Safer streets are evidence of a healthy self-rule, the very kind the Founding Fathers insisted on. America is a place where our values system is an aggregate of working safeguards of our liberty, our sovereignty, and our total way of life here. It is comprised of marriage and family, personal and professional integrity, good faith and the reasonable expectation of good faith, and a spirit of personal independence as a matter of personal dignity. In short, there is little for public servants to do beyond the enumerated powers they are supposed to have. The problem begins with powers servants are not supposed to have.
How are gun control and safer streets incompatible?
In 1987, Billie Boggs was a homeless lady in the City of New York. The story can be found by Internet search term Billie Boggs and is commented in my book Safer Streets 2010. Thumbnail, it was a case that compelled the government to release homeless people from the protection of psychiatric incarceration and other plans where they were kept against their will, and against their civil rights. President Reagan is often blamed for ejecting the homeless from such shelter, but among the facts are the details that the New York Civil Liberties Union showed that Billie Boggs was not so incapacitated and not worthy of incarceration. She was to be released. The significant highlight of the case was that people were rounded up to get them off the streets for cosmetic purposes without regard for their rights to refuse. When the case was litigated by the NYCLU, the idea of hospitalization of the homeless for some passed into history.
Civil rights are always going to be dissolved incrementally entirely because they are safeguards which make the ambitious public servant’s tinkering an unwelcome redundancy. What the second amendment does is make gun control unnecessary as well, because it is the armed citizens who manage around 2.5 million times annually to stop a crime in progress in the absence of law enforcement. This is a very good safeguard against violent crime (when the right is respected). It means 2.5 million acts which were not completed. Though police cannot be everywhere, citizens are everywhere.
Beyond the right to self-defense and the right to keep and bear arms, your average citizen also has the authority to stop a crime in progress. This is an aggregate of substantive and codified law, established public policy, established public interest, presumption of intent on the part of thugs, a few legal doctrines, and an Act of Congress in 2006.
A citizen can also bring up to lethal force to bear when facing grave danger, though it is almost always judged by the gun owner not to shoot once the situation is de-escalated and under control. Out of roughly 2.5 million such de-escalations nationwide in your average twelve-month period, the justifiable homicides by civilians hover around 184. That’s 1 fatal shooting out of 13,586 crimes stopped by an armed citizen without a fatal shooting. It’s not that the weapon was ultimately not needed, it is that the weapon did its job.
A citizen may also come to the aid of another and, yes, with lethal force if necessary. Legal eagles call it standing in the shoes of another, the reasonableness of a public policy and public interest which supports self-defense. ...and reasonableness plays a big, big part in the armed citizen's self-restraint, good judgment and responsibility.
In the Tucson, Arizona murders, alleged killer Jared Loughner was stopped by three citizens. You might say that this was the second amendment at work, a spirit of independence, or not having to ask permission. Though Joe Zamudio was armed and had reached for his sidearm upon hearing shots, he instead elected to grapple with Loughner in an exercise of independent good judgment aware that he was in a crowd. The argument is made that he did not need his sidearm; the fact is that only he had the right, the clearest perspective, and the authority to make that decision and he made the right one given the conditions. Gun control has no right nor authority to make it, especially after the fact, or worse, pre-emptively. Gun control is unreasonable this way in light of working safeguards performing much better.
The authority to stop a crime in progress is not something delegated to a citizen such as a powers-of-arrest certificate or being neighborhood watch captain, but within all of us as the sovereign in this nation.
In fact, the second amendment is the lethal force which backs our sovereign authority. Around the globe, the lethal force belongs to whoever is the sovereign in that nation. Our Founders knew very well their continental history and histories of other nations, and made the citizens of the United States the sovereign and our governments to be our servants. They had had it up to their necks with the government being the sovereign, an abusive sovereign. The real way the second amendment fights tyranny in the 21st century is in showing that there really is no need for bureaucratic program after program when an armed citizenry is more than adequate to keep crime as low as possible. And that is all one can reasonably expect: keeping violent crime as low as possible. Gun control interferes with a community's really doing everything it can to stop violent crime.
But, isn’t this the job of the police? No it is not; police have no duty to protect individuals from the criminal acts of others, a court ruling in case after case. [My favorites are Lynch v. NC DOJ and Castle Rock v. Gonzales, U.S. Supreme Court, 2005.] This non-duty to protect is one of the best kept secrets of the gun control movement. They don’t want you to know what gun owners know. And that is unreasonable, too. [Think of the armed citizen as the equivalent of Citizen CPR when EMS is still four minutes out. You don't need permission from officials to begin CPR, either.]
