Posted by
John Longenecker on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 10:44:01 AM
by John Longenecker
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In an earlier piece, I congratulated the Gura team for their win in D.C. v. Heller, the Washington, D.C. gun ban case. Like most good lawyering, not only does the team win, but all of America wins. Well done. [Now there’s some people I’d like to meet and shake hands with, and I hope to see this team perhaps at the 2008 Gun Rights Policy Conference in Phoenix. Non-gun owners and heads of household are most welcome. Please come. For details, see [www.SAF.org]
In the Heller case, I point out that one can win their rights if they have the Time, the Team and the Wherewithal, but the bad signal is that one has to. I point out often that D.C. v. Heller will mean new challenges to gun bans nationwide. To them, and to citizens prosecuting their claims for rights, I said Good Hunting.
I say it again: Good Hunting.
But there is much more to this than a simple road map back to safe streets in Liberty. I have my own Formula for Safe Streets in America, and here is an observation: The road back to any community of safe streets is fraught with highwaymen who will stop you and rob you, and where anti-gun, anti-liberty types are eager to describe gun ownership as a return to the Wild West, it is they who are lying in wait, ready to bushwhack Americans and to abuse law to do it. Not only do some go bankrupt in this abuse of law, but others die. That's Constituents doing the dying.
The stubbornness of major city officials in defying the Supreme Court ruling that handgun ownership is an individual right (which trumps anything officials can write) exhibits two frightening things: defiance of the law impeaches their statements that we are nation of laws, and it exhibits their lust for control at the expense of the lives of their constituents as criminal violence ignores the gun bans and other rules officials write.
As the Liberty Nuts say, it's not about Gun Control, it's simply about Control, and nothing says this better than major city defiance of the Supreme Court who has clarified it as if speaking to city officials individually.
This signals a new trend in governance, and it flies in the face of not only the Supremes, but also in the face of evidence of forty state legislatures who have elected to trust their constituents with handguns [as they should] by affirming concealed carry on such a large scale as statewide there. That’s forty states.
Of course, as you might suspect, crime is not the problem in these areas as it is in the major cities – Chicago, Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C. – where officials signal thugs that their targets cannot fight back. It rings the dinner bell for these as officials politically hold their coats for them and join the list of predators to point to high crime statistics including the non-gun crimes of knifings, beatings and abductions.
Understand that the anti-gun individuals are not government [not all of it] - they are individual officials who muster government clout and abuse the authority of their office to vex and frustrate rights in their personal playground. In doing this, they defy Government more than the gun owner who operates within the system with reasonable expectations of a just government. This brings abuses to meet the test of an interesting tool in our United States Code called Deprivation Of Civil Rights Under Color Of Law.
The FBI is charged with investigating such abuses under color of law, and United States Code [Internet Search term: Title 18, U.S.C., Section 242, Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law] particularly interests me. Title 18 has a host of laws about enforcing our civil rights and concentrates some of its legal scholarship on abuses of power in interference with civil rights. This is made especially for officials like Washington, D.C, Chicago, New Orleans and New York. One of the keenest elements is the idea of a Pattern and Practice of violating rights as an element of the offense, and it is this which interests me a great deal.
There are rules against abuse of process and abuses under color of authority, but this is something different I see. It comes to address abuses of civil rights specifically under color of existing law, which is to follow a predatory selective enforcement (abuses in themselves) which might otherwise be simply a conflict in laws, and therefore a matter of legal opinion, but it cannot be anymore. [As one example, some employers in Florida are hiding behind conflict of laws and legal opinion in violating employees' civil rights to carry.]
In the past, almost throughout the entire history of the nation, it was the Citizen on the defensive, the citizen charged with violating some of the more than 20,000 gun laws, oftentimes facing some real hard time, not to mention legal bankruptcy. Every single defendant citizen had his hands full as the Plaintiff as some agency had unlimited staff and unlimited funding. They also had the support of unlimited citizens who believed the Agency would not attack a citizen for nothing.
But, under this legal tool, for the intentional acts of a defendant who is now more likely to be not a citizen but a college campus, a large employer workplace or a major city, there is no conflict of laws to hide behind, but more of a naked violation of civil rights to answer for.
[But it has to be done right. For instance, recently, Virginia Tech was sued by some of the surviving families of the Cho campus shooting of 32, and she settled with the plaintiffs for a cool $11 Million approved tentatively around April 10th, 2008. You might say she dodged a bullet by settling, and here is how: She short-circuited being compelled to drop her gun ban. She elected to pay $11 Million rather than, as she must have anticipated, be compelled to really do the right thing, that is affirming guns on campus. Other campuses do affirm concealed carry on campus, which they do not deem the least bit unreasonable. Instead, V-Tech and other campuses around the nation get to continue banning guns on campus and workplace.]
For now. It could be in the offing that Virginia Tech paid $11 Million for nothing. One can hope.
Either way, a court order to her would have done two things: 1) it would have ordered compliance and changed the entire complexion of how campuses make such counter-intuitive policy which may be found to be a proximate cause of so many wrongful deaths, and hence the lawsuit, or; 2) she would have refused (as New Orleans and Washington, D.C. refuse) and continued this new pattern and practice of violating civil rights with impunity.
That lawsuit was a liability question, which turned on what the then legal team called a ‘watered down’ response of alerting the V-tech student body. New lawsuits will probably focus on recognizing and restoring the civil right to keep and bear arms anywhere, an entirely new issue. Good Hunting.
And there will certainly be plenty to work with, beginning with Washington, D.C.’s ignoring its adverse ruling from the Supreme Court, a little catch up with New Orleans for confiscating guns, and nearly every single workplace, college campus and public building banning guns. Chicago’s answering one lawsuit right now, and San Francisco’s looking at an easy out to sidestep one: her gun ban was found unconstitutional twice in two decades. Now she’s been warned. Will San Francisco respect rights under law whether she likes them or not, or continue to violate them with no penalty?
It won’t any longer be a matter of conflict of laws or legal opinion, but of violation of a civil right under color of law. The very laws they hide behind will be exposed as very poor cover for such intentional interference. This is not a finding of liabiity anymore, but one of Guilty.
This could be huge. The repeal of all gun laws can unwind many of these predatory policies modeled on a gun control formula, from Political Correctness (an abuse of rights under color of law) to high-tech surveillance (same), and will not trouble America as some predict, but free America from a new kind of abuse of power, the kind which allows Crime merely to point to it as its justification for all sorts of boondoggles. Repealing all gun bans sets us back onto a path of Liberty that has made us beacon to the world – the founders’ declaration that the Citizen is supreme authority, which supreme authority, it was declared, is backed by our own monopoly on lethal force.
Always.
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John Longenecker was one of the earliest Paramedics in Los Angeles EMS. When asked how he reconciles the idea of lethal force with a mission of saving lives, he answers that self-rule saves lives. Today, he is an author, syndicated columnist, speaker, father of three, and frequent talkradio guest. His latest book is Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns. His flagship website is www.GoodForTheCountry.com and he welcomes all correspondence.