"We're Fighting A War": Civilian Disarmament and the Martial Law Mindset

Bonfire of the liberties: Chinese police incinerate "illegal" guns.

Denver resident Shawn Miller is accused of several acts of criminal violence. On one occasion, he and an associate beat a pedestrian, leaving the man with a broken knee and a permanent physical disability. In a second assault, Miller and another buddy beat a disabled Iraq war veteran so severely --using both fists and clubs -- that he briefly "flat-lined" as EMTs treated him.


The facts in those cases are not disputed, yet Miller has not been charged with a crime. However, he is being sued by Jason Anthony Graber, one of his victims. In light of Miller's documented history of criminal violence, the plaintiff's attorney has demanded that the assailant not be permitted to bring a firearm while being deposed.

Miller protests that this is an unconscionable act of "oppression." With the aid of the Denver City Attorney, Miller -- an Officer with the Denver Police Department -- has filed a petition with the U.S. District Court seeking a "protective order" allowing him to be armed during the depositions.

The Department's Operation Manual requires that officers be "armed at all times" -- a provision that poses some interesting challenges for officers who choose to bathe, assuming that there are any who do. "Requiring a uniformed or non-uniformed police officer to disarm when he is compelled to give a deposition at an attorney's office, or at any other unsecured location, presents a significant officer safety issue," whines an affidavit provided by Lt. Dikran Kushdilian of the Denver PD.

Attorney David Lane, who is representing Graber, quite sensibly insists that some precautions must be taken in deposing people who are "defendants because they have acted illegally and violently toward others in the past."

The Denver Police Department has a well-earned reputation for brutality and corruption, and Lane has deposed more than a few abusive cops, and those proceedings "can get very contentious. When I'm cross-examining cops about their misconduct, past and present, they get angry, and I don't wish to depose angry people who have a long history of violent behavior while they're wearing a gun strapped to their waist."

Lane demands that the deposition take place in a setting in which neither side is armed. Denver's municipal government demands that the examination should take place at the federal Courthouse, where Miller and other officers in similar cases "would surrender their weapons to the custody of the U.S. Marshall [sic], and would be unarmed during the deposition."

In other words, it's not quite the case that Denver officers have to be "armed at all times"; the critical issue is the preservation of the government's monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force in all circumstances. Lane should counter Denver's demand by offering to permit Miller to carry his firearm to the deposition, while specifying that he and his associates would also be armed. The official response to that counter-proposal would be instructive.

Leading lambs to the slaughter: "Toy Gun Bash."

While Lane most likely wouldn't choose that approach, he is sensible enough to recognize that the State's agents of armed coercion are the most dangerous element in society, and prudent enough to act on that understanding.


Owing to the tireless efforts of the organs of official indoctrination, a large portion of the public assumes that the opposite is true, and as a result can be easily convinced that only those commissioned to commit violence on behalf of government can be entrusted with the means to do so.

A splendid example of this deadly agitprop is offered by the "Toy Gun Bash," which was first inflicted on Providence, Rhode Island seven years ago by the criminal clique running the municipal government.

Each year around Christmastime, children living in Providence are compelled to line up and feed their toy guns into the maw of the “Bash-O-Matic,” a device described by the Boston Globe as “a large, black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.” In exchange for feeding their toy guns into this recombinant monstrosity, each child is given a substitute toy that is deemed to be suitably "non-violent." They are also forced to endure a harangue regarding "the dangers of playing with guns, real or fake."

Maintaining the monopoly: Burning confiscated guns.

 The Providence event, continues the Globe, is "a version of the gun buyback program in which adults trade firearms for gift certificates.”

In fact, gun “buyback” programs are a form of what Dr. Edward J. Laurance of the UN’s Register of Conventional Arms calls “micro-disarmament” — or, more to the point, civilian disarmament.

The expression “buyback” assumes that government has a monopoly on the use of force, and that only duly authorized agents of officially sanctioned violence should be permitted to own guns and other weapons — and thus the State is taking back from Mundanes a privilege to which they’re not entitled.

Gun “buyback” and turn-in programs are a common feature of military occupations, both here and abroad. U.S. military personnel in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan have employed that tactic (as David Kramer notes, this helps the occupiers to acquire a useful hoard of “drop guns” that can be used to frame innocent people  as “terrorists” or “insurgents"). The same approach was used to disarm American Indians as they were cattle-penned on reservations.

