rights, said, "To disarm the people – that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Progressives and the Phony Gun Debate by William L. Anderson
Progressives and the Phony Gun Debate by William L. Anderson
Whenever one sees the word "debate" in the New York Times or any other Progressive Mainstream Media source, one should substitute the word "monologue," which is a much more accurate assessment of what actually is happening. Progressives and the MSM allies do not want a "debate" over gun control; what they want are laws banning private ownership of firearms, period, and anything else is only a way-station to the final destination: total private gun bans.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, the sister of one of the murdered children wrote a well-publicized letter to President Barack Obama, imploring him to ban all weapons except those held by the police and government agencies. Now, one can excuse a grief-stricken 10-year-old child for demanding that the USA adopt what essentially was the gun standard for the former Soviet Union and other communist countries, although I doubt seriously that the child herself actually came up with the idea for the letter at all, or at least its contents.
Nonetheless, the child pretty much has stated what is the ultimate agenda for American Progressives, and until that ban is complete, we will not hear the end of terms such as "sensible gun control." To Progressives, "sensible gun control" is not simple registration or even a ban on so-called assault weapons and handguns. No, it is total and absolute prohibition for private citizens, while at the same time, government authorities are going to be armed to the teeth.
(Lest someone doubt my point that Progressives want to ban private firearm ownership, this article posted on the Progressive Daily Kos website lays out a plan for banning private weapons. The police, of course, would remain heavily armed. Not surprisingly, this website, which is one of the most influential Democratic Party sites, claims that most gun crime is committed by "NRA members." So, when Progressives don’t have the data to back up claims, they just make up things as they go.)
In trying to "dialog" with Progressives on this issue, Libertarians have cited facts, appealed to the U.S. Constitution, and pretty much have acted as though Progressives can be convinced with an argument based upon reason and logic. Unfortunately, they forget that Progressives create their logical propositions based upon very different assumptions than do Libertarians. A Libertarian syllogism might go something like this:
Individuals have rights, and one of those rights is the right to self-defense;
Firearms provide a very effective way for individuals to defend themselves against those who would seek to invade their property and harm them and their families;
Therefore, individuals should not be impeded by the State from owning firearms.
The Progressive syllogism, however, is much differently-constructed:
All individual "rights" really are created and given by the State;
No private individual has a "right" to self-defense unless granted so by the State:
Therefore, private individuals have no right to firearm ownership.
A parallel Progressive syllogism would be constructed as such:
An all-powerful and unlimited State is necessary for the functioning of a good society;
All individuals employed in occupations that defend the State have the right to self-defense;
Therefore, those individuals should be equipped with firearms to ensure "officer safety" and the safety of other government officials.
This is not a caricature of Progressive thinking (although I wish it were). To typical Progressives, government is the very essence of life, and anyone who is not directly employed by government or who has been given police powers by the State stands in the way of the State providing life and happiness.
Lest anyone believe that denial of individual self-defense is a top agenda for Progressives, think again. Both Canada and Great Britain essentially have outlawed individual self-defense, and should any individual use any kind of "offensive weapon" in self-defense, then that person faces extremely harsh punishments. Joyce Lee Malcolm writes:
A homeowner (in Great Britain) who discovered two robbers in his home held them with a toy gun while he telephoned the police. When the police arrived they arrested the two men, and also the homeowner, who was charged with putting someone in fear with a toy gun. An elderly woman who scared off a gang of youths by firing a cap pistol was charged with the same offense.
She continues:
The BBC offers this advice for anyone in Britain who is attacked on the street: You are permitted to protect yourself with a briefcase, a handbag, or keys. You should shout "Call the Police" rather than "Help." Bystanders are not to help. They have been taught to leave such matters to the professionals. If you manage to knock your attacker down, you must not hit him again or you risk being charged with assault. (Emphasis mine)
This is quite instructive if one wishes to understand the mentality of Progressives. To the typical Progressives, the elderly lady and the homeowner mentioned above were a threat to the monopoly power and the primacy of the State and deserved harsh punishment – even imprisonment – for exercising "privileges" not granted to them by the State. Keep in mind that Progressives have permitted the police to use deadly force against unarmed people, and that police officers regularly beat people brutally, and even the worst of these actions generally are excused or legally "justified" altogether, or the offending officer receives a wrist slap for punishment.
We must understand that this is not a situation in which we see the "Law of Unintended Consequences" in action; the authorities have fully intended for these consequences to occur, and each time an innocent person is beaten to death by thugs, or each time a person intending to defend himself or herself from an unwarranted assault is charged with a crime, the State and Progressives have won.
Several years ago, while riding a bus in Vancouver, Canada, I conversed with a local and asked him about the prohibition on self-defense. (Canada’s laws on this subject are similar to those in Great Britain.) When I asked him his thoughts on the law, he replied, "We Canadians are quite proud of these laws." Incredulous, I asked him why he believed it was wrong for an individual to defend himself against an unwarranted assault. He replied, "It reduces violence, since one has to act violently in self-defense."
I suspect that he echoes a lot (though hardly all) Canadians and probably most citizens of Great Britain. Once State authorities strip rights from individuals, they make it very dangerous for people to try to reclaim them, and ultimately, people just want to be protected from the predations of the State as much as from attacks and assaults on their own property. And since they cannot defend themselves effectively from State agents fully intending to wreak violence upon others, they realize that the best defense is just to be as invisible as possible.
Thus, when they are burglarized or attacked by criminals, they call the police, and then bear the costs. If a loved one is assaulted or murdered, they bear those costs as well. They say nothing that would anger the authorities and invite State-sponsored revenge upon themselves.
But what about the Progressive canard, "The only protection you need is the police"? Nicholas Kristof, in his recent anti-gun ownership screed from the New York Times, writes:
Published research makes it clear that having a gun in the home simply makes it more likely that you will be shot – by your partner or by yourself. Americans are safer if they rely on 911 for protection rather than on a gun.
Other Progressives have written that it is "grotesque" even to contemplate having armed guards at school, yet they will not explain why it is not "grotesque" that police officers carry automatic weapons, and why government officials and other public figures are surrounded by armed entourages that will gun down anyone on sight.
Unfortunately, Progressives do have an answer, even to this question, and it is: "We want children to feel safe, and they won’t feel safe if someone with a gun is nearby. As for government officials, they are necessary for our very well-being and if someone is permitted to freely assault an official, then the attackers have assaulted all of us.
There is another lesson for everyone here, and that is the lesson of how socialism really works. In the U.S.S.R., people who were politically-connected received the best medical care, were able to be first in line to receive decent housing, and were permitted to shop in "Yellow-Curtain" shops that had goods unavailable in typical Soviet stores. Everyone else was left more of left to fend for himself, receive substandard medical care, and have to wait in long lines for food and other essentials, and lived in ramshackle quarters.
Likewise, Progressives believe that only state agents should be on the receiving end of proper care and protection. As Glenn Reynolds recently pointed out in a USA Today column, it took 20 minutes for police to respond to the initial 911 call when Adam Lanza began his shooting spree. Yet, according to Kristof and the editors of the NYT, 20 minutes is perfectly acceptable. (No doubt, they would call for "more training" for police officers to ensure better responses, but in the real world, police are under no legal obligation to respond to any calls at all, and since "officer safety" is the mantra of every police department, it always is easier for officers to draw chalk lines around the bodies than it is for a cop to be asked to defend little children from a crazed shooter.)
Furthermore, Progressives don’t even believe that draconian gun laws actually reduce spree shootings or other such crimes. Instead, they promote such laws because it forces even more dependence upon State authorities. Malcolm writes about a spree shooting in Great Britain by a man carrying a banned semi-automatic rifle:
In 1987, Michael Ryan went on a shooting spree in his small town of Hungerford, England, killing 16 people (including his mother) and wounding another 14 before shooting himself. Since the public was unarmed – as were the police – Ryan wandered the streets for eight hours with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun before anyone with a firearm was able to come to the rescue. (Emphasis mine)
British law did not protect anyone. Instead, it made law-abiding citizens even more vulnerable to the whims of others who did not respect the law. Yet, I should add that Progressives believe wholeheartedly that this is a perfectly-acceptable set of circumstances. If some eggs are broken while a Utopian omelet is being created, so be it.
