ATF To Spy On Gun Owners Via “Massive” Database
Agency has record for attempting to circumvent the law
Paul Joseph Watson
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms is looking to build a huge “online data repository system” capable of spying on Americans and their associates via the use of just a few keywords, leading to concerns that the system will be deployed to track gun owners.
“Primarily, the ATF states it wants the database to speed-up criminal investigations. Instead of requiring an analyst to manually search around for your personal information, the database should “obtain exact matches from partial source data searches” such as social security numbers (or even just a fragment of one), vehicle serial codes, age range, “phonetic name spelling,” or a general area where your address is located. Input that data, and out comes your identity, while the computer automatically establishes connections you have with others,” reports Wired News.
The system is described by the agency as a “massive online data repository system that contains a wide variety of data sources both historically and current that can be utilized in support of investigations and backgrounds.”
Despite being involved in the Fast and Furious scandal that saw firearms shipped to drug dealers in Mexico, the ATF has increased its efforts to keep tabs on American gun owners in recent years.
Promises that the database will not be used to track gun purchases ring hollow given the ATF’s recent efforts to circumvent the law in order to obtain information on firearms sales.
Last year it was revealed that the agency was illegally demanding that gun stores in Alaska submit ’4473 Forms’ going back to 2007, paperwork filled in by customers purchasing firearms containing their personal information which under current laws is supposed to be kept by the gun dealer and not sent to any government agency.
The ATF has hardly established a reputation for itself as a transparent, honest organization. In December 2011, it was revealed that the agency discussed exploiting the Fast and Furious scandal in which it was intimately involved to pass new gun restrictions in the United States that would force firearms retailers to report the sale of multiple rifles.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/atf-to-spy-on-gun-owners-via-massive-database.html
Warning to gun grabbers: If gun rights are lost, you will soon lose free speech, public protests, art, blogs and the right to a fair trial
Mike Adams
All those who value free speech, art, public protests, internet blogs and due process should be waging an all-out information war right now to defend the Second Amendment. Why? Because if the Second Amendment is lost due to unconstitutional legislative and executive actions pursued by the government, then there are no limits to what civil liberties and individual freedoms the government can declare null and void.
All those who are arguing for infringements of Second Amendment liberties (universal registration, banning AR-15s, criminalizing high-capacity magazines, etc.) are effectively arguing to hand the federal government the precedent it needs to criminalize free speech, religion, public protests, internet blogs, Youtube videos and more.
In effect, gun grabbers are arguing for the government to have the power to overturn the Bill of Rights when it is popular to do so. But such power will inevitably end up being used in circumstances never envisioned by the gun grabbers… and often in the hands of someone they hoped would never hold the office of President such as a third member of the Bush regime.
The Bill of Rights isn’t optional
You can’t have a half-way Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights either means what it says and strictly limits the reach of the federal government, or it means nothing and all the individual rights and liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights are null and void.
Those include the right to exercise whatever religion you choose and not have the state mandate what church you must attend; the right to speak your mind and even criticize the government without fear of being prosecuted for your opinions; the right to due process and a trial of your peers if charged with a crime; and the right to be safe in your person and effects (your home) without being subjected to illegal searches and seizures.
If the Second Amendment is nullified, then so is your right to remain silent. Without the Fifth Amendment, the government can (and will) torture you until you “admit guilt” for whatever crimes they claim you have committed. This is already being planned for Aurora Colorado shooter James Holmes, who prosecutors now say will be subjected to injections of a “truth serum” so that he will confess to his crimes.
Folks, there is no such thing as a truth serum. It’s a science fiction fantasy. What Holmes is being subjected to is torture until he “confesses” to the crime. This is precisely what awaits all Americans if the government is not held to the limits of the Bill of Rights.
