You Can't Silence Us

Laws, Redux

Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:

That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country’s existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.

What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. Here is a picture of one of the 53 titles of the United States Code:

The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. About 600 crimes a year are added to the Federal Code, so we should be somewhere near 14,000 Federal crimes in the US Code by now.

A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.

In 1982, the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question. (There are 53 titles now.)

So you see, even the Justice Department of the US government is not sure of how many laws there are, yet each and every one of us is responsible for knowing every one of them, along with the court cases that modify and define them, upon penalty of prison: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”

All of that pales in comparison to the regulations. Congress isn’t the only body that passes laws. There are also several dozen Federal bureaus, who have had the power to write laws since 1940. The laws that they write are called regulations, and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations.

The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. In 2018, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over 250,000 pages. Only a fraction of those pages involved regulations based on something spelled out in legislation. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.

The result of all of this is that each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over one million pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12 by reading 50 pages per day, by age 67 you would have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws and 28 years of reading to your quest while you were busy reading.

There are nearly 1.7 million regulatory crimes that a person can commit in this country as of 2020.

Remember, though: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you are spraying insect killer on some ants using a bug spray that says spray from 6 inches away, but you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal. If you are buying a gun and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.

Why is this happening? Ayn Rand gives us an insight into this:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Truer words were never spoken. More laws equals more crimes, which equals more criminals, which equals more power for those enforcing the laws.

There is only one destination for the path we are on: tyranny, enslavement, and the complete control of everything. That will eventually lead to revolution. Whether or not that will happen in my productive lifetime is anyone’s guess.

People who have read this post: 424
By Divemedic, ago

Same Old Arguments

The left is still hammering the “collective rights” theory. This attorney thinks that SCOTUS got it wrong on the Heller decision.

Carrying their logic to its extreme, if there is no limitation on the right to own a gun, all 330 million citizens of the United States must be part of a “well regulated Militia.” Are you? I’m not.

Actually, you ARE a part of the militia, whether or not you know it. The militia is actually composed of two parts: The organized militia (the National Guard) and the unorganized militia, which is comprised of all male US citizens between the ages of 17 and 45. See 10USC246:

§246. Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are—

(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and

(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

This so-called lawyer doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about, but that doesn’t stop him. He goes on:

No one would seriously argue you have the right to own a land mine or a nuclear-armed submarine.

Who says? The Second Amendment says “shall not be infringed,” and I believe that it DOES protect the right to own a nuclear armed submarine. Now, I am equally sure that many people would agree that citizens SHOULDN’T own a submarine armed with nuclear weapons. In that case, there is a process for changing that. It should not be difficult to get three quarters of the state legislatures and a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress to agree to add an Amendment to the Constitution that reads something along the lines of “No person shall be permitted to own a nuclear warhead.” I mean, the process is outlined right there in the paperwork.

What I can’t find in that Constitution is a clause that permits the government to ignore any clause which it, in its own judgment, finds inconvenient or irrelevant. That is EXACTLY what he argues, however:

The fundamental constitutional proposition many Republicans overlook is that no right is unlimited. That there is a limitation of our rights is fundamental to being civilized. So, for instance, the Supreme Court long ago held that your right to self-expression stops at the tip of the other guy’s nose. You have the right to own a car, but you don’t have the right to drive it at 100 mph through Downtown San Diego.

Of course no right is unlimited. He is just making a poor argument. No one has a right to own a car. There are all sorts of reasons why a person’s ability to own a car may be restricted, as any decent lawyer would know. I would also agree with him that a person doesn’t have the right to drive downtown at 100 miles per hour. A person does, however, have the right to own arms, to include firearms. What a person doesn’t have is the right to stand in the middle of a crowded street and fire that gun into a crowd, and no one is saying that they should, absent a legitimate exception like self defense.

If we are to allow the government to simply ignore the parts of the Constitution that they disagree with, then we can all agree that the founding documents of this nation are no longer relevant and are null and void. In that case, we might as well admit that might makes right, and we are a dictatorship after all.

If I lived in San Diego, I would not hire this moron as an attorney. He doesn’t seem very competent or knowledgeable.

People who have read this post: 426
By Divemedic, ago

They Have Chosen

The police have chosen sides. They want the left to be in control. I can no longer support the police. I know what many of you are saying: “I have a friend who is a cop, and he is a good guy.”

To that I ask you: “Imagine that you were the man who was walking down this sidewalk in front of a protest and were being harassed by these leftist idiots, just like in the video below. The cops came up to you and were plainly taking the side of the leftists. You tell those cops to get lost and one of them arrests you for stalking and assaulting the protesters. Your friend the cop then approaches. Whose side will he choose? Yours? Or his fellow officers?”

Watch this and see how the cop, who is following the guy and saw the entire incident, takes the side of the leftists. Then see how the other cops arrive and immediately defer to the first cop’s judgment. That is how it ALWAYS works.

I promise you that he will choose to support the other cops 100% of the time. He will protect his pension, his job, and support the blue wall over those who think that they are his friends. Cops do not go against other cops, mostly because they want to protect their jobs and pensions.

The only exception to this is if the aggrieved party is a part of the protected minority class, and there is a public lynching in progress by the left. (Ask Derek Chauvin how much he was supported by his “brothers in blue.”)

People who have read this post: 1,285
By Divemedic, ago

What Police?

If there is anything that I am convinced of, it is this: The press in this country doesn’t report on anything that the left/Democrat party hasn’t approved of first. The professional media outlets in this country report what they are told to report, when they are told to report it, and that includes the so-called conservative media and yes, even those on the right like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and all of Fox news. (Don’t forget that the radio network that employs Hannity and Levin told them to avoid certain topics or their jobs were forfeit.)

So with that in mind, just why have the media outlets spent so much time reporting on how police screwed the pooch by the numbers in the Uvalde shooting? After all, talk like this obscures the gun control message. Are they trying to make local cops look bad so they can put some kind of national police force in place? Is there something else happening that they are trying to distract us from? Why did the school board refuse to fire the Uvalde Schools Police Chief?

I am trying to see the big picture here, and I don’t understand it. Sometimes the picture appears to be so muddy.

People who have read this post: 379
By Divemedic, ago