By L. Neil Smith
Rodney William Ansell was a widely-respected Australian cattleman, hunter, and outbacker, most famous for his survival skills under harsh conditions, who served as the model for the movie character “Crocodile Dundee”. His business and his family were destroyed by trendy environmentalist legislation. In 1999, resisting a series of new victim disarmament (gun control) laws and other statist incursions into his life, he was savagely murdered by the police, whereupon all sorts of transparently phony charges and accusations were heaped against him by the government and media to defame him when he could no longer defend himself.
Running for the highest office in the land, Donald Trump famously promised all of us “deplorables” out here in Flyover Country that he’d protect our rights under the Second Amendment. He mentioned it at every rally, to the enthusiastic cheers of tens of thousands.
The sad truth, however, is that the man is a golfer, not a shooter, even if he is rumored to carry a concealed weapon himself. The first time he encountered any political pressure on the issue at all, he folded like a filling-station roadmap. Following a suspiciously spectacular mass-shooting in Las Vegas that we have still not heard a single word of truth about, he single-handedly banned so-called “bump stocks” by Imperial presidential decree. Bump stocks are an aftermarket device that allows a semi-automatic rifle to fire rapidly as if it were fully automatic, and were said to have been used by the Las Vegas shooter.
Not that we have any reason to believe what we’ve been told.
Like many another lifelong weapons “expert” (I am a retired ballistician), I have no use for bump stocks, myself, which destroy accuracy and achieve no useful effect. For that reason, the bad-guys are counting on me and my kind not to defend their ownership and use. But —
(a) not only was this an “illegal taking” under the Fifth Amendment, costing manufacturers, retailers, and gun owners millions of dollars, without compensation,
(b) not only does it defeat the entire purpose for which the Second Amendment was written — to defend liberty from the government, which has no lawful business knowing what weapons or accessories we possess, buy, sell, or trade, or telling Americans what is, or is not, acceptable in this context,
(c) not only does it it violate a tacit understanding (now null and void) in operation since the 1930s to the effect that, if “We The People” let the feds outlaw certain kinds of weapons, they will otherwise leave us the hell alone …
(d) it makes me worry for the first time about this administration’s real agenda with regard to the Bill of Rights.
Strike One, Mr. President.
Following that Las Vegas event and other pathetically contrived and staged outrages, a series of “red flag laws” began passing in the states, where, it is falsely claimed, the Bill of Rights somehow applies less than at the federal level. These laws allow the authorities to smash into your home and seize your guns, on nothing more than the unsubstantiated whining of some relative or neighbor. This is not only another violation of the Takings Clause (they claim you’ll get your weapons back, good as new, in a few weeks, but this is entirely inconsistent with my experiences with cops, property rooms, and seized weapons), it is a blatant violation of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Sections 241 and 242, which forbid the contravention of your rights “under color of law” and set forth penalties for those officials found guilty of it.
The even worse news is that certain politicians, including the perfidious Lindsey Graham, are collaborating with Democrats to write more red flag laws at the federal level, and the Trump Administration has done nothing to discourage it. These laws are the very essence and definition of a police state, and they have already allowed one old man in Maryland, who made a stand, defending his rights, to be murdered, like Rod Ansell, the real Crocodile Dundee, by the cops.
Strike Two, Mr. President.
Lately there have been rumblings that Trump is contemplating a godlike prohibition against suppressors (what the ignorant and butt-stupid media call “silencers”), simply because the accused perpetrator of the most recent politically useful atrocity had one screwed onto the end of one of his pistols. If you remember nothing else from this essay, remember this: the left always claims that the only way to deal with a crime is to severely punish everyone who didn’t commit it. This is insanity; Trump clearly has enemies at his side, giving him very, very bad advice
Lindsey Graham is a snake.
Strike Three, Mr. President.
Now contemplate, if you will, what comes next. These are not prescriptions; I don’t want them to happen. I like Donald and his family; I think he’s the best president we’ve had in over a century. Certainly in my lifetime. They are predictions of an inevitable, dismal future unless changes get made right away. It’s what I do for a living and I’m very good at it.
Gun owners have always been used by Republicans exactly the same way that Democrats have always used blacks: they’re pretty nice to have around during an election, otherwise, fuck ’em. I actually heard a famous Republican back in the 1970s ask, “Who else are they gonna vote for?”, “they” being you and me.
The answer today, in the twenty-first century, is nobody. Gun people got Trump elected. If those people stay home, next time, if they
“walk away” from the Republican Party, Trump will fail in 2020 and America will have lost its last chance to remain a free country. If you wake up, the morning after election day, and Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren, Kamala Harris who began her career humping Willy Brown’s leg, Beta O’Rourke, or some other member of the Democrat Zoo Parade is defecating in the Oval Office, you can thank the anti-gun crowd, the Rinos, and other weak-kneed and treacherous Republicanoids.
What. if anything, can be done to fix this mess? Write to freedom-oriented politicians (yes, I know it sounds like an oxymoron). Paper letters work best, but anything helps. Do not be particularly
respectful. They don’t deserve it and Contempt of Congress, they tell us themselves, is the order of the day. Tell them that you’re sick and tired tired of being used.
Tell them that they must rescind the bump-stock ban at once and indemnify former owners, using the funds, frozen under Title 18, of anti-Constitutional specimens like George Soros, Tom Steyr, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates.They must use federal law as President Eisenhower did in Little Rock in the 1950s to abolish red flag laws wherever they have sprouted, and jail those politicians, bureaucrats, and cops who introduced, sponsored, voted for, passed, or enforced them.
As a token of good faith, they must fully legalize suppressors and fully-automatic weapons immediately.
They must eliminate gun-free (meaning Bill of Rights-free) zones, if only for the sake of public safety. Constitutional rights are not privileges or luxuries, to be brushed aside at political whim, but dire necessities, as the Second Amendment itself declares, for a free republic.
They must formally and thoroughly investigate infamous false flag shootings going back to Charles Whitman in 1966.
Further (but not very far) down the road, they must break up California by county and allow blue counties to determine their own fate.
Finally, they must separate New York City from the rest of that state, and demote it to territorial status with a Governor appointed by the President so it can’t do any more harm.
And let the President know his administration is on probation.
Award-winning writer L. Neil Smith is Publisher and Senior Columnist of L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise and author of over thirty books. Look him up on Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com. He is available at professional rates, to write for your organization, event, or publication, fiercely defending your rights, as he has done since the mid-60s. His writings (and e-mail address) may be found at L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise, at JPFO.org or at https://www.patreon.com/lneilsmithHis many books and those of other pro-gun libertarians may be found (and ordered) at L. Neil Smith’s THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE “Free Radical Book Store” The preceding essay was originally prepared for and appeared in L. Neil Smith’s THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE. If you like what you’ve seen and want to see more, he says, ”Don’t applaud, throw money.“
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