Posted on 01/27/2007 1:36:11 PM PST by tpaine
By Vin Suprynowicz
For years, Garry Watson, 49, of little Bunker, Mo., (population 390) had been squabbling with town officials over the sewage line easement which ran across his property to the adjoining, town-operated sewage lagoon.
Residents say officials grew dissatisfied with their existing easement, and announced they were going to excavate a new sewer line across the landowner's property. Capt. Chris Ricks of the Missouri Highway Patrol reports Watson's wife, Linda, was served with "easement right-of-way papers" on Sept. 6. She gave the papers to Watson when he got home at 5 a.m. the next morning from his job at a car battery recycling plant northeast of Bunker. Watson reportedly went to bed for a short time, but arose about 7 a.m. when the city work crew arrived.
"He told them 'If you come on my land, I'll kill you,' " Bunker resident Gregg Tivnan told me last week. "Then the three city workers showed up with a backhoe, plus a police officer. They'd sent along a cop in a cop car to guard the workers, because they were afraid there might be trouble. Watson had gone inside for a little while, but then he came out and pulled his SKS (semi-automatic rifle) out of his truck, steadied it against the truck, and he shot them."
Killed in the September 7 incident, from a range of about 85 yards, were Rocky B. Gordon, 34, a city maintenance man, and David Thompson, 44, an alderman who supervised public works. City maintenance worker Delmar Eugene Dunn, 51, remained in serious but stable condition the following weekend.
Bunker police Officer Steve Stoops, who drove away from the scene after being shot, was treated and released from a hospital for a bullet wound to his arm and a graze to the neck.
Watson thereupon kissed his wife goodbye, took his rifle, and disappeared into the woods, where his body was found two days later -- dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Following such incidents, the local papers are inevitably filled with well-meaning but mawkish doggerel about the townsfolk "pulling together" and attempting to "heal" following the "tragedy." There are endless expressions of frustration, pretending to ask how such an otherwise peaceful member of the community could "just snap like that."
In fact, the supposedly elusive explanation is right before our eyes.
"He was pushed," Clarence Rosemann -- manager of the local Bunker convenience store, who'd done some excavation work for Watson -- told the big-city reporters from St. Louis. Another area resident, who didn't want to be identified, told the visiting newsmen, "Most people are understanding why Garry Watson was upset. They are wishing he didn't do it, but they are understanding why he did it."
You see, to most of the people who work in government and the media these days -- especially in our urban centers -- "private property" is a concept out of some dusty, 18th century history book. Oh, sure, "property owners" are allowed to live on their land, so long as they pay rent to the state in the form of "property taxes."
But an actual "right" to be let alone on our land to do whatever we please -- always providing we don't actually endanger the lives or health of our neighbors?
Heavens! If we allowed that, how would we enforce all our wonderful new "environmental protection" laws, or the "zoning codes," or the laws against growing hemp or tobacco or distilling whisky without a license, or any of the endless parade of other malum prohibitum decrees which have multiplied like swarms of flying ants in this nation over the past 87 years?
What does it mean to say we have any "rights" or "freedoms" at all, if we cannot peacefully enjoy that property which we buy with the fruits of our labors?
In his 1985 book "Takings," University of Chicago Law Professor Richard Epstein wrote that, "Private property gives the right to exclude others without the need for any justification.
Indeed, it is the ability to act at will and without need for justification within some domain which is the essence of freedom, be it of speech or of property."
"Unfortunately," replies James Bovard, author of the book "Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen," "federal law enforcement agents and prosecutors are making private property much less private. ...
Park Forest, Ill. in 1994 enacted an ordinance that authorizes warrantless searches of every single-family rental home by a city inspector or police officer, who are authorized to invade rental units 'at all reasonable times.' ... Federal Judge Joan Gottschall struck down the searches as unconstitutional in 1998, but her decision will have little or no effect on the numerous other localities that authorize similar invasions of privacy."
We are now involved in a war in this nation, a last-ditch struggle in which the other side contends only the king's men are allowed to use force or the threat of force to push their way in wherever they please, and that any peasant finally rendered so desperate as to employ the same kind of force routinely employed by our oppressors must surely be a "lone madman" who "snapped for no reason." No, we should not and do not endorse or approve the individual choices of folks like Garry Watson. But we are still obliged to honor their memories and the personal courage it takes to fight and die for a principle, even as we lament both their desperate, misguided actions ... and the systematic erosion of our liberties which gave them rise.
This is from your own post here.
Public policy "is to be found in the state's constitution and statutes and, when they are silent, in its judicial decisions."
If I'm wrong here, then according to your own post, you should be able to find something in a State Constitution, State statutes, or in its judicial decisions supporting your claim that private citizens exercising their rights as property owners over their own property are limited by the constrictions placed on government by the Second Amendment.
We've gone over a month debating this subject, and you've yet to provide substantiation for your own posts.
Why?
Because you're obviously wrong.
P.S. I see that you've taken to responding to posts directed at other people...is it because of the embarrassment you feel over helping the NRA legally disarm employees in Georgia?
You're right t...you're not funny.
You're a dangerous useful idiot who may have just helped provide for the legal, forceful disarmament of employees in Georgia.
Learn your lesson...when you run to the government for "help", people get screwed.
Luis claims:
We've gone over a month debating this subject, and you've yet to provide substantiation for your own posts. Why? Because you're obviously wrong.
Luis, you're advocating parking lot gun bans & gun free zones, -- which somehow make's my opposition "obviously wrong"?
Dream on.
>>I wasn't aware that anyone but Hick's father actually was killed in "Huckleberry Finn" though.<<
I think it was some "further adventures of" made for TV tripe actually. I didn't watch all of it.