If the Second Amendment goes, the First Amendment will soon follow
Once the dismantling of the Bill of Rights is tolerated, there will be no stopping the government’s planned destruction of all its provisions, including the First Amendment. With freedom of speech destroyed, all websites, blogs and online videos will be deleted or shut down unless they are approved by the government. All art must be government approved before being published or publicly displayed (First Amendment). Anyone charged with a crime can be held indefinitely, without charge, while the government waits for them to “rot in prison” for the rest of their lives (Sixth Amendment).
Gun control advocates are, almost by definition, ignorant of history. They foolishly believe that the more power government is granted, the more compassionate, fair and just that government will behave. History has shown exactly the opposite: power corrupts, and when power is centralized in the hands of the few, it is almost always exploited in a manner that brings great harm to the People.
America’s founders understood this, which is why the Bill of Rights was written and ratified. Power must necessarily be distributed (decentralized) for freedom to flourish, and the primary purpose of the Bill of Rights was to enumerate lines in the sand that the government cannot cross.
Those who are arguing for gun restrictions today are hopeless fools who seem oblivious to the tyranny they are bringing down upon themselves. In order to achieve one limited political goal, they will surrender all rights and freedoms to a government that will then recognize no limits whatsoever to its power. When gun control laws pass, they think they are “winning,” but what they’re actually doing is constructing unintentional prisons that will enslave their children and grandchildren.
Fortunately, many of us do understand history, and we will not allow the ignorant masses to destroy our fundamental rights and freedoms. We will fight these efforts with every means available, beginning with information and judicial strategies, but progressing to fighting enemies of America with physical force if necessary to defend the Republic.
Curiously, every U.S. Senator, Congressperson, President, police officer, district attorney and other “official” takes a sworn oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Yet in their actions, many of these people prove that they are themselves the very enemies cited in that oath of office. It is the job of the People to force our representatives to keep their oaths of office, first at the ballot box if effective, but then using incrementally more forceful means as necessary to keep government in check. The People are the commanders of their government, but if they refuse to remind government who is in charge, it is they who are soon commanded by government tyrants.
All laws that violate the Bill of Rights are null and void
Any law passed by either state government or the federal government is immediately null and void if it violates the Bill of Rights. This is why the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its landmark 1803 decision of Marbury vs. Madison:
“All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void.”
But this truth does not require a Supreme Court to make it so… it is self-evident under common law. Thus, any member of government who attempts to enforce an unconstitutional law is acting in violation of civil rights and the legal protections guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. Importantly, no citizen is obliged to follow unlawful orders even if directed by an apparent “law enforcement” authority.
If a police officer, for example, tells you to “go murder that woman standing on the street corner,” you have no obligation to follow such an order because it describes a criminal act. Similarly, a police officer or lawmaker commanding you to surrender your rifle is also an unlawful request, and no citizen has any obligation to follow it.
This is even true if local laws have been passed that violate the Bill of Rights. For example, if the police chief of New York City says you must surrender your rifle because New York has passed a law criminalizing the possession of such a rifle, you are under no legitimate legal obligation to do so because such laws are unconstitutional and illegal. That doesn’t mean you still won’t be arrested and thrown in prison while your case eventually makes its way to the Supreme Court, of course. Tyrants do not abide by laws unless they are forced to do so by the People… which is precisely the point of having a Second Amendment in the first place. No government can be trusted to remain honest and representative of the People unless the People possess the means of force to overthrow a corrupt, criminal government and replace it with legitimate, constitutional government.
Why gun grabbers are the true “anti-government” extremists
The mainstream media and the White House attempt to twist these ideas by branding anyone who disagrees with the government as an “anti-government” extremist. But that’s not the case at all: Most patriots aren’t anti-government at all. They are simply anti-corrupt government while being pro Constitutional government.
People who advocate gun control today are actually “anti-constitutional government” extremists because their ideas extremely diverge from the laws of the land (the Constitution and Bill of Rights). What could be more extreme than suggesting the People have no rights and that the government has total power to decide which rights in the Bill of Rights it wishes to recognize?
