Put Not Your Trust in Federalized Sheriffs
"You look
depressed."
"I was
lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence."
"You lost
that some time ago. If you've only just noticed, it can't have been
very important to you."
Exchange between
Thomas Cromwell – the Machiavellian Lord Chancellor of England –
and Richard Rich, an ambitious functionary who had sold his soul
in a buyer’s market, from A Man for All Seasons.
"I will
not enforce an unconstitutional law against any citizen of Smith
County," insisted Sheriff Larry Smith. The sheriff wants his
constituents to believe that he would refuse to participate in a
federally mandated gun grab, or permit one to be carried out by
federal officials within his jurisdiction. Yet ten days before Smith
offered that assurance, his office had taken part in an
early-morning SWAT rampage throughout East Texas in which 73
warrants were served as part of the federal government’s patently
unconstitutional war on drugs.
During a December
2011 campaign debate, Smith said that he wanted to "invest
more resources" – that is, redirect wealth plundered from the
productive – into a "Drug Task Force," and insisted that
under his administration the Sheriff’s Office would embrace a "Task
Force mentality" in dealing with law enforcement issues.
The problem
with the mindset Sheriff Smith was extoling should become obvious
once it’s understood that the German term for "task force"
is einsatzgruppe.
By their actions many multi-jurisdictional task forces in contemporary
America are increasingly faithful to their
historic pedigree.
Smith’s devotion
to narcotics task forces might be the residue of his early law enforcement
career, which included two years as a special agent for the Drug
Enforcement Administration – an
agency that could be considered the mentally deficient stepchild
of the CIA, which is the world’s largest narcotics syndicate.
Twenty years
ago, an ATF einsatzgruppe launched a murderous raid against
an isolated religious group at Mt. Carmel outside Waco. The warrant
they were enforcing was clotted with falsehoods. The investigation
that produced it was haphazard. Its target, Vernon Howell -- aka
David Koresh -- was suspected of trivial violations of federal firearms
regulations, and had indicated his eagerness to cooperate with ATF
investigators to clear the record.
If an arrest
were to be carried out – and one was neither necessary, nor justified
– it could have been performed during one of Koresh’s frequent solitary
jogging expeditions, or one of his routine visits to town. Instead,
the ATF – seeking a dramatic, high-profile enforcement action to
generate headlines for the scandal-plagued agency – staged a paramilitary
assault on the religious sanctuary. They did so even though the
raiders had lost the element of surprise, and when they arrived
at Mt. Carmel they opened fire on the building despite the fact
that an unarmed Koresh had confronted the stormtroopers with his
hands up, pleading for them not to shoot.
Four ATF agents
were killed during that Sunday morning raid. Their deaths were utterly
unnecessary, and entirely well-deserved: They were attempting to
murder innocent people, and the would-be victims acted within their
rights in using deadly force to defend their homes against that
assault. The criminal clique that had sent the ATF to attack the
Davidians sent a larger contingent to lay siege to their residence,
and eventually arranged for the holocaust that annihilated 76 people,
including seventeen small children.
Like most gun
owners in Eastern Texas, Smith can remember where he was the morning
of April 19, 1993, when the Mt. Carmel refuge went up in flames.
He was on the scene as
an agent of the ATF, which he had joined in 1989. Smith believes
that the initial ATF raid on the Davidians was justified, and that
the entire operation was at least a partial success. It’s doubtful
that his assessment is shared by many gun owners in his jurisdiction.
Larry Smith
is among dozens
of sheriffs who have gone on record in opposition to the Obama
administration’s impending firearms restrictions. All of them have
promised to intervene to protect their counties from federal tyranny.
And all of them are active collaborators in the same.
Kieran Donahue
was sworn in as the
new Sheriff of Canyon County, Idaho on January
14. Three
days later he joined the ranks of "refusenik sheriffs"
by promising
not to implement any federal gun policy at odds with his responsibility
to "uphold the Constitution."
