What Free Americans Fear Most Is Nearer Now
By John Longenecker (06/13/07)
It fact, some believe it's here now.
What a free people fear most is the assumption of powers not granted, compounded by indifference to our way of life and backing that indifference with official force. Even worse is the deliberate deteriorization of conditions to usher in self-dealing solutions even more adverse to our way of life.
Free people have a reasonable apprehension now of a complete disregard for our Authority.
Three recent anti-liberty newsmakers are exquisite examples of this kind of obnoxious and often illegal political defiance of the people who bring their grievances forward in asserting their rights in protection of their communities. Officials who oppose these ideas oppose citizen rule and community protection.
Let’s start with the critique of the Virginia Tech Massacre. I had urged all citizens concerned to insist on participating in the critique of the shooting, as I recommend with all shootings. It is imperative that the citizens have control over the direction of such disaster planning. I’d said on talkradio and in my column that psychoanalysis and divining-rod prognostications are useless because forecasting is useless. The better direction is not in profiling the next shooter, but in preparedness in the next victim. The ugly truth is that administrations ignore the most straightforward of the legal solutions -- citizen authority. The ugly truth is that citizen authority would work wonderfully.
The emphasis, as I have said, is not on guns per se, but on citizen authority to act with up to lethal force when facing grave danger. That authority comes into play when one is alone, most often when police aren’t even yet notified. As liberty nuts say, when seconds count, police are moments away. That’s all the time a Cho needs to kill as much as he likes. And it’s all the time the next one will need, too.
What a waste of sovereignty. What a waste of assets, namely citizen authority.
Again, praise to South Carolina and Utah for recognizing that individual citizen authority and for taking a pro-active position on student safety and way of life.
The present critique of the Virginia Tech shooting is the exquisite example of what we feared would come true — the panel examining the shooting is freezing out the parents of the murdered children. The panel promises other avenues of input, but it’s still freezing the parents out. I urge the parents and other concerned citizens as well to demand a place on the panel and in other critique venues, and I demand of the panel that they cooperate and furnish a seat for them.
Another example is more long-standing. Those officials in New Orleans are still in contempt of court where a judge has ordered the return of firearms confiscated during Hurricane Katrina. The Mare also released criminals from jails for their safety, remember? Another example of abuse of authority, this time found by a court to be wrongful.
Third, I received a bulletin and appeal from the Citizens Committee for The Right To Keep And Bear Arms and Gun Owners of America, patriotic organizations acting not only in the interests of gun owners, but in everyone’s public interest as many of these. Protecting a right for one protects the rights of all, and this appeal is to fight a handful of unpatriotic officials in Washington who recently stated aloud taking your authority from you. Not just my authority, but yours, too. Enter CCRKBA as a search-term alert keyword.
The bottom line is this, friends: each of these is not about guns, it’s about the force which backs your citizen authority against boondoggles which, themselves, talk you out of your authority. Violent Crime is an element of such boondoggles where violence seems to be intractable, but for the fact that your Independence can meet grave danger better than police or policies can. You're there -- they're not.
When it comes to protection, you’re on your own. Discouraging this authority on various levels is unAmerican, and any official against your authority to act is unpatriotic. It’s not their call to do that.
This obfuscation of your authority is part of every boondoggle of continuing violent crime. This is where gun rights groups are not about guns, but Independence; of backing your authority. You may not see how you need it today, but you use it every hour of every day, don’t you?
In all three of these, when it comes to exercising some of that legal authority in civic participation in self-rule, the citizen is becoming increasingly squeezed out of the process, and the takings of weapons, hiding authority and the freezing out of citizens in the preparedness and planning process are closely related. it's a new kind of taking: the taking of Self out of self-governance.
Lot of that going around lately.
Gun control fails because it excludes citizen authority to act. All policies which exclude citizen authority to act will fail. That includes Panels.
The practice of stubbornly obfuscating this authority lies to the people. Officials who freeze the people out of the process of critique and planning join in this most unpatriotic movement.
Stop excluding the people. Stop profiling the next shooter, and develop preparedness in the next victims to use their authority.
It’s good for the country.
John Longenecker
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