One cannot "debate" people who construct their own sets of logical premises and who see State-sponsored violence as the answer to "all of our problems." Progressives do not want individuals disarmed because they believe the result will be less violence and less danger; no, they push disarmament because they believe that a "good society" can come about only when individuals live in constant fear of the State and when the State is so powerful that it can do anything it wants to anyone.
Unfortunately, Progressives view those of us who believe that individual rights come from Natural Law and hold that State violence against the innocent is unacceptable as "whack jobs" and "gun nuts." There is no in-between, and there certainly is no dialogue, for no Progressive will be satisfied until whole classes of people are left totally vulnerable to the whims of State agents. In the end, that is their "good society."
LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
Whenever one sees the word "debate" in the New York Times or any other Progressive Mainstream Media source, one should substitute the word "monologue," which is a much more accurate assessment of what actually is happening. Progressives and the MSM allies do not want a "debate" over gun control; what they want are laws banning private ownership of firearms, period, and anything else is only a way-station to the final destination: total private gun bans.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, the sister of one of the murdered children wrote a well-publicized letter to President Barack Obama, imploring him to ban all weapons except those held by the police and government agencies. Now, one can excuse a grief-stricken 10-year-old child for demanding that the USA adopt what essentially was the gun standard for the former Soviet Union and other communist countries, although I doubt seriously that the child herself actually came up with the idea for the letter at all, or at least its contents.
Nonetheless, the child pretty much has stated what is the ultimate agenda for American Progressives, and until that ban is complete, we will not hear the end of terms such as "sensible gun control." To Progressives, "sensible gun control" is not simple registration or even a ban on so-called assault weapons and handguns. No, it is total and absolute prohibition for private citizens, while at the same time, government authorities are going to be armed to the teeth.
(Lest someone doubt my point that Progressives want to ban private firearm ownership, this article posted on the Progressive Daily Kos website lays out a plan for banning private weapons. The police, of course, would remain heavily armed. Not surprisingly, this website, which is one of the most influential Democratic Party sites, claims that most gun crime is committed by "NRA members." So, when Progressives don’t have the data to back up claims, they just make up things as they go.)
In trying to "dialog" with Progressives on this issue, Libertarians have cited facts, appealed to the U.S. Constitution, and pretty much have acted as though Progressives can be convinced with an argument based upon reason and logic. Unfortunately, they forget that Progressives create their logical propositions based upon very different assumptions than do Libertarians. A Libertarian syllogism might go something like this:
Individuals have rights, and one of those rights is the right to self-defense;
Firearms provide a very effective way for individuals to defend themselves against those who would seek to invade their property and harm them and their families;
Therefore, individuals should not be impeded by the State from owning firearms.
The Progressive syllogism, however, is much differently-constructed:
All individual "rights" really are created and given by the State;
No private individual has a "right" to self-defense unless granted so by the State:
Therefore, private individuals have no right to firearm ownership.
A parallel Progressive syllogism would be constructed as such:
An all-powerful and unlimited State is necessary for the functioning of a good society;
All individuals employed in occupations that defend the State have the right to self-defense;
Therefore, those individuals should be equipped with firearms to ensure "officer safety" and the safety of other government officials.
This is not a caricature of Progressive thinking (although I wish it were). To typical Progressives, government is the very essence of life, and anyone who is not directly employed by government or who has been given police powers by the State stands in the way of the State providing life and happiness.
Lest anyone believe that denial of individual self-defense is a top agenda for Progressives, think again. Both Canada and Great Britain essentially have outlawed individual self-defense, and should any individual use any kind of "offensive weapon" in self-defense, then that person faces extremely harsh punishments. Joyce Lee Malcolm writes:
A homeowner (in Great Britain) who discovered two robbers in his home held them with a toy gun while he telephoned the police. When the police arrived they arrested the two men, and also the homeowner, who was charged with putting someone in fear with a toy gun. An elderly woman who scared off a gang of youths by firing a cap pistol was charged with the same offense.