The ubiquitous armed citizen – that is to say, enough armed citizens within a community - is more than a deterrent, it actually stops crimes which might otherwise prevail. This is because the scene of the crime is where crime is fought best. Crime is not fought by chasing it, crime is fought by facing it. Once a criminal act is completed, crime has won. There is no more 'fight' once a thug has won. What is called fighting crime is after-the-fact, through detection, investigation, apprehension, administration of justice and other agencies. There, billions of dollars may be spent in trying to make whole someone or one’s community when the crime could have been stopped by the very target of the violence. Where law enforcement asks for public cooperation, more than forty states believe that it is the job of law enforcement, to cooperate with the public and recognize the right to be armed.
The best part of this is that a majority of states know this and view their ubiquitous armed citizen as an asset to the community and ally of law enforcement. Forty-eight states have some provision for concealed carry, and some states don’t even require a permit to concealed carry or open carry your sidearm. They have no problems with their gun owners; like most places, their problems lie with mentally deranged persons who are just lucid enough to acquire a weapon and use it. Just lucid enough to fool the system. Where murder is already illegal (along with other crimes the anti-social commit) the most horrific human crime is not stopped by the most stringent laws, but by the presence of superior force.
The problem is in unreasonable expectations of law and under-expectations of citizen capabilities. No law will stop a crazy person whose intent is to circumvent the system, whether it is buying legally or illegally. Meanwhile, such crazies have as allies gun control paradigms which tie the hands of the victim for them.
Where you see gun bans in spite of state law affirming second amendment carry is most often in major cities and college campuses. This makes for the highest violence rates, and colleges are a real hive of violence from robbery to rape to their share of anti-social nuts. Instead of banning guns on campus, trustees need to follow the epidemiologic success example of the rest of the states and affirm armed adult students citizens as proven to be workable against violence.
But more, the second amendment is the affirmation of the independence of the citizen from large government substitutions of second-best. Independence and authority to act impeach any need for programs we would refuse as unneeded. Anti-violence programs and gun control are common examples of waste and bureaucracy when gun owners are the last people to be lectured on violence. Gun owners, such as Joe Zamudio, are alert, they’re paying attention, and willing to act. Don't forget that authority to act. They are not playing cop; they operate in a society where cops operate on our authority of the electorate. Taking away the individual’s authority to act or even regulating it in the least is against the laws of the United States because it an abuse of due process against the sovereign in this country.
No government in America has that authority. Not even Arizona, for it was not an honest citizen who committed the shootings in Tucson, nor was it an anti-social's easy access to a gun: the shooting was possible because of a madman’s easy access to society.
It was said that Loughner was not seeing Congresswoman Giffords when he shot, it was America he was seeing. Truly, Loughner shot America.
Taking away guns or even regulating guns in the hands of the sovereign is also to hurt America. It hurts America by defiance of U.S. Law, and suppressing the independence of the sovereign.
In 2006, Congress saw it this way and, through the Vitter Amendment to the 2006 Disaster Recovery Protection Act, made it illegal to take guns from the people in time of emergency. I have said that Congress, through The Vitter Amendment, affirmed the Militia within the meaning of the second amendment.
For non-gun owner Americans, Militia within the meaning of the second amendment was every single person. After all, at the time of the ratification of the second amendment, there was to be no organized police force until the middle 1800's and there was no National Guard for another 130 years.
Today’s Militias are organizations of volunteers who have come to understand the shortcomings of government agencies in time of disaster. This is not hate or even being anti-government, but frank good faith preparedness. We know that aid will not be arriving for anywhere from 72-hours to 30 days or more, and someone has to fill in the gap. Who better than the community itself? Militias are pleased to train members in CPR and First-aid, healthy food management, general survival practices and a spirit of cooperation. They also aid in safer streets.
Militias are not always government agencies, and volunteer militias do not answer to the Commander-in-Chief. They are recognized as the orginal militia [unorganized militia] by United States Code Title 10, Section 311.
This is the second amendment. The realization that you are on your own in so many things, and that, speaking frankly, this is as it should be. We authorize our governments to carry out executive work on our behalf, but only on our consent of the governed. No militia, no gun owner, no conservative, or independent or libertarian is against our government any more than we are against servants; we summon government to their duty of limited powers and like to hold them to it, if that’s alright with them.
Americans are at a crossroads of taking back their country from the gun control mind-set of actively sabotaging working safeguards [as in gun control] in order to create a state of dependency on agencies. Communities can choose safer streets on the knowledge and understanding that we are actually on our own and preferring it. For other, wider things, we hire servants.
Safer streets are evidence of America's own brand of this healthy self-rule equilibrium, and safer streets will not come if we tolerate gun control’s cloned formula of taking powers not granted. A reliance on the state for food inspection, postal service, airline safety and a lot of other things all make for a great rapport between the government and the governed, but some things are to be refused on our supreme authority and on our word alone.
Safer streets and smaller government will come only with official affirmation of who is the sovereign in this country, and nothing would begin that affirmation better than the repeal of gun control. _______________________________________