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'Everyone who is able may have a gun' Buffalo hunter Rodney Ansell became a modern Australian legend after
surviving two months alone in the bush in 1977, staying alive by shooting
sharks and buffalo and drinking their blood after a giant crocodile
attacked and sank his fishing boat on the Fitzmaurice River.
Ansell, 44 and the father of two teen-agers, was honored by the Northern
Territory Government as "Territorian of the Year" in 1988. But he was being
sought by police Tuesday following an incident at a remote farmhouse in
which he was believed to have shot a homeowner in the hand before being
driven off with a baseball bat.
Ansell died after shooting and killing police officer Glen Huitson
through his bullet-resistant vest at a police roadblock.
"Despite the reflected glory of being the original Crocodile Dundee, the
buffalo-hunter ran into financial difficulties and was forced to sell his
cattle station in the early Nineties," reports Mark Chipperfield from
Sydney. "In 1992, he was convicted without sentence of stealing 30 cattle
valued at $7,200. ...
"Police say they are unable to shed any light on his descent into
madness," reports the British broadsheet, adding that neither the
lever-action rifle nor the 12-gauge shotgun used by Ansell in his attack on
the roadblock "was licensed to him."
In fact, when Ansell was forced to sell his beloved cattle ranch (the
Aussies call them "stations") in the Mary River wetlands 70 miles east of
Darwin in 1991, he reported he was living on unemployment benefits and
hunting small game for food. At that time, he blamed his financial ruin on
a government scheme to slaughter wild buffalo wholesale in a bid to
eradicate domestic livestock diseases.
"It's not just me that's gone under, it's an entire industry," the former
buffalo hunter said.
As for the notion that he had "descended into madness," are we supposed
to believe Ansell could have just walked up to that roadblock with his two
"unlicenced" weapons, said "Pardon me, lads, but I need to get through
here, thank you, Cheerio," and gone along his merry way?
Perhaps Rodney Ansell had come unhinged. Certainly no one should go about
attacking police officers. But under the ever-tightening vice of government
meddling and particularly of "gun control" -- even in the once
laissez-faire Australian outback -- I wonder if we aren't going to see a
lot more such death notices of men once content to let alone, and be let
alone.
"He seemed like such a quiet fellow," the neighbors will say. "Who knows
why he 'descended into madness' when they came to confiscate his weapons
and inspect the place for hoarding violations?"
Meanwhile, on Monday Aug. 2, in a so-called "Reality Check" segment, CBS
Evening News ignored the overwhelming weight of recent Second Amendment
research and chose to perpetuate the discredited myth (so vital to the
collectivist agenda) that the Second Amendment "does not protect an
individual right."
Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds of the University of Tennessee -- just
for example -- recently wrote that scholars adhering to an individual
rights interpretation "dominate the academic literature on the Second
Amendment almost completely," and that this view is "now the mainstream
scholarly interpretation."
In its 1939 "Miller" decision -- wildly misconstrued by CBS -- the U.S.
Supreme Court in fact ruled the central government could regulate or tax
moonshiner Miller's sawed-off shotgun only after it heard uncontested lies
from Solicitor General of the United States Robert Jackson, that such
weapons had been of no military use in such recent conflicts as the First
World War -- that they had no relevance to "the militia."
Thus, a strict adherence to both the spirit and letter of the Miller
decision (in which the court found, by the way, that the militia
constitutes "all males physically capable of acting in concert for the
common defense .... and further, (that) these men were expected to appear
bearing arms supplied by themselves") might allow the central government to
regulate air pistols (not of much military use), but would have to hold
that Washington has no power to in any way restrict
or inconvenience private ownership of belt-fed machine guns or
shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles.
America's leading Second Amendment scholar, Stephen Halbrook, Ph.D. and
author of the 1994 book "That Every Man Be Armed," probably summarizes it
best:
"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects
the 'collective' right of states to maintain militias, while it does not
protect the right of 'the people' to keep and bear arms. If anyone
entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and
Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most
closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing
surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis. The
phrase 'the people' meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it did
in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments -- that is, each and every
free person."
Do you know where Dr. Halbrook got the title of his book, by the way? It
was Patrick Henry, speaking at the Virginia ratification convention in
1787, who declared: "The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone
who is able may have a gun."
It is an honor to host this man's work, and we
encourage you to visit his site and read his book. To read other articles by Vin on this site, click here. You can also see his full archives at these two sites:
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