A Gun Activist Takes Aim at U.S. Regulatory Power

MISSOULA, Mont.—With a homemade .22-caliber rifle he calls the Montana Buckaroo, Gary Marbut dreams of taking down the federal regulatory state.

He's not planning to fire his gun. Instead, he wants to sell it, free from federal laws requiring him to record transactions, pay license fees and open his business to government inspectors.

For years, Mr. Marbut argued that a wide range of federal laws, not just gun regulations, should be invalid because they were based on an erroneous interpretation of Congress's constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. In his corner were a handful of conservative lawyers and academics. Now, with the rise of the tea-party movement, the self-employed shooting-range supplier finds himself leading a movement.

Eight states have adopted his Firearms Freedom Act, which Mr. Marbut conceived as a vehicle to undermine federal authority over commerce.

Ten state attorneys general, dozens of elected officials and an array of conservative groups are backing the legal challenge he engineered to get his constitutional theory before the Supreme Court. A federal appeals court in San Francisco is now considering his case.

Mr. Marbut isn't basing his pro-gun effort on the Second Amendment, the one that talks about a right to bear arms, but on the 10th, which discusses the limits of federal power.

"This is really about states' rights and federal power rather than gun control," Mr. Marbut says. There is "an emerging awareness by the people of America that the federal government has gone too far," he maintains, "and it's dependent on a really weird interpretation."

He is talking about the 1942 Supreme Court case of Wickard v. Filburn, which looms for him the way the Dred Scott decision denying rights to blacks did to antebellum abolitionists.

“Wickard v. Filburn is at the heart of the modern regulatory state. The author of the article neglects a whole raft of supreme court precident that was overruled by the Wickard decision.

It was a revolutionary decision at the time, coming from the revolutionary Roosevelt new deal court.”

This is true by all rights, and all evidence Wickard v. Filburn was decided by corrupt federal employees in black robes most of whome were hand picked by corrupt self-serving politician.

Wickard v. Filburn rejected all presidence, and law in favor of the nearly unrestrained power of the appointee of this “court”.

There is no possible sound reasons any just court could fairly decide that Wickard v. Filburn was in any respect correct. This revolution in the Federal Employees overturning what was left in the Federal Constitution must be abolished by any means necessary.

I fear it may take a real Revolution, a compete revolution of the people to undo his unmitigated power grabbing usurpation.

“Funny thing about he Wickard case, the logic for its legal conclusion (Farmer Filburn affects interstate commerce if he is allowed to grow and consume his own wheat) is totally undermined by its factual findings (Filburn could have avoided the penalty by feeding it to his livestock without threshing it first).”

When it comes to Federal employee rulings, nether logic nor law are permissible excuses to stand in the way of the leftist goals of absolute and total power over everything.

I would say this is a leftist phenomenon but it has been known to happen on the right as well, as proven by Ex parte Young. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Young

Totalitarians/socialist in the Government play both sides of the spectrum to advance the cause of greater and greater goverment.

The fact that your more likely to die or retire then be fired as a Federal employee only serves to bolster their incentive to advance the power of that same government. Still if we are going to successfully downsize this Leviathan we must divide it against itself.

Our traditional and well reasoned allies in the Military bureaucracy should continue to be allies. Ironically they are the most easily accepting of cuts. The truth is we need them and we need to remove their threat at the same time. The only way we Americans can do that is to transfer as many of them as possible to their respective State militia’s.

With their officers and training appointed and conducted by the States, they will be very much more disinclined and mispositioned to follow federal orders in levying war against the same.

I know nobody wants to talk about theses prospects. But in order to avoid them we must be prepared to confront them. That preparation must begin here and now while we still can, before they fully catch on to whats coming.

Once direct force is off the table for the power hungry federal officials, they will be forced to either argue on merits or attempt to set us against each other, as they did in the antebellum period.

In either case the superior information distribution afforded to us by modern technology grants us an extraordinary fighting chance to win that fight.

But to even get into this position we must fix the board, we must move resources into the proper positions where they are either useless to our enemy’s or useful to ourselfs when and if the time comes. Downsizing the federal army and air-force and transferring its assets and personnel to the various State National Guards (while using the A1S8C16 power to purge the same of disloyal officers) is a perfect way to help rig the board of force in our favor.

Thus rendering that force useless to our enemy’s and potentially useful to ourselfs if need be.

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