Over the past decade, UN-aligned activists in several countries have staged events in which guns confiscated from civilians have been destroyed, a ritual sometimes called the “Bonfire of the Liberties.” This is in keeping with UN-promoted dogma (expressed most forcefully in its 2000 agitprop film Armed to the Teeth) that the only “legal” weapons are those “used by armies and police forces to protect us,” and that civilian ownership of firearms is “illegitimate.”

The UN’s campaign for civilian disarmament -- which, just like matters of national disarmament, is assigned to the world body's Office for Disarmament Affairs -- was inaugurated in 2000 as part of the “human security” agenda promoted by then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In late 1993 and early 1994, Annan -- who at the time was head of the world body’s “peacekeeping” operations -- presided over the disarmament, and subsequent annihilation, of roughly 1.1 million Rwandans.

Annan was actually an accessory before the fact to that genocide: Informed in early 1994 of the impending slaughter by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer commanding UN peacekeeping troops, Annan ordered Dallaire to pass along his intelligence to the same government that was planning the massacre.

Dallaire, who had been ordered to disarm the future victims, was ordered not to raid the government arms caches that were later used to carry out the murder rampage.

Most of the killing was carried out by machete-wielding mobs acting as government subcontractors. But it would have been impossible to butcher hundreds of thousands of armed people, nor would the mobs have been able to round up and annihilate the targeted population without the active support provided by the regime’s armies and police forces — you know, the armed agents of state violence who were there to “protect” those who were hacked to pieces.

Children should learn what happened in places like Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda (as well as places like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee) when people willingly surrendered their guns to their rulers — but a government school classroom is no place for lessons of that kind.

One of the cases used to promote the Toy Gun Bash in Providence actually underscores the reliably fatal consequences of a government monopoly on force. The Globe points out that as children were herded toward the Bash-O-Matic, they were told the cautionary tale “of a 14-year-old boy who police nearly shot after they confused his air pistol with a real gun.” For rational people, this incident illustrates the compelling need to disarm the police, rather than swipe toys from innocent children.

The same schools that use DARE programs to recruit children into the Pavlik Morozov Brigade consistently force psychotropic drugs on children who display unfortunate symptoms of non-conformity. This principle applies to the issue of firearms: In the name of “Zero Tolerance,” children are routinely punished for such supposed offenses as bringing toy “weapons” to school (including -- I am not making this up -- candy canes), improvising them from school supplies, or even drawing pictures of guns, yet they are routinely encouraged to write letters to members of the imperial military who are “serving our country”  by killing people who have done us no harm.


Those who insist that religion has no place in the government-run school system aren’t paying attention: The entire purpose of “public” education is to catechize youngsters in the worship of the Divine State. Rituals like Providence’s Toy Gun Bash serve a sacramental function; they are the equivalent of a child’s first communion in the government-sponsored church of collectivist self-destruction.

 While the little lambs are taught to be docile, submissive sheeple, the Regime is honing the lupine instincts of those supposedly tasked to protect them.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal recently described how recruits at the Metropolitan Police Department Academy are indoctrinated into perceiving the world as a 360 degree battlefield, where they are perpetually under siege and should be prepared to employ lethal force without hesitation.

"When you put that badge on, there are people who want to kill you," intoned Officer Wil Germonsen, who -- like a large and growing number of local police officers, has a military background.

The Review-Journal plays an extended riff on the familiar, fatuous, and entirely false assumption that law enforcement is a spectacularly dangerous occupation:

"After some time on the street, the recruits will never see the world the same way. They'll always be on guard -- carrying a gun on duty and off, checking out fellow shoppers at the grocery store, thinking about those worst-case scenarios while having dinner with the family. It's like a switch that flips on and never turns off...."

"I believe every single recruit here, when they put that badge on, they are warriors," insists Germonsen. "We're fighting a war."

What this means, of course, is that the state-created armed tribe to which Germonsen belongs is an army of occupation -- primed to kill, given broad discretion in the use of lethal force, and trained to consider all of us who don't belong to their tribe as potentially lethal enemies. Some way had better be found -- and pretty damned soon -- to de-fang those wolves in sheepdog disguise.  Meanwhile, it would be wise to do what we can to avoid placing ourselves at a potentially fatal disadvantage when dealing with those who belong to the Brotherhood of Sanctified Violence.

                                                     UPDATE: Bringing the War Home

"Many law enforcement officers called up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are finding it difficult to readjust to their jobs once home, bringing back heightened survival instincts that may make them quicker to use force and showing less patience toward the people they serve," reports the AP. 

A report compiled last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance "warns that the blurring of the line between combat and confrontations with criminal suspects at home may result in `inappropriate decisions and actions — particularly in the use of ... force. This similarity ... could result in injury or death to an innocent civilian.'"

