My ignorance(AKA, how was I allowed to graduate High School?)

[Bostonterrier97]

It has been my experience in life: that whenever a certain class of people who have a great deal of power, have special priviledges such as being able to get a CCW for off duty purposes when ordinary citizens can't. And when these same people are mostly immune from being themselves arrested, charged and convicted for breaking the law that they are supposed to be enforcing and when the organization in which these people work for make it very difficult to fire them.

Well..most people in such a situation would end up rather arrogant and contemptous of ordinarly folk.

To me: that pretty much sums up the BATF and the FBI.
Local police are easier to deal with because, they don't have as much power and their are frequently citizen review boards and the Sherriff ever mindful of being re-elected will dump an officer if there is an enormous amount of bad press.

(Otherwise..the blue line will tighten up and protect their jobs..errr..themselves..)

With bills and a mortgage, most people are very concerned about their job security. Making it easy to fire them and prosecute them if they violate the law or constitution, would put a stop to most of the abuses.

But this is NOT going to happen. Because it is in the interests of higher officials holding elected offices to have corrupt law enforcement agencies..(so long as they are "managable")

Our situation in this country is like Orwell's Book: Animal Farm.
Where there is a steady growth in Totalitarianism.

 

[Jim March]

I'm not as afraid of "unfiltered information" as others here, and I'll explain why.

I've produced a number of articles on history and law without a degree in either. By all the normal rules, you'd expect what I create to be utter crap.

BUT I also heavily cite either original sources such as court cases or peer-reviewed scholarly journals, or exact scans of official documents I've obtained. Here's a good example:

http://www.ninehundred.com/~equalccw/practicalrace.html

"A Practical Guide To Race And Gun Control" tracks the effects on the RKBA that the 14th Amendment either has or should have had. It's written in the general style of a law review article. If you follow the links to source material, you'll find every single point fully supported, and it was also reviewed in early form by Clayton Cramer who supplied the text of the critical People vs. Rappard case. (That document is a very important read if you haven't checked it out, it's basically a sequel to Clayton Cramer's "The Racist Roots Of Gun Control" (1995) and starts with a link to that peer-reviewed paper. It takes Clayton's history work and asks "OK, cool, if that's the case then what's the modern courthouse effect we can achieve with this info?".)

In other cases, I've published material based on my own personal research (usually involving the California Public Records Act, this state's version of the FOIA). A good example is "Zen And The Art Of CCW Abuse", at:

http://www.ninehundred.com/~equalccw/oaklandzen.html

In this paper, can you be *certain* that I haven't doctored the scanned documents? Well no, except that I'm using my real name, I've been spotted in public talking about this scads of times, and if I were to screw this up I'd get caught by the grabbers in a heartbeat and lose my credibility. And it's easy to get caught, one phone call to the Oakland PD records will tell you more or less what's up.

The same basic ideas apply to everything you see online, if it's fact versus opinion.

Now, are there people too stupid to understand this (either in reading it or writing)? Hell yes. But that doesn't affect those of us who are doing it right (reading OR writing).