Posted by
John Longenecker on Sunday, December 07, 2008 12:50:19 PM
Refusing to renew current concealed carry permits until applicants can show cause frustrates thousands. Not to mention that this is not where crime is fought.
By John Longenecker
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Of late – as if not every single week these days – too many law enforcement Chiefs Of Police and Sheriffs are opposing concealed carry and second amendment rights on their own initiative. As with Orange County, California, more and more Sheriffs are demanding of their Concealed Carry Citizens that they show cause for their CCW renewals. Can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys? How do they determine who is officer candidate eligible? This is, of course, vexing and actionable, and citizens so affected need to file official complaints and demand compliance with the law to wipe out this nutty idea of having to show cause for the exercise of a civil right. Sheriffs who introduce requirements not stated in the law must stand down and remember who they work for.
As we know, 2A is the lethal force which backs our citizen authority as supreme in our system, and freezing more citizens out of the process is an interference with the exercise of that authority. It is in this concept that non-gun owners are beneficiaries of gun rights efforts. Examples of further such interferences are boondoggles such as anti-crime policies which mandate all citizens to comply with greater intrusion, personal tracking and other unreasonable mandates. This is not where crime is fought. Crime is fought by the alliance of citizen and law enforcement, not by the exclusion of the citizen. I don't know how belligerent the new administration will get on takings of weapons across America in missing this point, but the fraud of coaxing people or frustrating people to disarm and thereby increase crime statistics is well underway.
Instead, citizens are buying more guns, not in anticipation of confrontation with officials, but in the reasonable expectation that officials will continue to do the wrong thing in handling crime just as they've done the wrong thing in handling money, only worse. It's likely to come in the form of further frustrating victim rights, interference with our own reasonable use of force, defiance of laws already in place for self-defense, and new mandates which never touch crime, but criminalize or restrain you, the non-gun owner. It's important for every non gun owner to understand how gun laws profoundly affect them on so many non-gun issues. Americans are buying more guns and becoming gun owners because they have come to realize that we are on our own. Citizens are the Sovereign under our system, and this mistaken idea that officials are the Sovereign in America is killing the country. Any rule that states that we have to show cause for the exercise of such a right must be litigated.
Armed citizens, by their omnipresence, very ably impeach nearly all of the ineffective so-called anti-violence policies, inside law enforcement and outside law enforcement, and officials work harder to crush the very idea of reasonable resistance purely to hide this rather obvious fact. This alone impeaches the need to show cause.
As further evidence, this insistence doesn't seem to afflict all of law enforcement management, where their better advice elsewhere is to arm the citizen, not disarm them. In more than forty states, the reports of how violence is handled makes a lot more sense for a community than the vexing policies of the major cities do. They disagree with their brother officers who demand you show cause and in their own jurisdictions, see the citizen a little differently. Why? Given decades of appraisal and half a chance, the right to carry states have shown that the armed citizen plays a vital role in control of violence, as an ally of law enforcement, and why not? This is in part because of their on-scene presence, and in greater part in the fact that citizens have all the authority they need to stop a crime in progress. Those Chiefs and Sheriffs supporting concealed carry know it, they affirm it and employ it in building the relationship in the interests of their community, and they have safer communities. How's that for oath of office and doing the right thing?
Bloodless as it may at first seem, the boondoggle of disarming Americans in every way of disenfranchisement and corruption is quite bloody as violence escalates for lack of resistance in authority, namely our own. Losing your home, your credit, your reputation to corruption is just as bad for the country as violence has been from corruption. The career ladder of presiding over crisis has got to shift to presiding over prosperity and liberty once again.
It can be done. More to come.
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Longenecker is author of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns.