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Your Right to Self Defense

Thread ID: 19163 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-07-16

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Blond Knight [OP]

2005-07-16 02:25 | User Profile

For what it's worth, get yourself a copy of "Dial 911 And Die". It cites laws in all fifty states that you have no "right" to expect police protection.

[url]http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy83.html[/url]

The Right to Self-Defense

by Wendy McElroy by Wendy McElroy

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On June 27, in the case of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, the Supreme Court found that Jessica Gonzales did not have a constitutional right to police protection even in the presence of a restraining order.

By a vote of 7-to-2, the Supreme Court ruled that Gonzales has no right to sue her local police department for failing to protect her and her children from her estranged husband.

The post-mortem discussion on Gonzales has been fiery but it has missed an obvious point. If the government won't protect you, then you have to take responsibility for your own self-defense and that of your family. The court's ruling is a sad decision, but one that every victim and/or potential victim of violence must note: calling the police is not enough. You must also be ready to defend yourself.

In 1999, Gonzales obtained a restraining order against her estranged husband Simon, which limited his access to their children. On June 22, 1999, Simon abducted their three daughters. Though the Castle Rock police department disputes some of the details of what happened next, the two sides are in basic agreement: After her daughters' abduction, Gonzales repeatedly phoned the police for assistance. Officers visited the home. Believing Simon to be non-violent and, arguably, in compliance with the limited access granted by the restraining order, the police did nothing.

The next morning, Simon committed "suicide by cop." He shot a gun repeatedly through a police station window and was killed by returned fire. The murdered bodies of Leslie, 7, Katheryn, 9 and Rebecca, 10 were found in Simon's pickup truck.

In her lawsuit, Gonzales claimed the police violated her 14th Amendment right to due process and sued them for $30 million. She won at the Appeals level.

What were the arguments that won and lost in the Supreme Court?

Winners: local officials fell back upon a rich history of court decisions that found the police to have no constitutional obligation to protect individuals from private individuals. In 1856, the U.S. Supreme Court (South v. Maryland) found that law enforcement officers had no affirmative duty to provide such protection. In 1982 (Bowers v. DeVito), the Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit held, "...there is no Constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen."

Later court decisions have concurred.

Losers: anti-domestic violence advocates and women's groups, such as the National Association of Women Lawyers, failed to establish that restraining orders were constitutional entitlements. If they had succeeded, the enforcement of such orders would have been guaranteed by due process. Failure to enforce them would have been grounds for a lawsuit against the police, a precedent that local officials feared would flood them with expensive litigation.

Public analysis of Rock v. Gonzales has been largely defined by these two opposing positions.

A third position cries out: Given the court's position that the police are not obliged to protect us, responsible adults need the ability to defend themselves. Thus, no law or policy should impede the access to gun ownership.

Responsible adults – both male and female – have both a right and a need to defend themselves and their families, with lethal force if necessary. If domestic violence advocates had focused on putting a gun in Jessica's hand and training her to use it, then the three Gonzales children might still be alive. After all, Jessica knew where her husband was. Indeed, she informed the police repeatedly of his location.

Of course, the Gonzales case – in and of itself – presents difficulties for the use of armed force by private citizens. Would the same police who believed Simon Gonzales was not dangerous have believed Jessica to be justified in picking up a gun to protect her children from him? Would the police have charged her for use of a weapon? Regardless, these sticky debates would probably be taking place in the presence of three living children and not three dead ones.

Nevertheless, most anti-domestic violence advocates strenuously avoid gun ownership as a possible solution to domestic violence. Instead, they appeal for more police intervention even though the police have no obligation to provide protection.

When groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) do focus on gun ownership, it is to make such statements as, "Guns and domestic violence make a lethal combination, injuring and killing women every day."

In short, NOW addresses the issue of gun ownership and domestic violence only in order to demand a prohibition on the ability of abusers – always defined as men – to own weapons.

That position may be defensible. But it ignores half of the equation. It ignores the need of potential victims to defend themselves and their families. Anti-domestic violence and women's groups create the impression that guns are always part of the problem and never part of the solution.

The current mainstream of feminism – from which most anti-domestic violence advocates proceed – is an expression of left liberalism. It rejects private solutions based on individual rights in favor of laws aimed at achieving social goals. A responsible individual holding a gun in self-defense does not fit their vision of society.

In the final analysis, such advocates do not trust the judgment of the women they claim to be defending. They do not believe that Jessica Gonzales' three children would have been safer with a mother who was armed and educated in gun use.