She continues:
The BBC offers this advice for anyone in Britain who is attacked on the street: You are permitted to protect yourself with a briefcase, a handbag, or keys. You should shout "Call the Police" rather than "Help." Bystanders are not to help. They have been taught to leave such matters to the professionals. If you manage to knock your attacker down, you must not hit him again or you risk being charged with assault. (Emphasis mine)
This is quite instructive if one wishes to understand the mentality of Progressives. To the typical Progressives, the elderly lady and the homeowner mentioned above were a threat to the monopoly power and the primacy of the State and deserved harsh punishment – even imprisonment – for exercising "privileges" not granted to them by the State. Keep in mind that Progressives have permitted the police to use deadly force against unarmed people, and that police officers regularly beat people brutally, and even the worst of these actions generally are excused or legally "justified" altogether, or the offending officer receives a wrist slap for punishment.
We must understand that this is not a situation in which we see the "Law of Unintended Consequences" in action; the authorities have fully intended for these consequences to occur, and each time an innocent person is beaten to death by thugs, or each time a person intending to defend himself or herself from an unwarranted assault is charged with a crime, the State and Progressives have won.
Several years ago, while riding a bus in Vancouver, Canada, I conversed with a local and asked him about the prohibition on self-defense. (Canada’s laws on this subject are similar to those in Great Britain.) When I asked him his thoughts on the law, he replied, "We Canadians are quite proud of these laws." Incredulous, I asked him why he believed it was wrong for an individual to defend himself against an unwarranted assault. He replied, "It reduces violence, since one has to act violently in self-defense."
I suspect that he echoes a lot (though hardly all) Canadians and probably most citizens of Great Britain. Once State authorities strip rights from individuals, they make it very dangerous for people to try to reclaim them, and ultimately, people just want to be protected from the predations of the State as much as from attacks and assaults on their own property. And since they cannot defend themselves effectively from State agents fully intending to wreak violence upon others, they realize that the best defense is just to be as invisible as possible.
Thus, when they are burglarized or attacked by criminals, they call the police, and then bear the costs. If a loved one is assaulted or murdered, they bear those costs as well. They say nothing that would anger the authorities and invite State-sponsored revenge upon themselves.
But what about the Progressive canard, "The only protection you need is the police"? Nicholas Kristof, in his recent anti-gun ownership screed from the New York Times, writes:
Published research makes it clear that having a gun in the home simply makes it more likely that you will be shot – by your partner or by yourself. Americans are safer if they rely on 911 for protection rather than on a gun.
Other Progressives have written that it is "grotesque" even to contemplate having armed guards at school, yet they will not explain why it is not "grotesque" that police officers carry automatic weapons, and why government officials and other public figures are surrounded by armed entourages that will gun down anyone on sight.
Unfortunately, Progressives do have an answer, even to this question, and it is: "We want children to feel safe, and they won’t feel safe if someone with a gun is nearby. As for government officials, they are necessary for our very well-being and if someone is permitted to freely assault an official, then the attackers have assaulted all of us.
There is another lesson for everyone here, and that is the lesson of how socialism really works. In the U.S.S.R., people who were politically-connected received the best medical care, were able to be first in line to receive decent housing, and were permitted to shop in "Yellow-Curtain" shops that had goods unavailable in typical Soviet stores. Everyone else was left more of left to fend for himself, receive substandard medical care, and have to wait in long lines for food and other essentials, and lived in ramshackle quarters.
Likewise, Progressives believe that only state agents should be on the receiving end of proper care and protection. As Glenn Reynolds recently pointed out in a USA Today column, it took 20 minutes for police to respond to the initial 911 call when Adam Lanza began his shooting spree. Yet, according to Kristof and the editors of the NYT, 20 minutes is perfectly acceptable. (No doubt, they would call for "more training" for police officers to ensure better responses, but in the real world, police are under no legal obligation to respond to any calls at all, and since "officer safety" is the mantra of every police department, it always is easier for officers to draw chalk lines around the bodies than it is for a cop to be asked to defend little children from a crazed shooter.)
Furthermore, Progressives don’t even believe that draconian gun laws actually reduce spree shootings or other such crimes. Instead, they promote such laws because it forces even more dependence upon State authorities. Malcolm writes about a spree shooting in Great Britain by a man carrying a banned semi-automatic rifle:
In 1987, Michael Ryan went on a shooting spree in his small town of Hungerford, England, killing 16 people (including his mother) and wounding another 14 before shooting himself. Since the public was unarmed – as were the police – Ryan wandered the streets for eight hours with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun before anyone with a firearm was able to come to the rescue. (Emphasis mine)
British law did not protect anyone. Instead, it made law-abiding citizens even more vulnerable to the whims of others who did not respect the law. Yet, I should add that Progressives believe wholeheartedly that this is a perfectly-acceptable set of circumstances. If some eggs are broken while a Utopian omelet is being created, so be it.
