Prejudice and bigotry is not the sole province of the police, citizens are guilty too

By Seth Richardson

The Gazette’s new “Data Geek” Perry Swanson has taken on the important subject of the effects of race on law enforcement arrest decisions. In his April 27th article, Swanson outlines the statistics in Colorado Springs. The most significant statistic is that while blacks make up only 7 percent of the population, they account for 20 percent of arrests.

The pertinent question of course is whether or not blacks are committing more offenses than whites or Hispanics, or whether they are being arrested at a higher rate than whites because of their race? The statistics superficially suggest that officers, when initiating contacts, are racially profiling blacks, which is hardly an unknown law-enforcement phenomenon. Of course the term “racial profiling” itself is a loaded one, and carries a good deal of baggage that it may not warrant.

What would add a good deal of credibility to these statistics would be a comparison of convictions (or plea bargains) by race. Swanson points this out in his blog, but not in the article. He also points out the important question of what percentage of arrests of blacks versus whites is the result of officer-initiated contacts. It would also be interesting to see a statistical comparison of arrests of blacks by black police officers versus white police officers.

What’s important is not how carefully police scrutinize the conduct of any member of the public, because when you’re in public, the police have both the right and the authority, and indeed the duty to scrutinize you, within strict constitutional limitations of course; what’s important is whether you are engaged in illegal activity or not. Those who do not engage in illegal activity have nothing to fear from lawful police scrutiny. If you don’t want the police to be interested in what you’re doing, don’t do things that the police find interesting.

Do you get nervous when you see a police officer parked on the shoulder of the highway? Many people do because they know they are speeding. Do you become nervous when you see a police officer on the street? If so, why? And what sort of attitude do you exude if the officer approaches you to speak to you? Are you friendly, cordial and helpful, or are you hostile, angry and confrontational?

Experience tells police officers that those who are hostile, angry and confrontational often have something to hide, irrespective of their race, which makes the officer interested in finding out if that might be some illegality. It’s their job to do so, so one can hardly blame them for taking an interest in persons who show physical and emotional signs of guilt. They wouldn’t be good police officers if they didn’t pick up on such subtle clues of possible wrongdoing.

Unfortunately, the race issue is a place where guilt by association can skew the normal physiological reactions of an individual, which creates a feedback loop of increasing hostility and suspicion. And I’m not talking about guilt by association of blacks by police officers; I’m talking about guilt by association by blacks against police officers. If racial profiling of blacks by police officers is a problem in most big cities it’s as likely to be a result of institutionalized, cultural anti-police biases and open hostility to law enforcement on the part of blacks as it is racism on the part of police officers. This aspect of the problem is very often overlooked.

It’s important to note that a police officer’s response to evident postural and attitudinal hostility may have nothing whatever to do with racism and everything to do with a finely honed instinct for survival and an equally finely honed ability to sense that something isn’t right about an individual. While it may be true that police officers sometimes demonstrate heightened caution when dealing with blacks, that heightened caution may be the result of experience with hostile attitudes manifested by blacks.

Police work can be a life-or-death occupation and survival can depend on properly judging the imminence of potential threats. Making a mistake by underestimating a potential threat can be fatal, so we must allow some reasonable latitude to officers in how they act based on prior experience, and we must each do everything possible not to escalate the perceived threat level when dealing with the police. Observing the reactions of black police officers during interactions with other blacks can be highly instructive in this regard. One might say that for most police officers there are only two colors; blue and not-blue.

It could be racism, of course, as it too often has been on the part of police in the past, and it’s important to distinguish between experiential reactions to observable behavior and internalized beliefs by the officer about blacks in general that may constitute racism. Racism, you see, has a very specific definition, one that’s worth repeating: Racism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. So, in this particular context, unless the particular police officer can be identified as holding the belief that blacks are inferior because of their race, racism is not the proper term to use.

It may be that a particular officer is prejudiced or bigoted against blacks, but that is again is different from individual or institutionalized racism. It is important to identify officers who hold prejudiced or bigoted attitudes about any group, minority or otherwise and to weed them out of the department as quickly as possible, and it is the duty of the command structure to carefully investigate and take quick and decisive action against any police officer who manifests such prejudices. Such people cannot be tolerated in law enforcement and they endanger everyone by their presence.