The Imperial Military makes increasing use of Guardsmen and Reservists whose "civilian" job is domestic law enforcement, and domestic police agencies increasingly recruit from the ranks of combat veterans. As noted above, police recruits are being trained to consider themselves "warriors" on a battlefield, rather than peace officers. We really should dispense with the illusion that contemporary law enforcement is anything other than the domestic branch of a seamlessly integrated military apparatus. (h/t The Agitator.)

                                   Second Update: Seattle as a Battlefront

Courtesy of commenter QB we see the following video of 27-year-old Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk gunning down John T. Williams, an artisan who was carrying a carving knife and a block of wood. No more than four seconds pass between Birk's demand (it wasn't a lawful order, because Williams was threatening no one) that he drop the knife, and the first of several gunshots fired by the officer. The entire encounter lasted roughly eight seconds.

Williams had a troubled past, but was not known to be violent. He had some emotional problems and, most importantly, was functionally deaf -- which meant that he couldn't hear the demand that he drop his knife -- which was closed when photographed by crime scene investigators, despite Birk's claim that it was open at the time of the shooting.

A peace officer in this situation would have taken at least a little more time to resolve the situation without drawing his gun, let alone discharging it. But, as we've seen on numerous occasions, contemporary law enforcement officers are on a war footing, which means that their default setting is "overkill."

It's worth noting that one of the officers who responded to Birk's "shots fired" report tells him that he did the "right thing" -- even though the official review subsequently ruled that the shooting wasn't justified.

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"V" for Vigilante

For months, Ada County Sheriff David Updyke had been investigating a secretive group of armed extremists living at the periphery of his southwest Idaho jurisdiction. When an informant provided him with a membership list of the armed band, Updyke wasted no time. He obtained arrest warrants, organized a large, heavily armed strike force, and made a beeline for the Payette River Valley. 


The warrants were a ruse. Updyke wasn't planning a mass arrest; he was plotting a massacre. His quarry was a group of about two dozen law-abiding citizens who had organized a private "Vigilance Committee" under the leadership of an equable local farmer named William J. McConnell. 

William J. McConnell

Some of the Vigilantes had welcomed Updyke's election as Ada County's first sheriff in 1864, only to discover in short order that he was a predator, rather than a peace officer. Historian Randy Stapilus summarizes the matter quite tidily in his slender but fascinating book Outlaw Tales of Idaho: Ada County's new sheriff "was moonlighting as a stage robber." 

Updyke's inspiration was Henry Plummer, a New England native who carved out a criminal career that spanned several states and ran up a fairly sizeable body count. Swept into northern California just as the gold rush was waning, Plummer -- who was blessed with glibness and a certain facile charm -- was elected a town marshal. 

After gunning down two men for no defensible reason, Plummer spent a few years in San Quentin before being paroled and exiled from the state. News of mining opportunities in northern Idaho sent Plummer to Lewiston, which at the time was Idaho's territorial capital. He quickly fell into the company of thieves and rustlers and did a pretty brisk business in robbery until he was forced to flee to Bannack, Montana, where he once again sought out the company of the local criminal element.

Following a brief flirtation with local politics, Plummer found more honest work as a pimp. His business partner was a prostitute posing as his wife. This was a profitable arrangement until Plummer and his "wife," while visiting a saloon, encountered a man named Cleveland who knew of the ex-convict's dealings in California. Within a few days Plummer had killed Cleveland and forced the sheriff to flee, creating a vacancy he eagerly filled. 


Plummer moved with dispatch to make the most of his new position. As sheriff he was provided with detailed information about local ex-cons and criminal suspects, whom he treated as potential recruits for his road agent syndicate. He also was able to gather intelligence on potential victims. He used those assets to great advantage in arranging the October 1863 robbery-murder of Lewiston dry goods dealer Lloyd Magruder, who was one of five members of a pack train slaughtered by a team of Plummer's road agents at a camp in the Bitteroot Mountains. 

Magruder, who had made the trek from Lewiston to Bannack in order to sell goods to miners in Montana, made the fatal mistake of hiring some local help for the return trip. Plummer, who was aware that Magruder was headed back to Idaho with a large quantity of money, arranged for several of his thugs to hire on with the merchant. The robbers made off with an estimated $18,000 in gold dust. 

