Feb 5th 2013, my veterans hospital primary care doctor called my home and heard a message on my answering machine that he said sounded peculiar. The VA contacted the local police to perform a “wellness check.”
The police came to my home, and, without any justification whatsoever, hauled me away for a psychiatric evaluation at a local hospital. I submitted to their forceful insistence under duress and fear of arrest or worse. I wasn’t arrested, no crime was committed nor any threats were made to myself or others.
They confiscated my guns and pistol permit. I was released two days later from the evaluation on my on recognizance. I have since attempted to use the courts and attorneys to fight the revocation of my pistol permit. Then on top of everything else, the bills from the short stay at the hospital and EMS bills that they billed me, along with what I had to pay the attorney adds up to a large amount of money.
The embedded video (ironically, of a radio exchange) certainly seems to support the above summary.
A cautionary observation, to anyone credulous enough to cling still to this absurd but heavily marketed fiction: you may believe you have no stake in this issue--perhaps you just don't like guns, and just cannot empathize with those who do--but you're wrong. You're wrong because this isn't about guns, it's about power and who has it--the little people or the ruling class. (You perhaps think you're not little people?)
Now ALL politics, from traffic tickets to imperial marauding, is about power and who has it, but very few things are actually meaningful to this balance of power--meaningful beyond the panem et circenses gameplay of who gets to control the "legitimate" ruling mob for the next term. "The gun issue" absolutely is one of those few meaningful things, whether you choose to recognize that or not, and the stake you have in it is exactly the same as the stake I have in it. (Scoff if you will, but your disbelief does not make it untrue.)
Personally, I'm pretty sick of hearing otherwise intelligent people tell me that "they're not after your guns", because that quantity of ignorance very nearly must be a willful choice. But ironically, in one sense this is exactly right, if not in the way you might expect. It's true that "They" are not really coming for your guns--they are coming for YOU.
Yes, you. And your neighbor Cindy. And me. Everyone. It is no longer possible simply to live life without harming others and expecting only the same in return; your peacefulness is unimportant, to the unaccountable power-jockeys with the "legitimate" weapons--it is only your unquestioning compliance that matters. And who do you think gets to decide whether or not you are "complying"?
And we now live in a society in which each of us, legally, commits an average of three felonies a day, usually without being aware of it at all. Yes: you already are uncompliant. "Legally", the ONLY thing standing in the way of your arrest and prosecution, right now at this very moment, is the discretion of whatever state prosecutor can secure a jurisdiction claim. You and I are each only a "drop a dime" away from an encounter that could change, or end, our lives, today, and every day.
All that "gun control" will accomplish, is all that it has ever accomplished: it will make it easier for the state to get me, or you, on yet another malum prohibitum statute that in no way requires for me--or you--to have actually done anyone any harm. Perhaps you have also noticed that along with the frothing, frenzied push for such absurd statutes, is a comitant push to go ahead and "drop that dime" on your neighbor, for even the slightest perceived violation. (Well, after all, this same philosophy has been a pretty wild "success" in the Drug War, hasn't it? Just look at the proof: all those convictions--and drink in the fear of the realization that all these...criminals have been living among you, closeting their secrets, for all this time...)
But perhaps you don't own guns, or smoke weed, or eat fatty foods, or record police abuse, or drink raw milk, or say politically heretical things, or encrypt your email, or [one could go on]. Oh, please. Do you believe that you will be exempted, when your day arrives and the state turns its reticle on you? Do you think Officer Friendly is above planting a little contraband--some herb or an "illegal" gun on you, yes you, to get the conviction to match his snitch's tip? You think you'll be okay simply because you're a "law-abiding citizen", who has not "done anything wrong", meticulously obeying every possible law and rule? (Gaag.)
Do you think the next move you make would qualify as "a furtive movement"? Do you think that your opinion about that matters?
If you do: may your chains rest lightly upon your shoulders.
And don't worry, either. The inevitable is...well, just that. Someday, however long it may take, "they" will get around to "not coming after" something you do care about.
_______________
Note: I am presuming the basic veracity of the linked story, both because it is hardly the only one of its kind, and also because the details hardly matter, if nobody questions the legitimacy of the Almighty State to bring threats and violence to anyone it pleases without even a hint of due process.
1 comment:
Excellent, Kevin. So true. They may well be eaten last... but they will be consumed regardless.
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
Martin Niemoller
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