One cannot "debate" people who construct their own sets of logical premises and who see State-sponsored violence as the answer to "all of our problems." Progressives do not want individuals disarmed because they believe the result will be less violence and less danger; no, they push disarmament because they believe that a "good society" can come about only when individuals live in constant fear of the State and when the State is so powerful that it can do anything it wants to anyone.
Unfortunately, Progressives view those of us who believe that individual rights come from Natural Law and hold that State violence against the innocent is unacceptable as "whack jobs" and "gun nuts." There is no in-between, and there certainly is no dialogue, for no Progressive will be satisfied until whole classes of people are left totally vulnerable to the whims of State agents. In the end, that is their "good society."
LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
Sandy Hook and Pre-emptive Civilian Disarmament by William Norman Grigg
Sandy Hook and Pre-emptive Civilian Disarmament by William Norman Grigg
Civilian disarmament advocates insist that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre illustrates the dangers of inadequately restrictive firearms laws. That assumption is impossible to reconcile with the fact that Connecticut’s state government regards individual firearms ownership not as a right but as a highly conditional privilege subject to revocation without notice, on the whim of an unaccountable bureaucrat.
In 1999, the Connecticut legislature enacted Sec. 29-38c, a measure allowing the police to confiscate firearms from anybody believed to pose "a risk of imminent personal injury to himself … or to other individuals." All that is required is a sworn complaint "by any state’s attorney or assistant state’s attorney or by any two police officers to any judge of the Superior Court." A warrant will then be issued allowing police to confiscate the firearms and hold them for up to a year.
The gun confiscation measure was enacted in October 1999, about a year and a half after the last pre-Sandy Hook mass shooting to occur in the Nutmeg State. The assailant, Matthew Beck, was an ex-employee of the Internal Revenue Service who at the time was employed as an accountant at the Connecticut Lottery Corporation.
A few months before the March, 1998 massacre, Beck had been granted a medical leave for stress-related symptoms. His application for a promotion had been denied. Several of his co-workers and relatives had become concerned about his emotional state. Some of his close friends believed that Beck suffered from suicidal depression. But nobody had expected that he would arrive at work one morning, take out a Glock, and start gunning down his supervisors.
As is always the case in episodes of this kind, the shooter ended the rampage on his own terms, killing himself before the police arrived. The on-scene security guard was similarly useless: The only aid he provided was to suggest to the victims that they take refuge in a wooded area nearby.
Just weeks after the shooting, State Representative Michael Lawlor introduced the gun confiscation measure.
State police Lieutenant Robert Kiehm explained to the Associated Press that the purpose of the measure is to give police officers the power "to take some proactive steps instead of waiting for something to happen."
"The value of this law is not so much that police will seize your guns," Lawlor insisted when it took effect in October 1999. "It gives police a system to investigate a person who poses a threat. If the police never confiscate a person's guns, they can at least look into the person's behavior and perhaps prevent a tragedy by intervening."
During the first decade following its enactment, Connecticut’s gun seizure law resulted in the confiscation of at least 2,000 firearms from people who were never charged with crimes. Nearly all of the seizures followed reports from concerned relatives – generally spouses – of the victims. Attorney Rachel Baird, who has represented a dozen Connecticut residents whose firearms have been confiscated, insists that none of them posed any credible threat to anybody, including themselves.
Lawlor, who is now the state’s Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, invokes a variation on Dick Cheney’s "One Percent Doctrine" ("Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it’s a certainty") to justify the gun confiscation program. "Maybe it would have been just a suicide or a single murder of a spouse, but potentially one of these guys along the road could have been a mass shooting," he told NPR.
The standard set out in the Connecticut confiscation law – namely, that guns can be seized from anyone who presents "a risk of imminent personal injury to others" – would justify the pre-emptive disarmament of the police force. After all, the police constitute a body of armed individuals who are trained to employ violence and are rarely held accountable for injuring or killing others without a morally sound reason to do so.