A few months later, a well-respected young rancher named Nicholas Thiebalt was murdered during another robbery carried out by a road agent gang. Puzzled and infuriated by the sheriff's apparent indifference to the onslaught, local ranchers created a Vigilance Committee and set out to find and punish the robbers. One of the perpetrators, a man named Erastus Yeager, informed the Vigilantes that Sheriff Plummer was actually the kingpin of the criminal syndicate. 


In January 1864 -- seven months after the road agent gang had begun its depredations --- Sheriff Plummer was marched up the steps of a scaffold he had built himself. Just before the noose was put around his neck, Plummer reportedly made a desperate final offer to the Vigilantes: "Give me two hours and a horse. I can bring back my weight in gold." He wasn't given the opportunity.


Sheriff Plummer's history is worth reviewing, since it eerily prefigured the career of Sheriff Updyke. While Plummer was busy organizing a criminal syndicate in Montana, his former colleagues in Lewiston drifted south. Once it had oozed its way into Boise, Plummer's old gang quickly congealed into a political elite.

Boise City, as it was called, was a fair approximation of Mos Isley Spaceport. In their book Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West, historians Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes describe the town as being in thrall to "a splendid assortment of murderers, robbers and tinhorn gamblers ... the offscourings of all the abandoned and worn-out mining camps in the Territory...." In other words, it had all the necessary ingredients to create the engine of misery called a "government."

Henry Plummer

As Augustine pointed out long ago, a "government" is simply a gang that "acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples," and then obtains supposed respectability  "not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity." 

In 1864, Plummer's old criminal syndicate followed that time-honored formula with admirable fidelity by taking control of Boise's Democratic Party apparatus and electing David Updyke to be Ada County's first Sheriff. 

Prior to the advent of state-imposed "civilization" in southwestern Idaho, crimes against persons and property were an occasional problem. The arrival of government law enforcement resulted in a tsunami-magnitude crime wave. 

Armed robbers, operating out of Updyke's livery stable and under his protection, preyed on stage coaches and plundered local farms. The syndicate also defrauded local merchants and businessmen by passing bogus gold dust -- lead shavings covered with a thin layer of gold. This racket was, in some ways, a frontier-era foreshadowing of the officially sanctioned counterfeiting carried on today by the Federal Reserve System: The gold dust fraud ring enjoyed the protection of the "legitimate" government, which profited from its crimes. 


William McConnell was among those who initially welcomed the arrival of "legitimate" law enforcement. His opinion changed abruptly after a horse that was stolen from his materialized in Updyke's stable. McConnell was forced to hire an attorney and spend two days in court to retrieve his stolen property, spending more in legal fees than the market value of his horse. 

As a weary and frustrated McConnell departed the courtroom, a gang of Updyke's "Roughs" taunted the mild-mannered farmer. His patience finally exhausted, McConnell confronted the gangsters and warned them that the next time one of his horses went missing, he would track down the thief and "there will be no lawsuit about it."


A few days later, McConnell and two neighbors discovered that five horses and four mules -- livestock worth more than two thousand pre-Federal Reserve dollars -- were missing. McConnell and his neighbors took off in pursuit of the rustlers, returning two weeks later with the missing animals and a few honorably earned battle scars. This was, for all intents and purposes, the Payette Vigilance Committee's first campaign. 

Updyke continued to abet armed robbery and shelter criminals. He refused to investigate crimes plausibly suspected to be the work of his political confederates. Practically the only attention law-abiding people received from their local sheriff was when he or his deputies would pay a visit to collect taxes -- a form of "legal" theft used to underwrite the local government's clandestine crimes.  

As Albert Jay Nock pointed out in his definitive work Our Enemy, the State, government doesn't seek to abolish or suppress crime, but rather "claims and exercises [a] monopoly of crime .... [and] it makes this monopoly as strict as it can." In principle, this means that the government must also claim a monopoly on the use of force, and treat as criminals anyone who would undermine that monopoly. This is why the most urgent priority for the Ada County Sheriff's Department was to eliminate McConnell's Vigilance Committee, once the identity of its leader became known. 

Updyke's crack-down was "to be conducted in legal form," observed Nathaniel P. Longford in his 1890 account Vigilante Days and Ways. However, "in making the arrest, Updyke and his posse proposed to shoot the leaders of the Vigilantes and screen themselves under the plea that they had resisted."

Thus it was that Updyke gathered a posse composed of "fifteen of the worst men in the Territory" and headed to Horseshoe Bend, where they were to join with another group similar in size and identical in composition before heading to the Payette River settlement. 