HA! That is exactly what I saw in that show!
Putting this back into context, that part of the country experienced the "Compromise of 1850", "The Kansas Nebraska Act" the "Missouri Red Legs" raiders, John Brown's Bleeding Kansas, etc. Huck's journey occurred in a time just before that sort of thing became the norm.
Twain was a journalist before he was a novelist.
Thank you for expanding my mind this week!
Are you a Scotsman or just a fan of the movie?
I'm Welsh. I'm a fan of the movie - and my wife and I are both fans of the relationship between his wife and him (in the movie).
My family was probably from Cheshire, just north of Wales about ten generations ago. We can't prove it past eight though.
My grandmothers last name is Alden. She traced her ancestry back to John and Priscilla. Meanwhile, without getting into specifics, my last name is VERY english.
You are kidding right? Advocating the execution of innocent American workers?
I believe he was referring back to the Founding Fathers advocating killing oppressive government workers. Cleanse freedom with the "Blood of Tyrants and Patriots" and all that you know?
A town worker with a hoe working on a ditch deserves killing? Seriously. I am all for resisting the tax man, but this is too much. The people on this board who believe this 1) play into the hands of liberals who say they are kooks, and 2) Probably are being monitored by the FBI or such for advocating the killing of innocent Americans. There is nothing patriotic about advocating this; its no better than a leftist hoping Americans get killed and the US loses in Iraq.
The spin won't work t, I advocate the right of a property owner to exclude whomever he wants from his property, for whatever reason he wants.
You support using the force of government to violate property rights.
I don't have to like the way others exercise their rights, I just have to make sure that we HAVE rights to exercise,
Luis claims:
We've gone over a month debating this subject, and you've yet to provide substantiation for your own posts. Why? Because you're obviously wrong.
Luis, you're advocating parking lot gun bans & "- gun free zones -", -- which somehow make's my opposition "obviously wrong"?
Dream on.
I advocate the right of a property owner to exclude whomever he wants from his property, for whatever reason he wants.
Luis, you advocate parking lot gun bans & gun free zones, for "-- whatever reason --" and to hell with our right to carry arms in vehicles.
You support using the force of government to violate property rights.
You want the cops to kick gun owners out of your parking lot. -- I want our Constitutional RTKBA's to be honored. -- Big difference luis.
I understood CCguy as not being specific to this but only preemptively speaking for the 2nd Amendment in contrast all those that will use this case to advocate more gun control. That is how I responded. In this situation the nut-case Watson clearly jumped the gun, if you will pardon the pun.
This does remind me of Claire Wolfe's words years ago.
In 1996 I scrawled a pair of sentences that resonated with a lot of freedom activists.
Morally, of course it’s time to shoot the bastards.
Obviously, I voiced something a lot of people have been thinking about. Four years have passed since I flippantly said it’s too early. Is it time yet to shoot the bastards? At least it seems time to take keyboard in hand and give a straight answer -- yes, no, maybe and whatever turns your crank.
It was time the first day the first court upheld the first blatantly unconstitutional law for the sake of political expediency. It was time the first day the fedgov got the notion to use regulations or executive orders to control We the People, rather than merely the internal workings of agencies. All the abuses since - ninja raids, confiscatory taxation, rules too obscure to comprehend, bullying bureaucrats, millions imprisoned for victimless crimes, burgeoning nanny state, ever-increasing centralized control - are government gravy. The truth is, morally it’s been “time” since at least Lincoln’s day. And it’s time now.
It’s past time, since all those earlier Americans failed to get out the tar, the feathers or the M1 Garands because they were too quiescent, or too persuaded that justice would prevail. Or because -- like us -- they valued due process and knew the chaos that disregard for it could bring. Or because -- like us -- they feared the personal consequences. Or because -- like us -- they weren’t ever sure whether that moment was the right moment.
Whenever it becomes impossible to get justice or have freedom “within the system” of course it’s morally right to fight back. Even Gandhi recognized that, saying:
“He who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honor by non-violently facing death, may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden.”
Maybe it was even “time” on the day federal inspectors tried to close down a little, family-owned sausage plant whose product had been safely used by consumers for eight decades. I don’t know. Stuart Alexander thought it was.
But is it practical? Sensible? In that sense, no. And no surprise. It’s not time to shoot.
And for all the individual injustices or perceptions of injustice that always exist in the world, have things gotten any worse in the last four years?
There is more in her column but I'll let whoever is interested look for it himself.
I agree with that. But, as you implied, I was trying to remind people why we have the Second Amendment:
The Second Amendment is not about hunting for squirrels.
The Second Amendment, really, is not about self-defense from hoodlums.
The Second Amendment is about the fact that sometimes people who are paid by an official government body will approach you and boldly act in violation of your rights, as set out in the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights.
In such cases, we need to calmly ask the question, as you did: "Is it time to shoot?"
In the case cited, it probably was not time to shoot. However, no one on this board should voice shock and dismay that anyone dare ask the question: "Is it time for us to start shooting at our own government?" This, really, is an essential, and always reasonable question for any American to ask. Hopefully, the answer will always be "No, it's not time to shoot." But the question should always be on our lips.
We have the Second Amendment so that, when we ask that question, it is not an futile exercise in rhetoric but is, instead, a viable option for us as Free Men. It's good to have the ability. And it's good for Government to know that we have both the ability and the Will.
We have the Second Amendment so that, when we ask that question, it is not an futile exercise in rhetoric but is, instead, a viable option for us as Free Men. It's good to have the ability. And it's good for Government to know that we have both the ability and the Will.
Well put! I like the way you think!
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