Erosion in Nature and of US Citizens Rights are really the Same

The parable / story of the turtle and the hare is applicable to many situations - one reason that makes it an oft repeated example. Going fast as a jack-rabbit can cause you to lose while going slow and steady wins the long term race.

 

Erosion is a matter of scale. On a small creek right after a flash flood you can see the effects immediately as the banks give way. On the bottom of a river bottom as it empties into an ocean the individual sand particles that builds up over time it undetectable on a daily basis but wait a few years and the channel is now 6 deep instead of 16 feet deep.

 

When it comes to rights of citizens and what they can - and mostly cannot - do is also being eroded away on a daily basis but is seldom detectable. Laws are constantly being put onto the "books" prescribing punishment, or elimination of rights, for a very specific crime or situation. Sounds good. This would be fine but the sheer number of variations on a "crime" in some cases amounts to dozens of items - often things that have to occur even for a crime to even be committed - that a single crime performed spawns from five to several hundred charges against a person. The idea is of course to ensure that the person is convicted of something - and the sheer number of charges levied against them will ensure that. The same logic is true as they add in incremental restrictions on what people can do, can go, with what, how long, who they must tell etc. Miss any one item and you could face dozens of charges on one "instance" but with many variations.

 

This is the method that gun restriction advocates are taking, propose little things that “make sense” in isolation and they rack up so many restrictions and rules for every possible situation over a period of time so that eventually they will achieve their goal that no individual will be able to own a weapon of any kind for sport or defense except Government law enforcement and military personnel. Who of course will follow without question orders given to them since they have their OWN rules. This is the way Attorney General Gonzales is trying to permanently ban people from ever owning a firearm with some of his proposed rules to ban people from owning guns, ammo, having it even in a place where they reside based on his whim (or any AG that follows) - forever - with no oversight, no appeal, no review, and no right to even find out who recommended you be denied rights to own a weapon. And this could then easily be used to ban people forever from flying, traveling on a plane, bus, train etc - with no appeal. It would follow a logical progression that is someone is banned from owning a weapon - they are "dangerous" - then they should be banned from the public transportation system for the same extended reasons. Then they should be banned from being around the public at all since they are dangerous.

 

Every dictatorship bans guns, bans gathering, restricts what people can say or do, travel, and there is never an appeal of what is ordered. The US is going down this same path legally, just like what NAZI Germany did in the 1930s. Passing laws, legally, denying rights to people. NAZI elected government representatives all properly voted upon these laws in a democratic method, then changed the laws to restrict more, legally, then voted away rights of people, legally, and so on down the path to where in a true legal sense everything that Germany did to Germans and others during WW II were technically LEGAL under their system. If you had tried to prosecute any German under their laws for war crimes you could not. Everything they did was LEGAL under their system. Shooting hostages - perfectly legal and with lots of legal and historical precedence to do so. When the war was won we created new laws - crimes - and then tried them using them and of course there was no challenge since as prisoners they had no rights to challenge the laws passed which were used to punish them!

 

When you hear people vehemently rally against gun restrictions is due to the long term effect each new "sounds good" law has as each builds upon the previous to erode away the rights.

 

In Oregon there is a law that no firearms can be within 1000 feet of a school. With the way schools overlap and are spread throughout an area a person having a weapon in their own house could be charged with a few thousand crimes since they could count every schoolchild as a possible victim if you took your weapon out on your front porch and wanted to clean it in the sunshine. Portland Oregon now considers your front porch and yard the same as "public property" for all laws and you have all the rules / laws / ordinances / permits that any public street, park, stream does for use - and mainly non-use - on your own property - and all the crimes. You have no free speech rights on your front porch - nor you roof (they ban any advertising, banners, campaign statements any speech, drawings, diagrams, anything on all building roofs too!)

 

You may elect a person, but the people who write the RULES that are used to enforce a single line in a bill report is not responsible to the electorate. The person in charge of a department is appointed, held accountable to no one, create the rules based on what they are told, and there is NO APPEAL to the rules they publish. They cite the law and the you have to overturn the law and they may remove just 1 rule that affected you leaving the rest all in place. Then they create new rules (which are created to prescribe how to enforce the law) to still do the same thing using different words and procedures.

 

When you start seeing how a 1 line "law" passed by any governing body evolves into a few thousand pages of codes created to enforce that law you can see why people become passionate about stopping the very start of any idea.

 

A common example of rule / code / ordinance bloat that anyone can relate to concerns building codes. Cities did not enact building codes on their own, insurance companies pressured them to do so since they had started selling lots of life insurance and wanted to collect premiums but never want to pay out. The easiest way to ensure that insurance is never paid out to victims is to prevent fire and building collapses from occurring killing people. So they got buildings codes to be passed that keep upping the "safety" requirements for all buildings so that insurance sold to people / companies lowers the risk to insurance companies thus making the possibility of fire and other items from occurring to such a low state that they can make even larger profits. The same is true for insuring buildings, and even the everyday car. Note: It was the insurance industry that tested cars for crashes so they could figure out how much premium to charge. Getting cities to raise the code on buildings allows them to collect insurance with little chance of ever having to pay anything out.

 

The basic mantra that you have to watch out for is:  "it is for your own safety" and when they state it is for the "safety of children" really watch out - it means that you just lost another freedom in the USSA - United Socialist States of America.