Sheriff Updyke's plan may have succeeded were it not for two critical developments. First, a Boise resident sympathetic to the Vigilantes learned of the plot: While Updyke's posse took a longer route to join up with reinforcements at Horseshoe Bend, the Vigilante sympathizer raced ahead to warn McConnell.  Secondly, Updyke's would-be allies in Horseshoe Bend failed to materialize. 

Thus when the Sheriff and his gang arrived at Payette River, they had lost the advantage of surprise and were outnumbered at least two-to-one. The surprised and frustrated sheriff was forced to parley with McConnell, and "was obliged to comply with all the terms prescribed by the Vigilantes," records Longford. 

"City of Rocks," near the scene of the Portneuf massacre.

McConnell and his men agreed to travel to Boise to answer the warrants, but they refused to surrender their weapons or be taken into Updyke's custody. With the help of legal counsel the Vigilantes were able to get the criminal complaints dismissed, leaving Updyke humiliated and vulnerable. 


A few months after the debacle in Payette River, a stagecoach bound from Montana to Utah was ambushed by a gang of "road agents" in southeast Idaho's Portneuf Canyon. Five passengers were murdered, and $86,000 in gold was taken from the coach. Stage driver Charlie Parks and a passenger who survived the attack made their way to Boise, where they another positively identified Updyke and a "Rough" named Brockie Jack as two of the robbers. Neither was ever prosecuted for the crime, and the gold -- which was marked and numbered -- was never found.

The Portneuf heist was Updyke's swan song as a career criminal. The same County Commission that had appointed Updyke moved to expel him. While they were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to placate an infuriated public, the commissioners -- who belonged to the same criminal band -- were probably more enraged that Updyke had been skimming from their take by keeping roughly $11,000 in tax revenues for himself. 

Updyke soon found himself behind bars, in the custody of the newly elected sheriff, John Duvall. After Updyke bailed himself out, allies on the County Commission arranged for one of his criminal cronies, a deputy named William West, to be appointed interim sheriff until the end of the year.


In February 1866, a conflict with local Indian tribes presented Updyke with another career opportunity: His old road agent network re-constituted itself as a "militia" and elected Updyke its "captain." Backed by the "full faith and credit" of the local government, Updyke's militia purchased horses and supplies on credit. By April, the crisis had passed without this valiant band of heroes seeing action.



"The expedition ran its course, and, like all expeditions of the kind, was barren of any marked results," reports Langford's history. Just as he had been reticent to remit the taxes he had collected as Ada County Sheriff, Updyke wasn't eager to return the supplies he had requisitioned for his militia; accordingly, he "cached a large portion of the stores on the Snake River for future use of his road agent band." 

One of the men who had sold horses to Updyke sued him for non-payment. During the trial, one of Updyke's lieutenants, a young man named Ruben Raymond, admitted under oath that the "militia" was simply a front for Updyke's criminal band. Within a few hours Raymond was murdered by one of Updyke's loyal henchmen, a man named John Clark.  

Unfortunately for Updyke, the sheriff's office was no longer occupied by his erstwhile comrade William West: John Duvall had begun his term a few weeks earlier, and since he owed no loyalty to the Updyke gang he couldn't see any reason not to keep Clark behind bars until he could be tried for murder. Things were going very badly for Updyke, who couldn't resist making matters just a bit worse by openly threatening to go on a murderous rampage if Clark wasn't released.


Rather than being freed, Clark -- or what was left of him -- was soon seen dangling from a gibbet constructed on the future site of the Idaho State Capitol Building. Worried about what Clark might have disclosed to Sheriff Duvall before being dispatched to eternity, Updyke fled Boise in the company of an ally named Jake Dixon.


For several weeks Updyke and Dixon were pursued by the Payette Vigilantes, who eventually overtook them in a cabin near Syrup Creek on the western slope of the Sawtooth Mountains. The following day their bodies were found swinging from a makeshift gallows.


A notice pinned to Updyke's clothing announced that the Vigilance Committee had tried the former sheriff and found him guilty of being an accessory and accomplice to numerous murders and robberies (including the Portneuf stage robbery) and of "aiding and assisting" murderers and other criminals while serving as Ada County Sheriff.

Unlike a government agency, the Vigilance Committee didn't seek out new rationales for its continued existence. Updyke's demise had a chastening effect on the criminal oligarchy that had propelled him into office. Once government-sponsored crime abated, the Vigilantes disbanded. After Idaho became a state in 1890, McConnell was chosen to represent the Gem State in the U.S. Senate. He was later elected the state's third governor. In 1895, McConnell's daughter Mamie married future senator William Borah. 