Unfortunately,
that resolute statement of principled defiance was fatally undermined
when Donahue – in the same press conference -- expressed his willingness
to continue his office’s collaboration in the federal "war
on drugs" and displayed his indecent eagerness to accept new
federal subsidies to deploy deputies to guard public schools as
soon as the funds are available.
Wendy Olson,
the official assigned by the regime to act as the federal
regime’s legal sub-commissarina for Idaho, has said that her
office will fully comply with new federal firearms mandates. She
pointedly noted that the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office – like most
others in the country – has officers who are cross-deputized to
serve on federal einsatzgruppen. During last year’s campaign
the
future sheriff proudly boasted of his work as an "undercover
officer" with the FBI-supervised METRO Violent Crime and Gang
Task Force.
"In these
changing and difficult economic times it is a great benefit to have
all law enforcement agencies working together in order to share
costs and resources," insisted Donahue. Those words will almost
certainly come back to haunt Canyon County gun owners when – not
"if" – the Feds make it clear that they are willing to
"share resources" only with sheriff’s offices who are
on board with the gun grab.
Donahue insisted
on playing coy about the fact that he’s for sale. Fresno County
Sheriff Margaret Mims was shameless. She told
the local ABC affiliate that while
she will not enforce unconstitutional gun laws, she also "backs
the added funding for local law enforcement, especially in schools."
Her office
has a huge budget, a small
but significant
portion of which is derived from proceeds seized through a
federally supervised "asset forfeiture" program.
In 2009, Mims
was the "local" face that was pasted onto the Obama administration’s
"Operation
Save Our Sierra" marijuana crack-down, which was personally
supervised by federal Drug War Commissar Gil Kerlikowske. This campaign
involved 300 personnel from local, state, and federal agencies –
including military pilots that flew Black Hawk helicopters over
targeted areas. The manpower and hardware were deployed in a mission
best described as militarized horticulture. It’s quite easy to see
how the personnel and assets used against "illegal" plants
could be employed to confiscate "illegal" firearms in
the future.
A
few years ago, when Mims and her department faced
a $4 million budget deficit, the Fresno County commission had
to scrounge up $10.6 million in plundered funds to prevent layoffs
in the Sheriff’s Office. That money most likely won’t be available
next time Sheriff Mims wants to avoid handing pink slips to her
deputies. It’s quite easy to imagine a scenario in which her federal
supervisors will introduce her to a new variety of alchemy -- converting
confiscated "illegal" firearms into federal subsidies.
Four sheriffs
in Oregon have announced their opposition to the renewed campaign
to disarm citizens. Among
them is Sheriff Brian Wolfe of Malheur County (who, in the interests
of full disclosure, is a childhood friend). In
a letter
to Vice President Biden, Sheriff Wolfe declared: "I believe
that the Constitution stands above all laws and executive orders
of this Country. I want to be very clear that no one employed on
our team at the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office will enforce or
support any laws or executive orders that are not consistent with
the Constitution of this great land."
If only those
inspiring words were consonant with Sheriff Wolfe’s actions. Like
every other sheriff in the country, Brian Wolfe violates the Constitution
on a routine basis.
Last August,
the Malheur County Sheriff’s Department casually announced that
it had found several small marijuana gardens during a two-week aerial
surveillance operation conducted with the help of the National Guard.
Acting as the
department’s official stenographer, the Argus
Observer newspaper reported that Sheriff Brian Wolfe will
now "contact property owners and acquire search warrants if
needed." Warrants would not be necessary, Wolfe observed, if
the property owners consented to the searches. The Sheriff pointed
out that the plants may be part of legal medicinal marijuana operations,
or could have been planted without the owner’s knowledge or consent.
At this point an actual journalist would have asked Wolfe why his
office was conducting warrantless aerial searches of private property
without probable cause. After all, the Sheriff has admitted that
none of the property owners was a criminal suspect.