Gun grabbers are the true anti-government people because they are enemies of the legitimate and lawful government of America. Rather than constitutional government, they wish to see an illegitimate, unlawful government usurp power and run the country as a police state that respects no limits to its power. That’s the type of government desired by foolishly dangerous people like Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, Michael Bloomberg, Joe Biden and others.
Imagine if Bloomberg were given the power to rewrite the Constitution…
Think about it: If people like Bloomberg had their way, there would be no Constitution, no Bill of Rights, no due process, no trial by jury and no free market choices whatsoever. The people would have no rights and freedoms, and the government would simply dictate to them what they could buy, eat, drink, think, speak, write and more. All forms of expression would be tightly regulated by the government, and anyone who was labeled “guilty” by the government would be immediately sentenced without trial or even a requirement of any evidence being presented.
This is the world being created by gun control advocates. Yet, in the end, they owe gun owners a huge debt because it is gun owners who will halt the march of tyranny in America. We will protect the rights and liberties of all Americans — including those who are seeking to take away our rights. The purpose of the Second Amendment has always been to protect the integrity of all the other amendments, including the First. The only reason people like Jim Carrey can attack gun rights in America is because the Second Amendment has put enough guns in the hands of enough Americans to dissuade the government from destroying the First Amendment.
Finally, I know there are a few readers, mostly younger people, who cannot imagine government ever becoming “evil” or “tyrannical,” and they think this talk of the Second Amendment being needed to protect the rights and freedoms of Americans sounds outlandish. To those people I say you are uninformed. You are ignorant of history, and you would be wise to learn history now, lest you inadvertently become part of it in the very near future.
Link:
http://www.naturalnews.com/039813_First_Amendment_gun_control_Bill_of_Rights.html
Gun Control Even a Conservative Can Love (But Not a Libertarian)
by Joshua Katz
The state of Connecticut can now congratulate itself on having gun laws that, if not the most restrictive in the nation, are at least very close to it. Legislators are to be thanked for their hard work discouraging gun ownership among the law abiding and making felons of the innocent. Rapists, home invaders, and murders will, I hope, put out a press release thanking our leaders for making their jobs safer and easier.
Oddly, though, the representatives and senators who worked so hard to pass this bill seemed not to want any credit. The passed the bill under cover of darkness, holding the final vote at 2:30 am. Debate, of course, did feature many comments from our Masters about just how hard they are working, just how proud they are of themselves and their colleagues for seeing through, in just one day, the entire process of disarming the citizens.
What’s that, just one day? Indeed – the text was completed on the same day the bill went to a vote in both houses. No senator or representative, then, could make even a pretext of reading the bill they were voting on. There is no time for such wasteful activities as seeing what abuse they are heaping on the taxpayers. The bill was passed under a procedure known as Emergency Certification, invented for such situations as an on-going invasion or other situation requiring immediate action in response to a crisis. Using it in this situation simply reinforces the contempt those in Hartford feel for those who elect them. The procedure bypasses public hearings and committee referrals, bringing the bill immediately to the floors of both houses of the assembly. Our Masters do not want to hear from the irritating plebians they claim to represent.
The vote was almost party line, with an important exception. While most Republicans found the spine to vote no, almost the entire Republican leadership in both houses voted for it. This, while stunning, is not at all surprising. The higher one rises in government power, the more one comes to fear armed citizens and to embrace the power of the state.
Most frightening, though, is the attitude of those who found the strength to vote no. The bill combined three ideas: universal background checks, magazine restrictions, and mental health restrictions. The most commonly voiced complaint from those opposing the bill was not that the Constitutions of the US and the state of Connecticut explicitly recognize the right to keep and bear arms. Rather, the most common complaint was that the bill should really be three separate bills. Almost without exception, they told of their struggle to decide how to vote, since they opposed magazine restrictions but, of course, favored the mental health provisions. That is, among gun rights supporters, there is almost unanimous support for mental health restrictions.
