This is not where crime is fought.
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, 2 Amendment 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 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 the interests of their community, and they have safer communities. How's that for oath of office and doing the right thing?
Compare this to the pattern and practice of Sheriffs who begin to demand that all CCW applicants show cause, and you see the acceleration of assumption of powers not granted. The fears of a free people are beginning to come true, and 2008 was a crescendo for that.
It can be done
1. Though it is a disgrace to have to fight for your rights, they can be affirmed. The pattern and practice of violating civil rights under color of law is a serious offense, and it discredits the agency doing it. It order to make it really work, heads have to roll. Let me say it again: heads have to roll.
2. Officers need to speak out, write, and post their understanding of what they know citizens face in the absence of first responders. [I know it won't be easy, and I know it isn't made easy for them.] The fundamental of their working for us and not the other way around has to be coupled with limits on their powers, reined in or delegated much more tightly on our say so, because we say so.
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. 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.