The clear message of Gonzales bears repeating because you will not hear it elsewhere. The police have no obligation to protect individuals who, therefore, should defend themselves. The content of state laws does not matter; by Colorado State law, the police are required to "use every reasonable means to enforce a protection order." The Supreme Court has ruled and that's that.

In the wake of Gonzales, every anti-domestic violence advocate should advise victims – male or female – to learn self-defense. They should lobby for the repeal of any law or policy that hinders responsible gun ownership.

The true meaning of being anti-domestic violence is to help victims out of their victimhood and into a position of power.

July 15, 2005

Wendy McElroy

Blond Knight

2005-07-16 02:47 | User Profile

On a related note, this article decries the direction of law enforcement in recent years, and offers some worthwhile sugestions.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ [url]http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=6669[/url]

July 15, 2005 Hunting for Cops by William S. Lind

Until very recently, an article titled "Hunt for Cops" might have described a city's effort to recruit more police officers. Sadly, that was not the message of an article in the July 3, 2005, Cleveland Plain Dealer, my hometown newspaper.

"Residents of the capital of the poor and chaotic Russian province of Dagestan have come to call it 'the hunt for cops' – more than two years of bold and brutal attacks on police. … 26 police officers have been killed in gun and bomb attacks this year alone."

What is true in Dagestan is also true in Iraq: Iraqi police are being hunted and killed in large numbers by the Iraqi resistance. As one commentator recently put it, it is safer to be a door-to-door Bible salesman in Peshawar than to wear a police uniform in Baghdad. And it is happening in some American cities. Police officers are being killed – assassinated, really – not because they get in the way of some bank robber but because they are symbols of the state. A Fourth Generation fighter, usually a gang member, simply walks up to a police cruiser and shoots a cop.

It is easy to understand why Fourth Generation entities would go hunting for cops. The police are not only the first line of defense in the state's attempt to maintain order (remember that maintaining order was the state's original raison d'etre), they are an irreplaceable line. If the police fail and the military has to be called in, the state has probably lost. Why? Because troops, who are trained for combat, not police work, usually act in ways that alienate the population they are supposed to protect. That in turn further undermines the legitimacy of the state, which is both the origin and the goal of Fourth Generation war. This dynamic is one of the principal reasons why the legitimacy of Iraq's American-installed government remains tenuous at best. It continues to depend on troops, many of them foreign, rather than being able to rely on police to create and maintain order.

It is less easy to see what police should do about Fourth Generation threats, to themselves and to the communities they are supposed to protect. Two approaches do not work. The first is brutality. The aforementioned article reports that

"The roots of the hunt (for cops) reach back to fall 1998, when Dagestani authorities moved to fight back against growing criminality by forming a special police division to combat kidnapping. …

"The division was under pressure to show results, and its officers started employing torture regularly to squeeze confessions out of suspects, said an officer in the regional prosecutor's office who spoke on condition of anonymity."

A second approach that does not work is militarizing the police. This is a phenomenon which we already see too often in American police departments, where citizens increasingly face police officers in fatigues, helmets, and body armor, armed with automatic weapons. Such units are needed, but they must remain largely invisible to the public. Why? Because their intimidating appearance separates the public from the police, while effective police work demands the closest possible relationship between the police and the public.

This points to what is probably the most effective approach police can use against Fourth Generation elements: community policing. Community policing relies on police officers who always work the same neighborhood, often on foot. They come to know that neighborhood intimately, including many of the people who live there. With the help of the people they protect, they can quickly see any abnormality and move to nip it in the bud. And just as the cop protects the neighborhood, the neighborhood protects its cop. A close, working relationship between citizens and police faces any Fourth Generation fighter with a very difficult problem.

Cops, most of them anyway, understand this. Several years ago, I gave my standard Fourth Generation of Modern War talk to a police conference in Salt Lake City. Whereas maybe 10 percent of a military audience gets what I am saying, 90 percent of the cops got it.

Unfortunately, American government, on all levels, does not get it. The Bush administration has effectively destroyed the best community policing program in the country, the Police Corps. State and local governments are happy to spend money to militarize the police, but they regard community policing, which is labor-intensive, as inefficient. They remain content with the L.A. model, where police isolated in cruisers respond to calls. If the goal is to preserve order, by the time a call comes, it is too late. Order has already been undermined by an incident that community policing might have prevented.

When it comes to Fourth Generation war, an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure.