Posted on 02/25/2003 7:41:56 PM PST by Sir Gawain
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How do you kill civil disobedience? It's quite simple: just forbid it. This was done on January 30 by a criminal court in the Province of Ontario (Canada). Among the conditions for his release until his trial, Dr. Edward Hudson has been ordered "not to participate in any public rally or public gun protest in Canada." A comrade at arms, Korean War veteran Jim Turnbull, has been subjected to similar conditions. Just after noon on January 30, Dr. Hudson was led limping into the glass-protected court dock by a muscular policeman. After spending the night in police custody, the 57-year-old veterinarian did not have the cane he uses since an army parachute accident 30 years ago. He wore the crushed clothes he had when had been arrested at the Ottawa airport. He looked haggard when he glanced at the audience, made mostly of half a dozen supporters and four policemen. Although I had never met Dr. Hudson in person, I smiled at him; he returned a faint smile. Violent aggressors and robbers had just paraded before Court No. 6, most of them to be remanded in custody until their trials. Under guard in the dock, Dr. Hudson was only asked to state his name and place of residence, which he answered with a clear voice. What heinous crime had Dr. Hudson committed? Peaceful civil disobedience. On January 1, the Saskatchewan resident participated in an Ottawa protest by the Canadian Unregistered Firearm Owners Association (CUFOA) against the 1995 Firearms Act (called "bill C-68"), which was coming into full force – and "force" is not a figure of style. The demonstrators burned gun licences and gun registration certificates, and illegally exchanged an inoffensive gun part called a receiver. Ed Hudson and CUFOA's president Jim Turnbull were arrested. The praetorians took great care to charge them not under the Firearms Act, but under an older Criminal Code section against carrying weapons (the gun part!) while "attending or [being] on the way to attend a public meeting."[1] On January 30, Dr. Hudson and Mr. Turnbull flew back to Ottawa for a court appearance. CUFOA had planned a peaceful demonstration for the following day. Dr. Hudson had also organized a little target shooting event, to be held on a legal shooting range but where he would bring unregistered long guns. After Hudson had picked up his legally shipped, locked and checked guns in the Ottawa airport terminal (hunters regularly do this), waiting praetorians asked for his gun licence and registration certificates. He refused (he doesn't have these papers, anyway), and was charged with "obstruction," the desperate praetorian's excuse. The system has a way to break a resistor. When they were charged on January 1, Ed Hudson and Jim Turnbull were forbidden to carry their demonstrations in front of the federal Parliament and some other government buildings. They went to demonstrate in Montréal. Now, they are forbidden to participate in protests all over Canada. The system even coerces them into signing the prohibition order, or else. The gun control "law" (so-called) is immoral and contrary to Canadian traditions. It forces any individual who only wants to keep a hunting gun at home to apply for a personal licence every five years, and tell the police about his depressions and his love life. It forces ten percent of the Canadian adult population (i.e., registered gun owners) to notify the police when they change addresses. It grants the police arbitrary powers to seize guns, and to deny or revoke licences. In certain circumstances, it allows searches (re-christened "inspections") without warrants. It also forces the registration of all individual firearms, and prepares the sort of confiscation that the British and the Australians have recently suffered (like, before them, subjects of all totalitarian countries). It is one of the last nails in the coffin of the right of individuals to defend their lives if the police cannot (or will not) intervene. It discriminates against honest citizens in favour of criminals. This so-called "law" has created from a few hundreds of thousands (according to government estimates) to a few millions of instant, peaceful, paper criminals. Canada will soon be like the United Kingdom, where only criminals (and, in Canada, powerfully armed policemen) have guns. Sometimes rich and famous apparatchiks have privileges. It was recently revealed that Montréal businessman Pierre Péladeau was graciously allowed a special carry permit. Since 1978, this "privilege" has been inaccessible to ordinary citizens, deemed to be incompetent wards and potential criminals. George Orwell, the author of 1984, cleverly wrote: "That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."[2] The CUFOA resistors quote Henry David Thoreau: "When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow." They could also quote the 18th-century English writer Junius: "The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures." At one o'clock in the morning, while Dr. Hudson was trying to sleep in his freezing cell, and again one hour later, a praetorian came and offered to release him immediately if he signed an agreement never to own firearms. The hero refused. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles defines tyranny as: "Arbitrary or oppressive exercise of power; unjustly severe use of one's authority; harsh, severe, or unmerciful action." Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French political scientist, forecasted a more subtle, quiet, democratic tyranny. "[T]he supreme power," he wrote, "covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform … men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power … compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."[3] On January 30, 2003, in an Ontario criminal court, I saw the tyrant. He was not in the dock. References1. At http://www.cufoa.ca/ (visited February 17, 2003). 2. Quoted in Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), p. 328. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), Chap. 6; available at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm (visited February 17, 2003). Pierre Lemieux is co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research Group at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, and author of the Confessions d'un coureur des bois hors-la-loi (Montréal: Varia, 2001). Website:www.pierrelemieux.org. |
L
Sometimes I feel that we are getting close to this, and it's just a matter of time.
I don't get it. How can they go to militia practice? :-)
Five black robes can say that the moon is made of green cheese, or I have no right to own a gun, and it will not make either true.
But it will bring into the clear light of day who the traitors and domestic enemies of the constitution are.
If they want to settle the matter unde Rule 308, that will be for them to decide.
If they go on record officially declaring that we don't have the "Right to keep and bear arms", we won't have to wait decades to see the repurcussions.
Furthermore, there is no guarantee that Bush is going to put a Scalia or Thomas on the court. With the exception of Reagan, Republicans have put more statists than constructionists on the court.
Should the Supreme Court rule against the 2nd amendment, their ruling will have no more legitimatacy than the "laws" requiring Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus.
There is no legal (under the Constitution) nor moral requirement to obey illegitimate court rulings.
Such a ruling would only make "official" what the unofficial policy from DC has been for decades: that we have no Rights, only privlidges granted by the state. And since the primary purpose of the federal government is to "secure our Rights" (per the Declaration of Independence), such a ruling would bring the legitimacy of the entire government into question. As such, other parts of the Declaration may be invoked by "We the People".
If they want to settle the matter unde Rule 308, that will be for them to decide.
There are more than a few Americans who are well-acquainted with this rule and not afraid to invoke it if their Rights come under assault.
In another two generations, there may be nobody left who remembers freedom.
The Soviet Union also had a lovely constitution, but everybody understood that if you actually tried to apply it you would go to the Gulag.
Your right. Gunowners should have started shooting the govt bastards right around 1934...and we wouldn't have gun control.
jmt teeman
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Tell you what. Work for a gun group or a candidate in the next election for one week.
We already have threads on this website from gunowners who complain they get a letter in the mail asking for money. They're too lazy to get off the couch to throw the letter away without complaining.
"The supreme power covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform … men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power … compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
Got duct tape?
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