If Lawlor’s defense of the measure – that it is justified by the prevention of "just a suicide or a single murder" – were applied seriously, it would buttress the case for disarming the police in Connecticut. Between April and June of 2011, there were four police suicides in Connecticut, a development that prompted authorities to convene a special statewide conference on suicide prevention. That argument is enhanced even further by the case of Hartford Police Officer Robert Lawlor (no relation, as far as I can determine).
In May 2005, Officer Lawlor was part of a federal task force called the Violent Crime Impact Team (VCIT). He and his partner, ATF Agent Daniel Prather, were deployed on the streets of Hartford looking for firearms to confiscate.
On the evening of May 7, Lawlor and Prather – who were decked out in street attire – were harassing somebody on a street corner when the officer spotted a black Maxima with a young black male sitting behind the wheel.
Lawlor strode up to the car, flashed his badge, and ordered the driver, a young man named Brandon Henry, to stop the car and keep his hands in plain sight. He had neither probable cause nor "reasonable suspicion" to justify the contact. A few seconds later, five shots erupted and Henry, in a panic, pulled away in the car. While the officers called for backup, Henry collided into another vehicle before staggering from his car and running away, depositing a bloody trail in his wake.
Although he had been shot in the chest, Henry survived. His passenger, 18-year-old Jashon Bryant, did not. Lawlor, who had approached the vehicle from the passenger side, had shot Bryant in the head. A thorough search of the vehicle turned up a tiny amount of cocaine. No firearm was ever found.
Testifying under oath later, Prather admitted that he never saw a gun in the car – and never heard Lawlor mention one at the time of the shooting. An official investigation by the State Division of Criminal Justice concluded that "the use of deadly physical force was not appropriate." In other words, Lawlor had committed criminal homicide.
Unlike the people whose guns were stolen by Connecticut police, Lawlor’s background demonstrated that he was clearly a danger to the safety of others. He was investigated for a 1990 on-duty shooting in which a 15-year-old boy was needlessly wounded. He was sued on multiple occasions by professional colleagues, who accused him of malicious harassment and reckless driving that resulted in injuries to several other officers.
Lawlor is the kind of fellow who speaks of himself in the third person when explaining to a reporter that he’s willing to bend the rules to get things done – and that his problems reflect the fact that his professional colleagues just aren’t worthy of him.
"If you're a boss, is it easier to bring Bobby Lawlor down or is it easier to take 40 other officers and bring them up to my level?" Lawlor said to the Hartford Courant following the 2005 shooting. "I've had problems with supervisors because ... I fight for the little guy and I know policy and procedure better than the supervisors."
"Policy and procedure," from Lawlor’s perspective, apparently justified subornation of perjury in order to protect himself after he needlessly shot and killed Jashon Bryant.
About a week after the shooting, a minor-league drug dealer named Jaime Diaz called the Hartford Police to report that he had the gun Lawlor had supposedly seen in Henry's car. Diaz, who insisted that he didn’t know Lawlor, provided a detailed statement to police describing how he came into possession of the weapon. Two weeks later, Diaz contacted the Police again to recant his statement, admitting that he was actually a confidential informant who had worked with Lawlor as part of a narcotics task force.
Ten years earlier, Lawlor – once again, acting on "policy and procedure," as he understood the concept – refused to arrest Diaz on a narcotics charge. Now that he was in serious trouble after gunning down an unarmed 18-year-old kid, Lawlor called in the favor.
In July 2006, after the State Division of Criminal Justice ruled that Lawlor’s shooting of Jashon Bryant was not legally justified, the officer was confronted by several of the victim’s relatives outside the Hartford Superior Court.
When Lawlor returned a week later for a pre-trial hearing, "The entrance to the [courthouse] was lined with blue," reported the local NBC affiliate, WTNH. "State and local police in uniform were there to guard Officer Lawlor from friends and family of the man he's accused of killing...."
Although there was no serious dispute about the facts of the case, Lawlor was acquitted in 2009. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he displayed not a scintilla of regret over the fact that he had needlessly killed an unarmed and terrified 18-year-old boy.
"No mistakes were made," Lawlor defiantly sneered at Bryant’s father and sister as the bereaved relatives confronted the killer outside the courthouse. "Being sorry, to me in my personal belief, would be admitting some sort of wrongdoing. I did nothing wrong."