But what’s just as likely is that additional scrutiny of blacks by police is related to the historical and cultural animosities towards police by blacks that manifests itself in behaviors that police officers find suspicious. This is not to say that these behaviors are entirely unjustified, given the long history of very real oppression of blacks in major cities across the nation by police. Such institutionalized discrimination has been the subject of countless investigations and remedial programs and many problems remain on the law enforcement side of the issue. However, it is equally important to acknowledge and address unwarranted hostility and confrontational attitudes by blacks towards police if we hope to create a community where law abiding people of all races have a comfortable and cordial relationship with their law enforcement officers.

Much work remains on both sides of the cultural divide between blacks and the police, and the efforts must be aimed at the deeply held prejudices and bigotries of both groups. It is wrong to blame only the police for these difficulties. Everyone has to accept their share of creating an atmosphere of hostility and animosity between citizens and police, regardless of race.

Prejudice means to form an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge or an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race or their supposed characteristics. Bigotry means an obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one’s own belief and opinions, with narrow-minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them.

The police are our public servants. They are there to assist and protect us, and while they owe us a duty of honesty and even-handed enforcement of the law, we owe them a duty of respect and cooperation for the difficult job they do. Let us recognize that our police, as a class, are too often the subjects of prejudice and bigotry themselves, and let us all strive to judge every individual police officer on his own merits, weeding out the bad ones and respecting and supporting the good ones.

© 2009 Altnews

Expedience and cost-cutting through plea bargaining is immoral

By Seth Richardson

Justice is always costly, and its wheels grind slowly. We know this and accept it as a necessary part of civilization. But a prosecutor should reduce no person’s life or liberty, neither the accused nor the victim, to a financial calculation or a matter of expedience.

As it stands however, too often access to justice comes down to whether or not the prosecutor can find a plausible (or even not so plausible) reason to charge the defendant with several crimes in order to induce him to plead to a lesser charge, thus saving the cost and trouble of prosecution. That’s not justice, that’s expedience.

Plea-bargaining is a miscarriage of justice in every respect. And it all too often leads to innocent people pleading guilty in order to avoid harsh penalties for crimes they did not commit. If we, as a society, cannot afford to prosecute each and every violation of the law while respecting the rights of the accused in full, then we should not be prosecuting such laws at all. Selective prosecution and plea-bargaining are too often used as tools of oppression and discrimination against the ignorant, poor and socially disadvantaged. And in the obverse, it allows the cunning and well-heeled guilty to escape just punishment for their crimes merely through the threat of costly and time-consuming trials.

The calculus of justice must be based on the severity of the crime, the strength of the evidence against the accused, and the needs of society to be protected against that individual in the future. If the prosecutor cannot economically and socially justify a full and fair trial for a particular defendant, then the prosecutor must elect not to prosecute at all. Better yet, if the economic burden of a particular law is too great because of the large number of people violating it, it’s worth considering whether the law should exist at all. If there is a shortfall in judicial funding, then all the prosecutor has to do is ask us for more money and abide by the budgetary restrictions we place upon him. It’s up to the public to decide how much justice they can afford, and a society will have precisely as much crime as it is willing to tolerate.

Our legal codes are stuffed with petty, niggling laws to a degree that makes it impossible for any individual to go through life for a single day without violating some law. Many of these laws do not protect society against palpable harm; they are little more than revenue generators, to be wielded like a blunt instrument against the small and powerless by the mighty in an exercise and aggregation of naked power and control. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nowhere does power pose a greater danger to life, liberty and property than when it is in the hands of a prosecutor, whose decisions are absolute and whose liability is non-existent. Prosecutors are absolutely immune for their actions, no matter how egregiously they may abuse their authority. The only recourse is to unelect them, but that’s small comfort to those already wrongfully convicted or coerced into pleading guilty out of fear to a crime they did not commit.

This is not to say that our local prosecutors are corrupt. I see no evidence of this. But wherever power lies, corruption waits, hiding in the crevices like mold, waiting for the right environmental conditions to spring to life and infect everything around it. So it is our duty as citizens to keep a close eye on those in power and to limit those powers where necessary, to inoculate the system against corruption to the greatest degree possible, consistent with the duties we lay upon our elected officials. Eliminating the plea bargain is one way of reducing the danger of miscarriages of justice and stemming corruption before it begins.

