Toward a Police Reform Movement -- Part Two

By L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise

PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

         The American people will have their privacy again, whether the government and government-chartered corporations want them to or not. In general, owing to an established pattern of abuse by police agencies and individual officers, all wiretaps, internet surveillance, and other invasions of individual privacy -- or any procedure, including taxation, which requires disclosure of private financial information -- will be forbidden. It was a grave mistake to grant such privileges to government in the first place. For the foreseeable future, the Fourth Amendment must be read as if the word "unreasonable" did not appear in it.
         Given the unmistakable injunction of the Second Amendment, possession or use of any device for detecting personal weapons (whether by government at any level or by government-chartered corporations) will be illegal and severely punishable.
         It is inappropriate for sovereign individuals to be sorted and tracked as if they were breeding livestock or government property. Understandably, there is no provision whatever for it to be found in the Constitution. Fingerprint records and other identification systems presently maintained by government or by government-chartered corporations must will be destroyed and practices like fingerprinting, voiceprinting, and retinal photography strictly forbidden.

A PERSONAL MESSAGE

         To individual members of the police and military, I say that the time for denial is over. If any of these proposed measures angers you, remember that Bill Clinton did it to you. Janet Reno did it to you. Louis Freeh did it to you. Larry Potts did it to you. Lon Horiuchi did it to you. And you let them do it. Until you can prove the contrary to the people you are sworn to protect and serve, you're no different than they are. You're the same as those who:
         Firebombed and burned an entire neighborhood out of existence when one group of its residents was accused of nothing more serious than disturbing the peace;
         Assassinated a harmless old man simply in order to steal his valuable real estate;
         Shot a little boy and his dog to death, then blew his mother's head off with a telescopically-sighted high-powered rifle as she held her baby in her arms;
         Illegally confined, terrorized, poison-gassed, and machinegunned dozens of innocent men, women -- and 22 little children -- in the church that was their home;
         Tortured, intimidated, and attempted to dispose of political prisoners by denying them necessary and lawfully prescribed medication and proper medical assistance;
         Threatened and confiscated evidence from independent investigators when they questioned the government's cover-up of an airliner crash that killed hundreds;
         Viciously stomped helpless kittens to death underfoot in an attempt to frighten the innocent victims of a narcotics raid carried out at the wrong address;
         And committed any of the hundreds of thousands of other brutal acts that have begun to transform a once free and noble country into a horror-filled dictatorship.

TIME TO STAND DOWN

         The Cold War is over. The War on Drugs was intended from the beginning to destroy the Constitution you swore to uphold and defend. Don't let socialists, elected by a minority, use your body and mind to force illegal, immoral, alien ideas on an unwilling populace. Your one goal must be to enforce the highest law of the land, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Indeed, that's the only possible justification for the existence of government.
         Don't let deskbound, overpaid "superiors" tell you what the Bill of Rights means. Remember your oath. Don't let judges and lawyers -- who only stand to benefit from the destruction of the Bill of Rights -- tell you what it means, either. Do what most Americans haven't done for half a century. Think for yourself.
         Ask yourself this question: if you were one of America's Founding Fathers and you'd just fought a successful revolution against the most powerful and heavy-handed government on Earth, and the last thing in the world you wanted for yourself or your children or your grandchildren was to stumble beneath the heels of its jackboots ever again, what would you want the Bill of Rights to mean?
         And if the first act, under martial law, of that powerful, heavy-handed government had been to try to take your guns away, would you have written a Second Amendment to guarantee its "right" to own and carry weapons? Or would you have written it to forbid government from having anything to do with your guns?
         I say again, it's time to end the War on Drugs. Think back: every dime ever spent on it has only made the problem worse, not better. Many decent individuals have come to believe that, from the outset, it was never meant as anything but a war against the people of the United States of America. It's time to end it, to abolish the DEA, FBI, ATF, and every other federal agency wihich is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, and is for that reason alone, illegal.
         My last proposal is that all hiring for these agencies cease immediately, and that individual officers who survive scrutiny of their past activities be made US marshals, given a new assignment, Bill of Rights enforcement, and be turned loose on politicians, bureaucrats, and judges, instead of the American people.

L. Neil Smith, a Life Member of the National Rifle Association for 24 years, is the award-winning author of The Probability Broach, Pallas, Henry Martyn, and many other novels, as well as publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise, available free by e-mail subscription or at http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/. His own site, the "Webley Page" is at http://www.lneilsmith.org//

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