For those who understand the moral superiority of society's non-coercive sector, McConnell's political career is a bittersweet coda. His most valuable public service came as a nominal outlaw who employed defensive violence in order to protect life, liberty, and property from the criminal onslaught of the territory's "legitimate" government.

Like its counterparts in Montana and elsewhere, the Payette Vigilance Committee was  representative of the private "protective agencies" created by settlers, miners, and ranchers during the westward expansion to protect property rights and settle disputes. 


Admittedly, vigilante action, like any kind of applied violence, is problematic. As Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo points out in a recent essay for The Independent Review, one advantage of private protective agencies is that, unlike government entities, they don't claim "a legal monopoly on keeping order." Most frontier-era groups of this kind -- McConnell's Payette Vigilantes among them -- were created to confront criminal gangs who had been granted a limited franchise within that government monopoly.

"One of the most pejorative terms one can use in reference to law and self-defense is `vigilante," notes Dr. William L. Anderson, who teaches economics at Maryland's Frostburg State University. "Indeed, if one is called a vigilante, it is tantamount to being declared a criminal. Public officials, newscasters, and those in law enforcement solemnly tell us `there is no room in this country for vigilante justice.' Instead, we must wait for the `justice system' to work, and if it doesn't, well, that is simply a price we pay for having a free society."

However, continues Dr. Anderson, "the so-called threat from vigilante justice is like the threat we face from private companies delivering the mail or from home schooling: it undermines an established government monopoly." 

The innate danger posed by vigilantism is the temptation to dispense with the non-aggression principle and engage in "preemptive" action. This is why some Vigilante groups -- among them elements of Montana's Vigilance Committee -- ended up being assimilated into the the state's apparatus of official coercion. 

The November 1879 murder of Helena shopkeeper John Denn inspired the creation of a subterranean Vigilante group. Its identifying sign was the cryptic inscription "3-7-77," which began to appear on fences and walls around the city. 

Unlike the Vigilantes of 1864, those who organized in 1879 didn't focus on redressing officially sanctioned crimes; instead, they harassed and intimidated people suspected of being "bad elements," often using their enigmatic signature as a notice of banishment. 


Given that this latter vigilante group was little more than a gang of sanctimonious, opportunistic bullies, it's entirely appropriate that the legend "3-7-77" has been incorporated into the insignia of the Montana Highway Patrol. 


Honorable and peaceful men like William McConnell were driven to vigilante action by the besetting corruption and criminal aggression of the government that presumed to rule them.  Henry Plummer and David Updyke each ruled over a criminal fiefdom that was in many ways a microcosm of the malignant Robber State afflicting us today. To cite merely the most obvious example: The "road agents" employed by those "rogue sheriffs" are unmistakably the ancestors of the paramilitary "forfeiture gangs" employed by police agencies to plunder motorists and property owners today.


Many of the State's agents of wealth extraction are dispensing with any pretense that they are involved in protecting and serving the public. Modern analogues of Henry Plummer and David Updyke abound. It's not difficult to imagine circumstances in which the heirs of William McConnell would make their presence known as well.

Update: As If To Illustrate My Point ....

Police in Aurora, Illinois "forfeited" -- that is, stole under the supposed authority of "law" -- a total of $190,000 from residents Jose and Jesus Martinez on the pretext of a narcotics investigation. Neither of the brothers has a criminal record of any kind, and there is no evidence that they were involved in drug trafficking or possession. 

Officers working with a "road agent" syndicate called the North Central Narcotics Task Force had tapped the brothers' home telephone, and were keeping them under surveillance as drug suspects. The actual robbery took place when Jesus, during a traffic stop, made the mistake of consenting to a search of his vehicle. No drugs were found, but the police seized the cash and gave Jesus a worthless receipt. Within hours the stolen money had been turned over to the task force, which in turn delivered it into the hands of the Cheka (aka the Department of Homeland Security). 

Laundering the money in this fashion allows the police -- which will get a large cut, thanks to the federal "equitable sharing" racket -- to defy a court order demanding that it be returned to its owners.

The victims claim that the money was family savings earned from a remodeling business -- but that detail is inconsequential: This was a literal, undisguised act of highway robbery that differs not one whit from the crimes committed by Henry Plummer, David Updyke, and their minions. (H/T The Agitator.)

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"Find Me The Man, I'll Find The Crime"

A menace to society, seen here in his lair: Telecommunications professional, inventor, and law-abiding gun owner Gregory Girard (above, left) hard at work to support his wife and son, along with the tax-fed parasites who plunder his paycheck. Below, left: The photograph released by police to demonize Girard after a squadron of stormtroopers dragged him away to jail on spurious firearms-related charges.