Defenders of plea-bargaining will make the argument that the entire justice system will grind to a halt if plea-bargaining is disallowed. Perhaps it will, but only if those who are responsible for deciding which cases to prosecute choose to make it happen by wasting public resources prosecuting victimless crimes and cases that neither serve any legitimate need for justice nor protect the public against any real harm. Such arguments for expedience must be rejected because fundamental rights are at stake.

We should not give the prosecutor a motive to engage in coercive misconduct. By being allowed to threaten someone with multiple counts and every vaguely associated crime he can think of in order to induce a plea by a person who, by law and by our fundamental societal beliefs, enjoys a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the prosecutor makes his job easier, keeps his record of convictions spotless, and enhances the judicial system’s budget.

But if the crime is serious enough to warrant any prosecution at all, then the prosecutor must be compelled to try that case before a jury of the defendant’s peers each and every time, without regard for the costs involved, or the profit to be had, and without suborning and engaging in perjury before the court.

And that is exactly what happens when a defendant is coerced into pleading guilty to a lesser crime or even unrelated offense. Both the defendant and the prosecutor must stand before the judge and perjure themselves by falsely swearing to negotiated untruths. Such routine violations of the prosecutor’s oath of office debase our system of justice, which depends for its credibility upon the adherence to oaths and honesty. And too often such institutionalized and cavalier disregard for the truth leads prosecutors to abuse their discretion and their authority.

Justice is a harsh taskmistress. She is blind to all but the evidence, and if the prosecutor cannot prove the defendant guilty beyond all reasonable doubt based on the evidence, then the defendant must be freed. And there is no way to meet that burden of proof without a trial. This heavy burden of proof requires careful attention to the details and expertise in collecting, evaluating and presenting evidence, which is as it should be. To allow the police and prosecutors to be sloppy and slipshod in expectation of a plea bargain endangers us all. It is better that ten guilty men go free than that an innocent man go to prison.

Justice requires more of us than expedience, and the evidence of falsely accused persons who plead guilty and languish in prison as a result of prosecutorial coercion and misconduct increases every day as more and more innocent people are released based on exculpatory DNA evidence.

Ban plea bargains and let justice prevail, though the heavens fall.

© 2009 Altnews

Police can no longer routinely rifle through your car for no good reason

By Seth Richardson

For 28 years police have had Supreme Court authorized permission to rifle through the belongings in your car if they had arrested you. Under two different cases, New York v. Belton, 453 U. S. 454 and Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752, it mattered not why they arrested you, any search incident to a custodial arrest was authorized and the police could search the entire car, it’s contents and all closed containers, on the spot, without your permission and without a warrant issued by a judge.

The original justification for this broad exception to the normal Forth Amendment requirement for a search warrant was that the car was “mobile” and that such searches were reasonable in order to prevent the destruction of evidence and for officer safety reasons in the event weapons were present. This search was authorized even though you had been removed from the car, handcuffed, placed in a patrol car and even already driven off to the pokey. For 28 years the courts simply overlooked the obvious logical flaw in this significant intrusion on your right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

Here’s the flaw: if you’re not in the car, if you’ve been arrested and handcuffed, or even if you’ve been removed from the car and have no physical access to it, then how are you going to use a weapon or dispose of evidence, which might justify a warrantless search?

Most importantly, the exception to the search warrant requirement was based on the necessity to protect evidence of the crime for which you were arrested. If the police stopped you because they saw you smoking a joint and smelled marijuana in the car, then the post-arrest search was intended to preserve evidence of drug use.

But what if you were stopped because you were speeding, or made an illegal left turn? And what if you were arrested because your driver’s license was suspended? What evidence of your suspended license or illegal left turn is there to be found in your car? None. And why therefore should the police be authorized to search your car for evidence of some other crime, like possession of drugs or weapons, something they had no reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe you possessed? Why should the police be allowed to go on fishing expeditions in search of evidence of some sort of malfeasance that they are guessing at?

