Stroke of the Pen – The End of Your Gun Rights
By Richard W. Stevens
Every gun owner must have a registration card. Embedded into the card
is a microchip carrying your identifying information, your fingerprints, and
the gun's ballistics information. Anyone who uses an unregistered weapon will
face two years in prison.
Scare talk? Hardly. In
July 2004, that will be the law for the 400,000 registered gun owners in
Honduras. The Minister of Security is implementing the program now using
"smart cards." Honduran gun owners will have to prove their identity
and their permission to have a weapon for self-defense.
"That can't happen
here … we have the Second Amendment!" Really?
Your Papers, Please!
Dudley Hiibel, a Nevada
citizen, was arrested because he politely but firmly refused to identify
himself to a police officer. (The whole incident is available for public
viewing on Internet video.) That was the only charge against him, and he was
convicted.
The Nevada courts upheld
his conviction under the state law that requires citizens to identify
themselves to police officers. Mr. Hiibel challenged that law in the U.S.
Supreme Court, saying it was unconstitutional to punish him in such a case. As
a citizen presumed innocent, he had a right to remain silent, didn't he?
Sorry to say, but the
Supreme Court will likely uphold the Nevada law. Government monitoring and
tracking of citizens is becoming accepted by the American public. The Court
will probably say that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, contained in the Bill
of Rights, do not give citizens the right to refuse to cooperate with the
government's obtaining identification information. An innocent man can be
punished for failing to answer police questions about who he is.
Still Relying on
Government To Protect Your Rights?
If Mr. Hiibel can be
punished for failing to identify himself to authorities, then gun owners can be
punished for failing to identify themselves to authorities. Does the Second
Amendment prohibit the government from demanding identification? Not in its
words. A federal court could interpret the Second Amendment to
prohibit owner licensing and gun registration … but that has never
happened.
Consider the recent
experience with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. That court held in
2003 and 2004 that the Massachusetts Constitution requires the government to
grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Meanwhile, in California, the
Mayor of San Francisco defied state law and authorized licenses for same-sex
marriages. Marriage has been defined for thousands of years as the union
between a man and a woman. Regardless of your position on the same-sex
question, these events show that government officials are willing to defy laws
and ignore settled principles of civilization.
Self-defense is a
settled principle of civilization. You can't rely on it to stay settled. The
Second Amendment is the law of the land. You can't rely on the government to
obey it.
Smart Cards for Gun
Owners: Police State Convenience
Anti-self defense and anti-gun owner ideas still hold sway over the media, the
colleges, the courts and the politicians. New York prosecutes people who
successfully use a firearm to defend themselves against criminals. The BATFE
maintains files on individuals who purchased guns from now out-of-business
dealers. The supposedly pro-gun party controls Congress and the White House,
but federal "gun control" remains fully in place.
What happened in
Honduras could take place in the United States very quickly. Just call it a way
to identify citizens and weed out terrorists, and national firearms
registration and owner licensing would sail into law. Because Americans are
comfortable with technology and carrying cards, "smart cards" for gun
owners will seem so convenient.
Needed: Cultural Sea
Change
The only people who can halt this seemingly unstoppable movement to identify,
monitor, register and license gun owners are: you, me, and everyone we know.
Get a copy of Innocents
Betrayed – the documentary film – watch it – show it
to others. No other single teaching tool can touch hearts and change minds
about human liberty and the lifesaving right to keep and bear arms. No other
tool can affect large numbers of people as quickly as Innocents Betrayed.
Call (800) 869-1884 and
or order on-line at www.jpfo.org. Americans must learn to despise "gun
control" – Innocents Betrayed can teach them.
See
and download the Dudley Hiibel arrest video:
www.papersplease.org