We have finally found, then, a gun control method for conservatives to love! What could possibly be more popular than hating The Other? The liberal, of course, need only conjure a picture of hunters, Constitutionalists, preppers, and Nascar fans to find the hated Other. The conservative has long opposed gun control because he does not think of this type of person as the Other. That role, though, can be filled by the so-called mentally ill. Now the conservative, too, can join in the game of fearing those who differ from him and disarming those he fears.
The tactic, used by supporters of gun rights, of scapegoating others to save the right to keep and bear arms – of saying "no, no, it’s not us – attack them over there!" – is not new. Sadly, those who stand up to fight for some particular right have, with few exceptions, been willing to throw others under the bus. Those who fought for the right to interracial marriage hastened to assure their listeners that they weren’t interested in the rights of ‘perverts and deviants.’ Today, gay marriage advocates rush to demonstrate that they are discussing only extending legal privileges to monogamous homosexuals – emphasizing that they love men through no fault of their own, certainly they would never choose to deviate from middle-class values – not endorsing polygamy or in any way wanting to protect the rights of others who deviate more than they do from the norm. Liberation movements, sadly, have almost exclusively been interested in bringing their members into the fold of privilege, not fighting for uniform rights for all. Their members are brought into this fold by targeting some other group as the real bad guys.
So too, we now see gun rights defenders struggling to identify the real bad guys who should be stripped of their rights. Rather than pointing out the obvious – that there is no epidemic of mass-shootings, that infrequent bad events do happen, are a byproduct of being human, and that even utter tyranny cannot prevent them – in fact, makes them more common – they look for other bad guys. The NRA first settled on children, calling for more armed policemen in schools – knowing full well that those officers would be used as enforcers against the children, keeping them more firmly enslaved in the system of mind control that we call education. The consensus now, though, is that rather than sacrificing our children to gun rights, we should sacrifice the mentally ill. This is a far better choice, as the mentally ill appear far more scary than children.
One problem with this approach is the obvious immorality of purchased your freedom at the cost of another’s, who has done nothing to harm anyone. Another problem is that it won’t work. Banning the mentally ill from owning guns is not a way around gun control, it is an end-run towards gun control. Mental illness is fundamentally undefined and indefinable. The word means nothing more or less than making others uncomfortable – and gun owners, it is well known, make many uncomfortable. Anyone wanting a gun is presumed either to be paranoid about crime or desirous of protecting himself from government tyranny – which, of course, marks him as crazy, hence not permitted to own a gun.
The face is, mental illness is a catch-all phrase for signifying that a person behaves in a way that is undesired, either by society at large or by the power structure. Children are routinely drugged for behaving like, well, like children – wanting to run and play, not sit and be instructed on abstract matters beyond their developmental level. Mental illness is an artifact of a system of social control in which no person should be discomforted by the actions of another, or by anything they find unpleasant. It is an artifact of a system of social control in which a person is judged by their adherence to the norms instituted by the powerful, for their own purposes. The schools are a perfect example of this. Children are expected to behave in a way that maximizes, not their own benefit, but the ease with which teachers and administrators can get through the day with a minimum of thought and difficulty.
Psychiatrists are simply one arm of our social control systems, working in tandem with police, courts, and prisons. This is the system to which conservatives are now comfortable turning over gun control. To them I ask – if you do not believe that government has the right to restrict access to weapons, as I do not – then how can government delegate this power to psychiatrists? As unaccountable as government is, are we to trust a medical monopoly more – especially a branch of medicine which explicitly disavows any objective means of verifying an illness, and insists that illness can be defined by committee and diagnosed by symptoms only – so long as the clinician has been duly accepted into the club?
