From the June 1999 Idaho Observer:

The American Coward

by Hari Heath

America was begun with “the shot heard round the world.” Impassioned men and women fought against great odds to claim that great prize of liberty. Scholar/Warrior/Diplomats gave their all in a fight to end the reign of a tyrant king.

King George and his “swarms of officers sent hither to harass our people and eat out our substance,” were toppled from their wall by a rag tag militia of tax protesters, determined to rule themselves as freemen. They fought side by side as a guerrilla army of citizens and gentlemen. The war was largely a long series of retreats that eventually wore down the British, turning the tide with a few pivotal engagements.

As the American warriors gained their ground and sent the king's men back across the sea, they became scholarly statesmen and crafted a revolutionary new form of government and began the American experiment of a Constitutional Republic.

Our Republic, in the beginning, adhered to the commands of the Constitution which formed it.

It is the nature of power to seek to increase itself. Always.

The founders of our nation knew this tendency well and installed many checks and balances in our national Constitution to limit any excessive collection of power.

The Constitution breaks down the functions of government into three branches and limits the acts and authorities of each one. This being good, but not good enough, the Founders added the Bill of Rights to spell out what rights the people had, thereby placing limits and duties upon those operating within the general government.

Right after the freedom of religion, to speak and publish, to peaceably assemble, and petition for redress, came the teeth.

The Second Amendment guarantees that each man may possess the means to terminate tyranny. It is nothing less than the right to keep and use whatever force becomes necessary to maintain the high principles of our national trust, the Constitution and that government which is founded by it.

It is nothing less than the right of each man to possess, without infringement, the means by which he can put a permanent hole in the face of tyranny, thereby securing a free state, for himself and his posterity.

Government or Administrative Regime?

If you bothered to look, you may find that the government set up by the Constitution is not the one we have operating today. Yes the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Executive offices appear to be occupied, but what force of government actually reaches out and touches you? Almost always it is an administrative agency.

If you look, for example, at the Idaho Administrative Procedures Act in Idaho Code 67-5201(2) you will find the definition of “agency.”

It says: “Agency” means each state board, commission, department or officer...but does not include the legislative or judicial branches [or] executive officers...of the constitution of the state of Idaho in the exercise of powers derived directly and exclusively from the constitution...

This seems to say an agency does not include the constitutional offices of government or the exercise of powers derived directly and exclusively from the Constitution.

Since the constitutional offices are few and limited in their scope, our constitutional government could never be expanded to regulate and meddle in so many areas of our lives. It takes an administrative bureaucracy to do that. Agencies are essentially subcontractors of quasi-governmental functions in our current socialist age.

The pseudo-corporation/government that has been super-imposed over our constitutional government uses these agencies and their army of agents just as King George did against the colonists. Even our current King Clinton and many of his predecessors have turned the office of the presidency into an agency when he bypasses Congress and issues an executive order.

Remember, as we celebrate our “independence,” what those brave souls who signed the Declaration of Independence had to say about the king's administrative agencies:

“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers, to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

Do you pay your taxes to an agency? Get permission to drive on “your” highway from an agency? Do agencies issue your permit to build a house, or operate a business, or own a gun?

Is how you farm, or log, or hire a worker controlled by an agency? Does an agency regulate where you get your water from and where it goes to when you're done with it?

Isn't just about everything you use, buy, or own controlled by an agency? Does the Constitution create any agencies?

Do you see how we once free and brave Americans now cowardly submit to innumerable intrusions into our private lives by a host of agencies?

Have we become so placated by our plentiful possessions that we are no longer willing to pledge our lives our fortunes and our sacred honor to the cause of freedom?

Our Liberty Teeth

Guns used to be common and acceptable in American culture. It is, after all, how we won our freedom from the English king and his agents.

Guns are the liberty teeth of the Bill of Rights. Now, with all the socialist programming in the media and our government schools, our liberty teeth have been cast aside as an old set of dentures.

In 1967 a 14-year-old boy could buy a gun and ammunition from the Sears catalog, have it mailed to him, and pick it up at the post office. This was a normal event in our culture. Did we have a youth gun violence problem then?

Then “our” Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, which was translated nearly verbatim from Hitler's Gun Control Act of 1938 (it worked for him).

Did we have an epidemic of school shootings or gang violence before the 1968 Gun Control Act? Has it kept guns out of the hands of criminals? Has the increasing barrage of gun control legislation made our world any safer? Will more laws improve our society?

Did any member of Congress who voted for the 1968 Act read the Second Amendment, especially the constitutional command “shall not be infringed.”

The fallacy of democracy

In a Democracy, public opinion means everything. A Democracy, by definition is mob rule. We however live in a Constitutional Republic where individual rights are secured by our Constitution and cannot be tread upon, no matter what public opinion thinks would be good for us.

The socialist media has gone into overdrive with the gun debate as if public opinion on the issue actually matters. The Second Amendment, if Congress would bother to read it, prohibits any law which would “infringe” on the right to keep and bear arms. Legislative action and public opinion in our republic are moot on the issue of guns in America, no matter what some socialist do-gooder thinks.

We can have opinions about the gun issue. We can wish the criminal acts of gun violence go away. We can hope that the socialist controls on guns would solve the problem of criminal misuse of guns (even though history shows the opposite is true). But, our constitutional republic secures our individual rights against the “democratic” mob rule of the “there oughta be a law” socialist politicians.

Yes, within the limits of its own private island, the District of Columbia, Congress has the power to “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever,” but not in a state. The power to regulate guns in a state is not a power granted to Congress. That's what the Supreme Court told Congress in the 1995 U.S. vs. Lopez case, but Congress just didn't listen.

Congress had used its presumed power under the commerce clause to control guns within a state. The School Zone Gun Ban Act Mr. Lopez was convicted of violating was based upon the presumption that since guns are made in one state and sold in another, they are regulatable as interstate commerce. What a stretch of the congressional mind.

The problem with tyrants is they just don't listen

Our legal remedies to the redress the assault of agency intrusions include letter writing to our legislators, voting, suing in court for our rights, or petitioning the executive officers or the agencies themselves.

Sometimes these work, but usually they require a monumental effort to obtain any success. More often we fail to achieve any justice when we appeal to corrupted courts; executive officers and legislators cannot afford to help ordinary citizens because they are indebted to the lobbyists who represent the special interests that purchased their offices for them.

When these civil processes fail to achieve the desired result we are then left with a choice between accepting failure or applying the final solution -- the Second Amendment solution.

Perhaps we are too morally guided to use the Second Amendment solution as our founders did with great success. Like the death penalty, it has seen too little use in our time to have any real effect. What percent of murders result in a conviction and the carrying out of a death sentence? Less than one percent? Not hardly a deterrent to the murderer who knows the odds of receiving final justice.

Our tyrants in office and their agents in administrative regimes similarly have not recently been reminded that the Second Amendment applies to them.

Thus, they go on regulating to their hearts content as we suffer intrusions and taxation beyond anything our Founders ever tolerated. And daily we submit!

Just before the American Revolution Samuel Adams said: “If ye love wealth better than freedom, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel, nor you arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you. And may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Remember as you celebrate the Fourth of July, it's about real bullets, bombs and rockets with more than just a red glare. It's about those who dedicated their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor and were willing to give their all to the quest for freedom.

Are you willing? Do you deserve to be called an American?

Mr. Heath is a logger from Santa who really wants to know why Americans are willing to put up with unconstitutional agents who now regulate everything.