All of the serious charges against Gregory Girard have been dropped, yet he remains behind bars and denied bail until the people responsible for putting him there can devise a suitable "crime" to justify his imprisonment.

This task shouldn't tax the malicious creativity of the Salem County Prosecutor, given that Girard, a resident of Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts, is a middle-aged male gun owner and unreconstructed "right-wing extremist."

As Josef Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria put it: Find me the man, and I'll find the crime.

In early February, police learned of Girard's unremarkable gun collection -- invariably described as an "arsenal" or "cache" by the statist stenographers who call themselves local journalists -- when his wife, a psychiatrist, told them that she was afraid to return to their home following an argument.

On the following day the police were contacted by the ATF, which relayed a report from someone described as a "friend" of Girard's wife who supposedly saw hand grenades in the condo.

At the time, Girard held a Class A firearms license and had dutifully registered all of his weapons. A "license," of course, is a document that redefines an innate right as a government-granted privilege, and its purpose -- as Girard would learn -- is to simplify the process of revoking that "privilege" at the whim of a government functionary. Glenn McKiel, Chief of the Manchester-by-the-sea Police Department, revoked Girard's license and called in the Cape Ann Response Team (CART) -- the Homeland Security State's local paramilitary affiliate -- for a joint assault on Girard's home.

Would you trust your life to these guys? Well, Gregory Girard didn't think it was a good idea, either. Below, right, we find an example of the Massachusetts State Police Tactical Team conferring the blessings of order on an unarmed, outnumbered, helpless protester.



Among the specific concerns related to the police by Girard's wife was his supposedly alarming view that martial law is imminent.


Since it is unacceptable for people to believe that government agents will carry out paramilitary raids to confiscate firearms, a paramilitary force was sent to Girard’s home to confiscate his firearms.

Stormtroopers from CART, the ATF, and the state police surrounded the condo, evacuated two units, and then called Girard to invite him outside. Seeing his home surrounded by a ring of heavily armed, black-clad bucketheads clearly possessing malign intent, Girard understandably declined the invitation. After the police barged into his home, Girard put up no resistance, beyond insisting that his "hand grenades" were innocuous and perfectly legal smoke grenades.

The first media accounts of the incident were a bulimic recital of pre-chewed soundbites fed to the press by the police.

Girard’s collection of “approximately twenty” firearms — in fact, he owned 11 rifles and two handguns, all legally purchased and duly registered — suddenly became an “an alarming, nearly military-grade stockpile.”

In similar fashion, Girard's food storage, flashlights, batteries, and camping gear were also described as "military-style items."

I suspect that the only reason Girard's home wasn't similarly transformed into an "armed compound" is the fact that it was a multi-family condominium.

In addition to the firearms, Girard’s arms cache reportedly included “four police batons” he had “illegally” acquired.

Clubs in the "right" hands: Blackshirts employed by the Massachusetts State Police deal with a "suspect." This image, incidentally, is from the SERT's webpage; they're proud to offer "service" of this kind.

That’s right: Civilian disarmament is not limited to “gun control,” but includes “club control,” as well.

In the hands of the armed servants of the tax-feeding class, tear gas, pepper spray, and batons are considered “less-than-lethal” weaponry. But such items become dangerous implements of violent disorder when they fall into the hands of mere Mundanes. Accordingly, Girard was charged with four counts of possessing “an infernal device” and four counts of possessing a “dangerous weapon.”

Girard also reportedly converted his third story into an “illegal indoor firing range,” complete with what was described as an “illegal ballistic plate” (apparently possession of metal plates of a certain thickness is now impermissible without explicit government permission).

“We feel our community is safer having this kind of weaponry off the street,” intoned a police spokesman as he performed the familiar post-raid gun-grabber liturgy.

As it happens the “weaponry” in question was never on the “street” to begin with -- and its mere possession by Girard wasn't a crime even in a positivist sense.

No charges were ever filed relating to Girard's "arsenal" of firearms. The charges of owning "infernal machines" -- five "explosive" hand grenades -- have been dismissed because, as he had patiently tried to explain to the armed marauders who abducted him, the objects in question were perfectly non-explosive gas grenades. The charge of "carrying dangerous weapons" was also vacated, since Girard was never accused of carrying a knife or baton outside his home, and no state or local ordinance forbids private ownership of knives or clubs.

The only remaining charges -- discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a dwelling, and two counts of illegal possession of silencers -- are made of the same alloy of dishonesty and prosecutorial desperation.