The Malheur County Sheriff’s Department spends part of each summer
arresting marijuana plants – that is, dispatching its
SWAT team to barren locations in rural Oregon to clear out patches
of marijuana.
Sheriff Wolfe
insists this is necessary to "protect the public," which
is more acutely threatened by the unconstitutional, paramilitary
operations of his own department. Wolfe’s department spends a great
deal of time seizing contraband and prosecuting people who possess
it. That experience will prove quite useful when – once again, not
"if" – the Feds decide to treat legally owned firearms
as illicit contraband.
There isn’t
a single county sheriff’s office in the country that hasn’t compromised
itself by accepting federal funds, and collaborating in unconstitutional
federal enforcement operations. They’ve long since lost their innocence,
but are pretending that they’ve just noticed that fact.
Nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizes the Feds to prohibit
the consumption of narcotics or any other substance. Indeed, last
time the Feds undertook a campaign of national prohibition, they
had to change the Constitution in order to do so. Unless they’re
investigating charges of treason or counterfeiting, sheriffs should
not collaborate with the Feds – and in such circumstances the Feds
themselves should be treated as the primary suspects.
If you take the nickel, you take the noose. If a sheriff’s office
receives so much as a farthing of federal funding, it will be subject
to federal mandates. That principle was underscored about seven
years ago in the case of Josh
Wolf, a 24-year-old video blogger imprisoned for refusing to
turn over a portion of footage he shot of tumultuous street protests
during the G-8 summit in San Francisco.
The Feds claim
that Wolf, who
spent two-thirds of a year in prison on civil contempt charges,
possessed footage of a police car being set on fire. Wolf maintained
that he didn’t have the material the Feds were after, and that under
California's very liberal journalist shield law, he wasn’t required
to turn over his confidential, unpublished material. A Federal District
Court Judge ignored Wolf's argument and incarcerated him in a detention
center in Dublin, California for contempt.
The alleged assault on a San Francisco police car would be a municipal
matter, and the California shield law is obviously a question of
state law. Why was this dealt with in a federal court?
As Time
magazine pointed out: "The Feds say they have jurisdiction over
the case because the police car is partly U.S. government property
since the SFPD receives federal anti-terrorism money."
Note well that the Feds didn’t claim that the regime paid for the
specific cars that were reportedly destroyed, only that the
police department had been subsumed into the federal law enforcement
apparatus because it had received some quantity of Homeland Security
funding.
What this means, in principle, is that any police agency that receives
a dime of federal Homeland
Security money is effectively an appendage of the Department
of Homeland Security (or, to use the appropriate German expression,
the Heimatsicherheitsdienst).
This is obviously true of municipal police departments, which are
innately
illegitimate paramilitary bodies in no way accountable to the
public they supposedly serve. We’re invited to believe that local
elected sheriffs are different – at least where the incipient gun
grab is concerned.
 The
ranks of the refuseniks will continue to expand, and they will feed
gun owners a steady diet of bold talk about their willingness to
interpose on
behalf of their constituents if the Feds come for their guns.
Some of them may be sincerely committed to do so. But until they
stop actively collaborating in existing federal abuses, why
should we assume they would be willing to take the side of the public
against the Feds when the Regime decides to come for our guns?
By
Way of Illustration...
... we see
the following
act of felonious assault and kidnapping by Citrus County, Florida
Deputy Sheriff Andy Cox, who threatens to murder innocent, law-abiding
gun owner. It took less than two seconds for this this cretinous,
foul-mouthed tax-feeder to drop the pose of superficial geniality.
His first instinct, on learning that this harmless man was armed,
was to threaten to murder him, because he had been indoctrinated
in the belief that Mundanes simply cannot be permitted to bear arms.
When assessing
the credibility of "constitutional sheriffs" as protectors of the
right to bear arms, bear in mind that sheriffs are politicians and
administrators; the patrol officers in their departments are people
like Andy Cox.
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