Lawlor did find it appropriate to express sympathy toward someone he considered a worthy victim. After the trial, Lawlor – who by that time had retired with a full pension – whined that the verdict brought to an end "the longest four and a half years of my life." He promptly filed a lawsuit against the prosecutor who had filed criminal charges against him.
If Connecticut’s pre-emptive disarmament law had really been intended to mitigate public danger, Michael Lawlor would have been required to surrender his firearms, rather than using them to confiscate guns from other people. But if sociopaths in uniform are required to give up their guns, how would they be able to disarm the rest of us?
Civilian disarmament advocates insist that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre illustrates the dangers of inadequately restrictive firearms laws. That assumption is impossible to reconcile with the fact that Connecticut’s state government regards individual firearms ownership not as a right but as a highly conditional privilege subject to revocation without notice, on the whim of an unaccountable bureaucrat.
In 1999, the Connecticut legislature enacted Sec. 29-38c, a measure allowing the police to confiscate firearms from anybody believed to pose "a risk of imminent personal injury to himself … or to other individuals." All that is required is a sworn complaint "by any state’s attorney or assistant state’s attorney or by any two police officers to any judge of the Superior Court." A warrant will then be issued allowing police to confiscate the firearms and hold them for up to a year.
The gun confiscation measure was enacted in October 1999, about a year and a half after the last pre-Sandy Hook mass shooting to occur in the Nutmeg State. The assailant, Matthew Beck, was an ex-employee of the Internal Revenue Service who at the time was employed as an accountant at the Connecticut Lottery Corporation.
A few months before the March, 1998 massacre, Beck had been granted a medical leave for stress-related symptoms. His application for a promotion had been denied. Several of his co-workers and relatives had become concerned about his emotional state. Some of his close friends believed that Beck suffered from suicidal depression. But nobody had expected that he would arrive at work one morning, take out a Glock, and start gunning down his supervisors.
As is always the case in episodes of this kind, the shooter ended the rampage on his own terms, killing himself before the police arrived. The on-scene security guard was similarly useless: The only aid he provided was to suggest to the victims that they take refuge in a wooded area nearby.
Just weeks after the shooting, State Representative Michael Lawlor introduced the gun confiscation measure.
State police Lieutenant Robert Kiehm explained to the Associated Press that the purpose of the measure is to give police officers the power "to take some proactive steps instead of waiting for something to happen."
"The value of this law is not so much that police will seize your guns," Lawlor insisted when it took effect in October 1999. "It gives police a system to investigate a person who poses a threat. If the police never confiscate a person's guns, they can at least look into the person's behavior and perhaps prevent a tragedy by intervening."
During the first decade following its enactment, Connecticut’s gun seizure law resulted in the confiscation of at least 2,000 firearms from people who were never charged with crimes. Nearly all of the seizures followed reports from concerned relatives – generally spouses – of the victims. Attorney Rachel Baird, who has represented a dozen Connecticut residents whose firearms have been confiscated, insists that none of them posed any credible threat to anybody, including themselves.
Lawlor, who is now the state’s Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, invokes a variation on Dick Cheney’s "One Percent Doctrine" ("Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it’s a certainty") to justify the gun confiscation program. "Maybe it would have been just a suicide or a single murder of a spouse, but potentially one of these guys along the road could have been a mass shooting," he told NPR.
The standard set out in the Connecticut confiscation law – namely, that guns can be seized from anyone who presents "a risk of imminent personal injury to others" – would justify the pre-emptive disarmament of the police force. After all, the police constitute a body of armed individuals who are trained to employ violence and are rarely held accountable for injuring or killing others without a morally sound reason to do so.
If Lawlor’s defense of the measure – that it is justified by the prevention of "just a suicide or a single murder" – were applied seriously, it would buttress the case for disarming the police in Connecticut. Between April and June of 2011, there were four police suicides in Connecticut, a development that prompted authorities to convene a special statewide conference on suicide prevention. That argument is enhanced even further by the case of Hartford Police Officer Robert Lawlor (no relation, as far as I can determine).
In May 2005, Officer Lawlor was part of a federal task force called the Violent Crime Impact Team (VCIT). He and his partner, ATF Agent Daniel Prather, were deployed on the streets of Hartford looking for firearms to confiscate.