Rebecca Whitehill, Girard's attorney, has pointed out that while firing a weapon inside one's own home might be unwise, it is not a criminal offense under state law. She also insists that the objects described as "silencers" are in fact flash suppressors, private ownership of which is not prohibited by state law.

Even if he is found "guilty" on the remaining charges, Girard wouldn't face prison time. Yet Judge Richard Mori of the Salem District Court refuses to grant bail.

Prosecutor Michelle DeCourcey, the Beria disciple heading the case against Girard, insists (as paraphrased by the Salem News) that "the facts of the case have not changed, only the charges." What this means, assuming that it means anything, must be that the prosecution is following the Stalinist formula of finding a "crime" to fit the facts. And Judge Mori is willing to facilitate this fraud by keeping Girard behind bars, because Mori "still"considers Girard "to be a danger to the community."

Stolen property: A police official fondles some of the firearms his department pilfered from Gregory Girard.


Like assistant DA DeCourcey, Judge Mori is employing Soviet legal concepts to justify undisguised violations of Girard's individual rights.


Specifically, they are treating him as what the Soviet penal code called a "socially dangerous" person -- a designation used to justify summary punishment of political dissidents and others deemed enemies of the state, whether or not they were charged with an actual criminal offense.


More than a decade ago, the state government of Connecticut enacted a “law” permitting state agents to confiscate firearms from people suspected of “dangerous” tendencies — a variation on the Soviet idea of pre-emptive punishment of “socially dangerous persons.”


Almost exactly a month after Girard was kidnapped and his gun collection was stolen by the local police, David Pyles of Medford, Oregon endured a similar assault. Shortly before dawn on March 8, a mob of heavily armed police -- two SWAT teams, officers from two local police departments, sheriff's deputies from two counties, and troopers from the Oregon State Police -- ringed Pyles' home and demanded his surrender.


Pyles had recently made a wise and timely investment by purchasing two handguns and an AK-47 rifle. Shortly before Pyles bought the guns -- something he had long planned to do, but hadn't been financially feasible until he received a tax refund -- he had been put on administrative leave by the Oregon Department of Transportation.


This convergence of events led police to categorize Pyles -- without evidence of criminal intent or derangement -- as a "disgruntled employee" planning retaliation of some kind against his ODOT supervisor. Thus they demanded that he submit to a mental health evaluation -- an ominous echo of the Soviet regime's habit of forcing dissidents to undergo psychiatric confinement. They also seized his firearms for "safekeeping."


"They woke me up with a phone call at about 5:50 in the morning," Pyles told Reason magazine.
"I looked out the window and saw the SWAT team pointing their guns at my house. The officer on the phone told me to turn myself in. I told them I would, on three conditions: I would not be handcuffed. I would not be taken off my property. And I would not be forced to get a mental health evaluation. He agreed."


The negotiator, being a police officer, did what comes naturally to people in that profession. He lied.


"The second I stepped outside, they jumped me," continues Pyles. "Then they handcuffed me, took me off my property, and took me to get a mental health evaluation."


Within a few hours Pyles had been discharged from the hospital. He never saw the inside of a jail cell. The local police -- most likely in reaction to a nation-wide spasm of outrage triggered by their Orwellian persecution of an innocent gun owner -- returned the firearms, albeit not before lying to him again by claiming that he would have to undergo a second "background check."


All of this, according to Sgt. Jeff Proulx of the Oregon State Police, was a successful exercise in "proactive" police work. Stalin and Beria would undoubtedly agree.


Note: In the original version of this essay I mistakenly referred to Mr. Girard's Massachusetts carry license as a "federal firearms license." My thanks to commenter OldEasterner for catching and correcting this error.

Obiter Dicta

During the past week I've been busy finishing the manuscript of my next book, the working title of which is The Blood-Dimmed Tide: Reflections on the Rise of the Robber State. It's a collection of essays, only two of which were published here. Stay tuned for further details.


Yesterday I had the privilege of participating in the annual Patriots Day commemoration on the steps of the Idaho State Capitol in Boise. The video of that event will be available soon (you'll have no trouble recognizing me; since I'm not running for anything, I was the only speaker who didn't wear a suit). Yesterday's Pro Libertate Radio broadcast dealt at length with the meaning of Patriots Day and the escalating campaign to vilify and criminalize those of us determined to preserve the principle of self-ownership.

Tune in each weeknight at 6:00 Mountain Time (7:00 Central) for your daily injection of unfiltered anti-government outrage, courtesy of Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!