The mentally ill are those who are out of step with society – an ever increasing group in this age of statism, in this age where the orthodoxy grows ever more demanding. It is expected that the statists, the control freaks among us, will want to deny the right of self-defense to those who are too different. It is a sad day, though, when the friends of freedom, liberty’s only friends – the defenders of one of our most important rights, the ability to defend oneself against tyranny – when these, too, join in the crusade. It is a sad day when defenders of gun rights turn around and say "yes, well, except for Those people."
If it means anything to stand for freedom, it means to stand for unpopular freedoms. It means to stand for the rights of those whose actions you don’t quite understand. It means to let your love of freedom overcome you fear of what others might do. The mental illness loophole might be a form of gun control that even a conservative can love, but the true defenders of freedom and of gun rights will not be fooled. Self defense and defense against tyrants for all – usual and unusual mental processes alike!
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/katz-j/katz-j35.1.html
The Totalitarianism of Universal Background Checks
by Anthony Gregory
Finally, some sanity, and from a somewhat unexpected source. The ACLU is concerned about the civil liberties implications of the new Harry Reid Senate bill to establish so-called “universal background checks” for firearms purchases. The organization has tended toward silence on gun rights, but at least now it recognizes aspects of the problem with this terrible proposal.
Ever since Sandy Hook, the Obama administration and its progressive choir have demanded a new Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). Now it looks like that plan is toast. California Senator Dianne Feinstein blames gun owners and the NRA, and in a sense we should have expected all along that this proposal would get nowhere. Such a ban would mostly target “semi-automatic” rifles – which, despite all the hysterics, simply refers to any standard rifle that fires one round each time the trigger is pulled – that happen to have esthetic elements like the pistol grip that do not in fact add to the weapons’ lethality. This is the nonsensical standard used to ban some classes of weapons instrumentally identical to the ones banned in 1994.
The first AWB devastated the Democrats politically, and probably contributed as much as anything to the Republicans’ crushing victory in the 1994 congressional elections after forty years in the legislative minority. It also hurt Al Gore in his run against George W. Bush in 2000. The ban generally prohibited ordinary but scary looking rifles, which are used in about two percent of violent crimes committed with firearms. The law did not apply to, say, most of the weapons used at the Columbine school massacre in 1999. But it did interfere with Americans’ basic right to own what we can fairly call the modern version of the musket. Millions of Americans own such weapons like the AR-15, the most popular rifle and one targeted by the Democrats’ proposal for a new, robust AWB. These weapons are used for hunting, sport, and self-defense. They are not, despite all the misinformation to the contrary, repeating, military-style rifles.
In any event, the unpopularity of an AWB always doomed this proposal, especially under a Democratic president as distrusted on the right as Obama. The Republicans have the House and too many Democrats in the Senate are loyal to their gun-owning constituents.
So this whole time, the real threat to our firearms freedom has been these less debated, peripheral proposals – proposals that strip people the state deems “mentally ill” of the right to bear arms, proposals that violate the civil rights of released convicts, proposals to increase penalties for violations of current law, and, as disturbing as anything, proposals to institute “universal background checks.”
The gun restrictionists have pointed to polls showing more than 90% approval of such background checks, including among a vast majority of conservatives, Republicans, and gunowners. Liberty is always attacked on the margins, and most Americans don’t go to gun shows and so don’t see the big deal. Surely the state should know who is armed. Surely we don’t want people buying and selling guns freely.
But, in fact, universal background checks are arguably even more tyrannical than banning whole classes of weapons. Why should the government know who is armed? Why shouldn’t people be allowed to freely buy and sell private property without government permission? Half of Americans see background checks as the first step toward full registration then confiscation. Many fear that the new law would create records of these deals that would not immediately be destroyed, which could form databases or enable government in further nefarious purposes. The progressives have tended to regard any of these worries as paranoia, but it looks like the ACLU is now among the paranoid...
Read the rest here:
http://blog.independent.org/2013/04/04/the-totalitarianism-of-universal-background-checks/
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