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Dan Lungren is a criminal.
Not content with selectively imposing a statute which violates the
highest law of the land, the first ten amendments to the Constitution,
commonly known as the Bill of Rights, now the attorney general of the
state of California has whimsically extended this exercise in
illegality to prohibit items it was never meant to prohibit -- items
he himself swore for years it didn't prohibit -- turning thousands of
decent, law-abiding Californians into instant lawbreakers. Many of
them may not even find out what they've "done" until they're beaten up
and killed by Lungren's California Cossacks hell bent on filling a
quota of arrests they'll afterward claim, as they always do, doesn't
exist.
The details are reasonably straightforward. Some years ago, under
a Republican administration desperately afraid of even the mention
of its own shadow, the California legislature passed the Roberti-Roos
Victim Disarmament Act which basically attempts, with a few "generous"
exceptions, to cancel out the individual right to own and carry
weapons. Of course nothing of the sort can be done legally. There is
some question -- owing to its unique history -- whether Article II of
the Bill of Rights could even be repealed by Constitutional amendment,
without nullifying the very authority under which such action was
taken.
Thus any government official, elected or appointed, who advocated,
introduced, sponsored, voted for, or subsequently enforced the
Roberti-Roos Victim Disarmament Act is a criminal, including Dan
Lungren.
Recently, having spent years swearing (even filing amicus curiae
briefs) that the Roberti-Roos Victim Disarmament Act didn't outlaw
certain gun types, now, browbeaten by the moral and intellectual heir
to Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine, the Los Angeles Times, the
criminal Lungren has reversed himself, arbitrarily withdrawing the
"generous" exception, creating an even more illegal ex post facto
situation of the kind forbidden by Article I, Section 9 of the
Constitution. Meaning Lungren has made himself a criminal all over
again.
Note that I didn't mention what type of gun was involved. That's
every bit as irrelevant as freedom to the Borg -- or to the criminal
Dan Lungren. The Bill of Rights says "arms", meaning anything and
everything useful in defending a country from its own government, from
frisbees (explored as a shape for hand grenades during the Vietnam
war) to four-wheel drive RVs (Napoleon was wrong: an army doesn't
travel on its stomach, but on its Michelins). Along that gamut, we
encounter sawed-off shotguns (despite the abysmal ignorance of the
Supreme Court in U.S. v. Miller), SKSs of whatever magazine type, and
anything else that you or I might happen to believe is suitable to the
task.
Dan Lungren knows that, which is another thing that makes him a criminal.
Of course the Attorney General has accomplices, and they're hardly
limited to the street gang he happens to lead, the one whose colors
are blue on the outside and, as we discovered during the Los Angeles
riots, yellow on the inside. (I remind readers that California is
that enlightened jurisdiction where, when a young woman wrote an
insider's acccount of police corruption. she was framed, jailed, and
her manuscript confiscated.) Governor Pete "George Bush Lite" Wilson
could have vetoed the Roberti-Roos Victim Disarmament Act or nullified
it by an executive order as unconstitutional, so he's an accomplice,
too.
So are many California gun owners who let them get away with their
crimes, especially the National Rifle Association, now fighting a
desperate war that's half catch-up and half cover-up, thanks to their
decades-long uncritical (nay, fellationic) regard for any Republican
whatever, regardless of his actual track record on Second Amendment
issues.
Not to mention publications like Shooting Times whose editors
admonished me for being an hysteric every time I warned them --
starting 20 years ago -- that this California confiscation was
precisely what would happen if they didn't press our case more
radically.
Apologies are in order, Constantino.
The day will come -- not next year, maybe, but possibly five years
from now, or ten, or twenty -- when the criminal Dan Lungren finds
himself hauled out of the cushy corporate offices he'll have occupied
since his gubernatorial defeat at the hands of whoever inherits Diane
Feinstein's vote-replicators, hauled out in handcuffs and leg-irons,
with a belly-chain wrinkling the middle of his $5000 suit like a
potato sack, hauled out the way they did Michael Millken in the 1980s,
indicted, tried, and convicted for his crimes, and put away where he
can become a sex toy for Aleric the Visigoth and Jo-Jo the Dog-faced
Boy.
Either that or contemplate decades of solitary confinement in a
prison system emptied by repeal or nullification of every victimless
crime law on the books, including the War on Drugs, the Occupational
Safety and Health Atrocity, and the Roberti-Roos Victim Disarmament
Act. Come to think of it, solitary might be a far worse punishment
for a political guy than anything Aleric and Jo-Jo might want to do to
him.
But in the meantime, what should Californians do? Hunker down,
bury their guns, and hide? Turn in their hardware like good little
Brits?
How about doing what they should have done in the first place:
remembering who the criminal is, here, and who are the good-guys, the
forces of law and order? If Californians really want to retain their
rights through this Dark Age of corrupt politicians and even more
corrupt courts, they should make sure that the criminal Dan Lungren
can't speak anywhere -- can't make the briefest public appearance --
without five hundred noisy pickets to announce his criminality to the
world.
If they're persistent and consistent, the world will eventually
catch on. It worked with Nixon, and Lungren is just Nixon writ small.
Owning a gun the criminal Dan Lungren (or the L.A. Times)
doesn't like doesn't make you a criminal. Dan Lungren is the
criminal. If you're old enough, you've seen his kind before. He's
this decade's big, fat, greasy, drawling sheriff in sweat-stained
khakis and mirrored sunglasses. He's the cheap demagogue standing in
the doorway between the people and the unencumbered exercise of their
fundamental rights. He's the pillowcase-headed Grand Boogie of a Nu
Klux Klan fixing to write some Jim Crow gun laws and do a little
lynching.
He's a criminal.
Don't let him, or the world, forget it.
Don't forget it yourself.
My home on the web, The Webley Page: www.webleyweb.com/lneil/
My e-zine The Libertarian Enterprise: www.webleyweb.com/tle/
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