THE LAW HAS CONVERTED PLUNDER INTO A RIGHT
(Re: Al Carlos case)

by Jane Gaffin



A great amount of print material these days seems to deal in some way with life, liberty, property and law.

It's a harbinger to heed.

Paul Harding launched into his letter (Star, March 21) with:

"...Liberty means the unalienable right to do, to be, and to have whatever one desires so long as it does not infringe upon the unalienable rights of others. In Canada no person shall be deprived of life, liberty nor property."

A two-page spread in "Canadian Access to Firearms" warned of DANGER! Another insidious law is about to drop on property owners who have to know how to waltz around it. A banner across the top of one page read "protecting you, your rights and your heritage."

A recent merger between the Ontario-based Canadian Shooting Sports and the Canadian Institute for Legislative Action offers many benefits to its members.

One is access to an exclusive legal fund should members ever be wrongly charged with a firearms offense; sound, intelligent legal opinions can be obtained to help keep firearms owners out of hot water with the law.

The ad is comforting in one respect but distressing in another. When did this country begin turning on its own citizenry to the extent that decent, peace-loving Canadians, who try to be law-abiding, must seek means to fend off oppressors legally committing crimes of force?

Badge-bearing, pistol-toting door-crashers have legal license to storm homes and plunder personal property. They need not knock before entering. They can charge you with breaking whatever law they want. It does not have to relate to a warrant, if indeed they have one.

The only self-defense for responsible folks against these brutish authorities is solidarity with like-minded warriors.

Harding discussed property and security, or a false sense of it, in terms of people believing everything is safe and secure behind locked doors.

"The fences mark the boundaries of what is ours," he wrote. "Yet the vandals find their way in and create damage while they plunder our valuables."

In spite of who the vandals are or what the property is, under any political system, whenever bureaucrats become aware of an individual citizen seeking what is his rightfully by law, the authorities will search ruthlessly for a means to withhold that right from him.

The reasons are rooted in jealousies one has for the material wealth of others. Therefore, every political system ever invented has been collectivist by nature.

Southwestern University (Texas) law professor Butler Shaffer points out to his students that every political system is founded upon a disrespect for private property as well as the rightful authority to violate the property owner.

In a nanny-statism system, the state confiscates a portion of an individual's bank account and redistributes the money to others.

Under fascism, private property remains in the hands of an individual or business while control of the property is dictated by the state.

Under socialism, the state confiscates the most important means of production, such as mining, and the system inevitably degenerates into communism, a system where the state confiscates all property and every means of production.

It is that disrespect for private property that has led to a failure in Canadian law and has reduced this nation to confusion and lawlessness.

The inconsistencies contained within the Liberals' unworkable gun laws are perfect examples. In separate parts of Canada, police targeted two gun owners for home invasions. Both gentlemen were charged with the same storage infractions but the court decisions differed vastly.

In the March 13 "Star", Roy Stephen told of a "Justice" department having the embarrassment of a dysfunctional firearms act on its hands and of forcing Whitehorse resident Allen Carlos to the Supreme Court of Canada on April 17.

"He has already been cleared twice on the trumped-up charge of unsafe firearm storage due to a home invasion come 'fishing expedition'," frothed Stephen.

A comparison "fishing mission" was hosted by Ontario, where members of the Snoop Club declared open season on Steve Harris. A National Firearms Association's monthly journal reported the Ontario Provincial Weapons Enforcement Unit (PWEU) stormed Harris' house on the pretense of looking for a sawed-off shotgun.

They bagged a fine collection of firearms plus a few other incidentals like the educational display Harris had set up at the local legion hall.

According to the charter of rights and freedoms, any person charged with an offence has the right to be tried within a reasonable time. Fourteen court appearances spanning three years before his case came to trial does not strike me as "reasonable".

The judge dismissed the careless storage charges on the grounds that "an individual cannot be found guilty of careless storage when he/she is present at the time of the investigation." He ordered the firearms, ammunition and other items seized to be returned to the lawful owner.

Back in Whitehorse, Carlos also was home when his house was raided in February 2000, albeit an emergency response team tried to lure him away first. His valuable gun collection has not been returned. And he is headed for the Big Round Up in Ottawa because territorial and appeals judges only toyed with but did not fully accept the "privacy of your own home" defense argument.

This conundrum is one solved years ago by pithy newspaperman H.L. Mencken who described a judge as nothing more than a law student who marks his own papers.

Despite the discrepancies in adjudications, both gentlemen scored major hard-fought victories and should be applauded. Their refusals to compromise principles and the community support shown them have caused a flurry of humiliation for "Justice".

Bill Rantz noted in the NFA article that Harris spoke to a gun show crowd shortly after the raid on his home. He indicated the Ontario PWEU wanted to make a shady deal. Things would supposedly go easier on Harris if he'd introduce a police informant around the local gun-show circuit as a personal friend.

"Mr. Harris stood tall," commended Rantz, president of the NFA Ontario chapter. "As a result he has been persecuted by an extremely expensive team of prosecutors and police investigators."

The taxpayers' burden, I remind. And as Mencken wrote in a 1924 piece titled "Breathing Space": "All the extravagances and incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to lawyers (in the bureaucracy and as elected politicians)...who are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them."

The blizzard of odious and contradictory New Age laws regarding private property flow from laws created, enforced and interpreted by demonstrable criminals for demonstrably criminal purposes. The ultimate goal is promoted as serving the collective good.

Regulating what people can and cannot own, what they can and cannot do, where they can and cannot work and play, how they can and cannot behave, how they can or cannot structure their business and personal affairs, where they live, what they eat, what they speak, even what they should think all start with and revolve around property rights, which includes self-ownership.

Life, liberty, individuality, property and production existed long before law. It was those faculties which compelled decision-makers to write law. Some was good; some was bad; some was just plain awful.

The law has become perverted and the police powers perverted along with it, fumed French political economist Frederic Bastiat, whose 1850 works still rank up top with the legal writings of Sir William Blackstone.

Bastiat felt a moral duty to alert his fellow-citizens that law had strayed directly opposite from its proper purpose and was heading toward a nasty socialist regime. The law has become the weapon for every kind of greed, he insisted. Instead of checking crime, the law itself is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.

Bastiat's argument is that law is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. Each of us has a natural right--from God--to defend his person, his liberty and his property.

The preservation of any one of these three basic requirements of life is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two.

Since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty or property of another individual, then it's logical that the common force for the same reason cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty or property of individuals or groups.

The law should be designed to protect people, liberties and properties and to maintain the right of each, he urged. It should cause justice to reign over all.

Unfortunately, law has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain. It has limited and destroyed the individual rights which its real purpose was to respect and uphold.

The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous, who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty and property of others.

"It has converted plunder into a right in order to protect plunder," Bastiat warned. "And it has converted lawful defense into a crime in order to punish lawful defense."

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