Original Homeland Security and Pass ID Card, Part III: The last word.

June 20, 8:15 AMLA Gun Rights ExaminerJohn Longenecker

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The question in this series is, How does the National ID Card impact the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms? It all rests in whether we lose not privacy but sovereignty over our own public servants.

Under color of national security, Americans are again asked to make further sacrifices for the indolence of the government to do as we asked from the beginning. This was where they stopped being servants so they could be masters. They ignore the People, they let adverse conditions (crime) deteriorate, then demand compliance with the surrender of more and more of our authority and sovereignty. You get an instinct about this, and what validates it all is that you are the sovereign and the State is not. You are right because the electorate is the Boss, and the State is the servant. What we are really witnessing is the servant who wants to be Boss.

The National ID Card against the will of the people is stating outright that it suspects all citizens. This is Red Flag Clue #1. It gives away that they suspect opposition. When it comes to applying high technology to surveille citizens — all citizens — it is what I call electronic stalking. The stubbornness itself against the sovereign reveals their true intentions and disrespect for the true authority in this country.

This is not a privacy issue, it is a sovereignty versus tyranny issue. It is crystal clear by dint of the fact that it keeps coming back with another sales pitch after we have smelled danger and said No to the first one. That's Red Flag #2. Persistence. DHS admits as much when it says that so many states rejected it. I admit as much when I say it's the same old Pig with Lipstick.

Trusting an immense database is a trap. It is a tool for the Centralization to win every dispute now. Forget privacy, forget inconvenience; it's now all about confusion in the evidence. When confusion or ambiguity surfaces, as it usually does from such large databases, it goes to the advantage of the State every time. It is becoming increasingly conventional to accept the data from a database as the final word in more and more cases. It some technologies, it is wise and very helpful. In others, the very existence of such a database is predatory. Maybe the evidence doesn't lie, but its interpretation is flawed and seizes opportunities that go against conscience. When the database gets the last word in the issue, no matter what evidence you may introduce, then the State gets the last word.

As I say often, this is not where crime is fought, which is a giveaway of the intentions of greater centralization. Like too many programs, it won't really do what it's supposed to do, and it replaces what did work before: the People as the Original Homeland Security; this is where crime is fought. Suppressing a community's ability to fight crime by freezing the citizen out of the process is not where crime is fought. Disarming the citizen is where fighting crime is stopped. Red Flag Clue #3.

The citizens armed with knowledge, authority, and lethal force to back it all are the Original Homeland Security on many levels, and we have a lesser need for such databases than the State might insist. After all, it is too absentee when needed most, it prevents very little really, and is far too sweeping in suspicion to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

How do we observe that Original Homeland Security at work? When go-nowhere, predatory programs are declined from the git-go and our refusal is respected. Armed citizens can fight crime better than absentee after-the-fact policies, so there goes your anti-crime argument. When citizens discern the useful tools from the dangerous programs, then sovereignty is operating as the ultimate Homeland Security.

When citizens are smart enough (knowledgeable and authoritative enough) to see a boondoggle coming, they ought to be free to refuse it, and when the first National ID Card (the Real ID Act) was rejected as it was, that ought to be the end of it.

The greatest danger of any National ID Card in any form at all is how the database will have the last word in any question, and with the bureaucracy's track record of mistake, abuse and retaliation, the People have reason enough to reject all sorts of immense databases. When No is not a No, you have Red Flag Clue #4.

A lot of the rejection of the National ID Card must have come from millions of non-gun owners, since it was whole state legislatures who were the thrust of the rejection overall. They now sense the same danger gun owners have been predicting for non-gun owners for decades. It's not the cost in dollars that the people rejected, it's the cost in respect for our authority over the State, our suspicions of their motives, and our insistence that we remain forever Independent from the foibles and peccadilloes of their unreasonable governance. Governance can be most reasonable, but it has to be done our way to be reasonable, or it becomes tyranny in 2009.

Anyone who says that a citizen is anti-government or who remarks that some people may believe they are not governed in the way they feel they ought to be governed, you see the smug system's true intentions of being masters instead of servants. Red Flag Clue #5. Smugness over the people.

It would be a lot less costly all around if officials simply did as the electorate asked, as the Constitution limits them to do and nothing more. We can unseat the officials, but the officials cannot unseat us. . . though they are trying.

The authority we give to officials rests with the office, and when the individual leaves office, he/she does not take their authority with them, for it remains with the office. The authority of the people rests with the people always, and it is always superior to that of the officials.

The Pass ID is a betrayal of one of our deepest oaths and beliefs even to create a database which will ultimately have the last word in any disputes summoning the giant database to even have a say. It is a false witness who never swears to tell the truth and the whole truth. It is not evidence which might speak for itself, but subject to the whim of the State in their very selective content or omission. This is a greater horror and perhaps even a terror if new crimes are defined to make it impossible for the citizen to know what is illegal and what isn't between registration and recall of the data. What's missing from a database can be just as incriminating as what is in the database.

Assurances have proven to mean nothing, as each unwelcome program gets its nose in under the tent. Safeguards which were already in place are the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution, and it's now an offense to invoke these. These amendments have been pushed aside, especially the second one. The people who sell the Pass ID are the same who advised law enforcement to suspect right wing extremists who invoke the Bible, the Constitution and even summon the law. Morality, professional integrity, the average reasonable person doctrine and conscience would no longer be a guide; servants perceptions of the citizen shift further and further away from who is really the sovereign here.

The emergency service and 9-1-1 have their burn-out. Education has its habit of listening to ‘expertz' more than parents, and bureaucrats send bulletins to police who return them as wrong for their overall mission. Too many powerful bureaucrats view their constituents as troublemakers who interfere with what they're trying to do. The trouble is not with the sovereign, it's with what the bureaucrats are trying to do against the will of the people.

A giant database by its very enormity will have a prestige it has never earned. It could never be wrong or ambiguous, right? But the potential for abuse by taking the data as the last word over any other evidence or testimony portends a nightmare of conformity purely on an or-else basis.

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John Longenecker is author of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns.  

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