On the evening of May 7, Lawlor and Prather – who were decked out in street attire – were harassing somebody on a street corner when the officer spotted a black Maxima with a young black male sitting behind the wheel.
Lawlor strode up to the car, flashed his badge, and ordered the driver, a young man named Brandon Henry, to stop the car and keep his hands in plain sight. He had neither probable cause nor "reasonable suspicion" to justify the contact. A few seconds later, five shots erupted and Henry, in a panic, pulled away in the car. While the officers called for backup, Henry collided into another vehicle before staggering from his car and running away, depositing a bloody trail in his wake.
Although he had been shot in the chest, Henry survived. His passenger, 18-year-old Jashon Bryant, did not. Lawlor, who had approached the vehicle from the passenger side, had shot Bryant in the head. A thorough search of the vehicle turned up a tiny amount of cocaine. No firearm was ever found.
Testifying under oath later, Prather admitted that he never saw a gun in the car – and never heard Lawlor mention one at the time of the shooting. An official investigation by the State Division of Criminal Justice concluded that "the use of deadly physical force was not appropriate." In other words, Lawlor had committed criminal homicide.
Unlike the people whose guns were stolen by Connecticut police, Lawlor’s background demonstrated that he was clearly a danger to the safety of others. He was investigated for a 1990 on-duty shooting in which a 15-year-old boy was needlessly wounded. He was sued on multiple occasions by professional colleagues, who accused him of malicious harassment and reckless driving that resulted in injuries to several other officers.
Lawlor is the kind of fellow who speaks of himself in the third person when explaining to a reporter that he’s willing to bend the rules to get things done – and that his problems reflect the fact that his professional colleagues just aren’t worthy of him.
"If you're a boss, is it easier to bring Bobby Lawlor down or is it easier to take 40 other officers and bring them up to my level?" Lawlor said to the Hartford Courant following the 2005 shooting. "I've had problems with supervisors because ... I fight for the little guy and I know policy and procedure better than the supervisors."
"Policy and procedure," from Lawlor’s perspective, apparently justified subornation of perjury in order to protect himself after he needlessly shot and killed Jashon Bryant.
About a week after the shooting, a minor-league drug dealer named Jaime Diaz called the Hartford Police to report that he had the gun Lawlor had supposedly seen in Henry's car. Diaz, who insisted that he didn’t know Lawlor, provided a detailed statement to police describing how he came into possession of the weapon. Two weeks later, Diaz contacted the Police again to recant his statement, admitting that he was actually a confidential informant who had worked with Lawlor as part of a narcotics task force.
Ten years earlier, Lawlor – once again, acting on "policy and procedure," as he understood the concept – refused to arrest Diaz on a narcotics charge. Now that he was in serious trouble after gunning down an unarmed 18-year-old kid, Lawlor called in the favor.
In July 2006, after the State Division of Criminal Justice ruled that Lawlor’s shooting of Jashon Bryant was not legally justified, the officer was confronted by several of the victim’s relatives outside the Hartford Superior Court.
When Lawlor returned a week later for a pre-trial hearing, "The entrance to the [courthouse] was lined with blue," reported the local NBC affiliate, WTNH. "State and local police in uniform were there to guard Officer Lawlor from friends and family of the man he's accused of killing...."
Although there was no serious dispute about the facts of the case, Lawlor was acquitted in 2009. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he displayed not a scintilla of regret over the fact that he had needlessly killed an unarmed and terrified 18-year-old boy.
"No mistakes were made," Lawlor defiantly sneered at Bryant’s father and sister as the bereaved relatives confronted the killer outside the courthouse. "Being sorry, to me in my personal belief, would be admitting some sort of wrongdoing. I did nothing wrong."
Lawlor did find it appropriate to express sympathy toward someone he considered a worthy victim. After the trial, Lawlor – who by that time had retired with a full pension – whined that the verdict brought to an end "the longest four and a half years of my life." He promptly filed a lawsuit against the prosecutor who had filed criminal charges against him.
If Connecticut’s pre-emptive disarmament law had really been intended to mitigate public danger, Michael Lawlor would have been required to surrender his firearms, rather than using them to confiscate guns from other people. But if sociopaths in uniform are required to give up their guns, how would they be able to disarm the rest of us?
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