I guess what I want to know is this: when the supposedly inalienable right to keep and bear arms becomes tied or linked somehow to a D.U.I. conviction, is it going to be another one of these *retroactive*, *ex post facto* things, like the Lautenberg Amendment?
The last time I tried to drive home under the influence was 13 years ago this past Saturday, December the 27th. (I mean December 27, 1990, thirteen years and four days ago.)
I have lived almost my entire life in one of two adjacent "dry" counties. Most of the surrounding counties are "dry" too. I mean a sort of de facto Prohibition has lingered on for seventy long, gray, dreary, cheerless years of "always winter but never Christmas" hereabouts. At that time the nearest legal bar or package store was actually in an adjacent *state*, about 12-14 milles from my residence.
I'm not going to waste a lot of time pleading this or that excuse. It was a foolish thing that I did, and I'm glad no harm was done to anyone but me. But I *do* mean to say that, no, there was no accident of any kind, no schoolbuses full of children were wiped out, no one was hurt, and nothing got bent (except the law).
All I'm saying is this: I paid my fines and court costs, I sat out my time in jail, and I did *not* drive during the year-plus period during which my license to drive was revoked. I walked, or bummed rides (and, in an example of the immutable Law of Unintended Consequences, I found myself in *far* worse and more crooked company because of it -- I mean I actually got only *too* well acquainted with the worst elements of local society, sort of what passed for a small town's "underworld," so that I was actually in some danger from some of these characters; also, my mother was hovering near death for much of 1991, and I was rarely able to go to her; at that time the law made no exceptions for such things.)
As far as I'm concerned, my debt to society was paid, in full. I don't believe that there are or ever can be any sort of morally or constitutionally acceptable grounds now for reaching back into the past and imposing *new*. retroactive, ex post facto penalties on me or anybody else in a similar situation. I only did a week in jail. But I would have *gladly* done a year rather than retroactively lose my right to defend myself *for life*.
I would *never* have pleaded guilty if such a thing as permanent loss of gun rights had been any part of the prescribed legal penalties at that time.
I would have demanded a jury trial, and fought it tooth and nail, and appealed any conviction all the way to the Supreme Court if I could. (For one thing, I didn't believe I *was* guilty as charged: I'd had five beers in a period of eight hours, which, according to those weight-and-time charts, should have left me well under the the .010 BAC which was the legal limit then. I only pleaded guilty after it became clear that it was going to cost me about *three times as much* to contest the charges as to just plead guilty, even though I wasn't, really, and that there was no more than a 50/50 chance of success, at best. It is almost unheard of for *anyone* (except LEOs and judges) to beat a D.U.I. charge where I dwell. The region is controlled in an almost theocratic way by real, live anti-alcohol crusaders. There is a real, serious fanaticism about it here that simply has to be experienced to be believed.)
This sort of thing is not acceptable. MADD and their fellow-travelers are skating real close to pushing this thing too far.
"No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." -- United States Constitution, Article I, Section 9.
Look it up, if you don't believe me. And remember your oath. Article I, Section 9 is nowhere near as subject to misinterpretation by black-robed Sophists as the 2nd Amendment. It is *very* clear. Honor your oath, and refuse to enforce anticonstitutional, un-American laws. They couldn't print enough money to hire me to enfoce anti-Constitutional, un-American laws, and not because I think "The Job" is all that extraordinarily dangerous. (Actually, it is my understanding that a convenience store clerk, a cab driver, a logger, a miner, a railroad worker, or a high-rise construction worker is a good deal more likely to be killed on the job than a policeman.)
Offered a choice between being a jobless, homeless derelict (also a more hazardous "occupation" than police work, I'm told) and taking a job requiring me, as acondition of my employment, to violate my fellow Americans' rights, and my own sworn oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, against all its enemies, *domestic* as well as foreign, I'd take my place on the park bench with a botle of Thunderbird in a paper bag, rather than *become* one of the Constitution's domestic enemies.
"EX POST FACTO LAW, in criminal law, is a law enacted or decreed after the commission of an act, and which retrospectively changes the legal consequences of that act. Ex post facto laws may declare criminal an act not subject to punishment at the time it was committed; *or they may retroactively increase the punishment of previously committed crimes*."
-- Funk & Wagnall's Standard Reference Encyclopedia, Volume 9, p. 3356 (emphasis added)
"Misrule breeds rebellion."
Maimaktes