Well, for 28 years the Supreme Court, and all the lower courts, and the police ignored those questions. Worse yet, the police began to look upon the search warrant exception as an entitlement to police to search nearly any vehicle they came in contact with, so long as they could justify an arrest of one of the occupants. Watch any episode of “Cops” and you’ll see how cavalier the police are about the Fourth Amendment protections.

But that’s all changed now. On April 21, 2009, the Supreme Court finally faced those questions squarely and decided that the police have abused their discretionary use of the vehicle search warrant exception for custodial arrests and they reversed course 180 degrees.

Rodney Grant was arrested in Arizona in 1999 on an outstanding warrant for driving on a suspended license. After arresting and handcuffing Gant and placing him in a patrol car, officers searched his vehicle, finding cocaine and a gun. The case worked its way to the Arizona Supreme Court which held that the police search was unreasonable. On appeal by the state, the Supreme Court upheld the Arizona court’s ruling that the search was unconstitutional because, being in handcuffs and in a patrol car, Gant did not have access to the vehicle which would allow him to either destroy evidence or obtain the weapon, and that there was no probable cause for officers to conclude that further evidence of the crime for which he was arrested, driving on a suspended license, would be found in the vehicle.

In the ruling, Arizona v. Gant, opinion No. 07-542, Justice Stevens said, “It is particularly significant that Belton searches authorize police officers to search not just the passenger compartment but every purse, briefcase, or other container within that space. A rule that gives police the power to conduct such a search whenever an individual is caught committing a traffic offense, when there is no basis for believing evidence of the offense might be found in the vehicle, creates a serious and recurring threat to the privacy of countless individuals. Indeed, the character of that threat implicates the central concern underlying the Fourth Amendment—the concern about giving police officers unbridled discretion to rummage at will among a person’s private effects.
…
Countless individuals guilty of nothing more serious than a traffic violation have had their constitutional right to the security of their private effects violated as a result. The fact that the law enforcement community may view the State’s version of the Belton rule as an entitlement does not establish the sort of reliance interest that could outweigh the countervailing interest that all individuals share in having their constitutional rights fully protected. If it is clear that a practice is unlawful, individuals’ interest in its discontinuance clearly outweighs any law enforcement “entitlement” to its persistence.
…
Police may search a vehicle incident to a recent occupant’s arrest only if the arrestee is within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search or it is reasonable to believe the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest. When these justifications are absent, a search of an arrestee’s vehicle will be unreasonable unless police obtain a warrant or show that another exception to the warrant requirement applies.”

There is nothing to add to Justice Stevens’ ruling. Finally, after nearly three decades of abuse, your right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure in the form of police fishing expeditions of your vehicle has been vindicated.

Well done, your Honors.

P.S. Learn something else from the TV show “Cops”, never, ever give the police permission to search your vehicle. You’re not required to do so, and now they cannot simply trump up an arrest to justify a search without your permission. If they order you out of the vehicle, lock the doors behind you and decline any request for a voluntary search. Believe me, if they have probable cause to search your vehicle, they don’t need your permission, and if you give it to them, you give up your ability to argue, as Gant did, that the search was unlawful.

©2009 Altnews

New Haven deserves only the best and most competent fire department commanders

By Seth Richardson

In New Haven, Conn., firefighters of all races are required to test for promotion. But when New Haven officials realized that no black firefighters would be promoted after one testing session, they threw out the test results, thereby denying high-scoring white firefighters promotions.

The United States Supreme Court is now considering the question of whether minorities are due special consideration in competitive testing or whether such racial considerations are discriminatory against whites. New Haven lawyer Christopher Meade told the Court, “There is no entitlement to be promoted based on a flawed test.” This is true, but the essential question is whether the test is “flawed” merely because no blacks passed it, or whether it’s “flawed” because it was deliberately designed to discriminate against blacks.

Only in the latter case does New Haven have any justification for throwing out the results. But Meade told the court that having an “adverse impact” on minorities was a sufficient flaw to justify tossing out the results and thereby discriminating against better-qualified applicants merely because it was a difficult test to pass.

This sort of dumbing-down of competitive testing has been spreading like a cancer throughout our society. It’s another manifestation of socialist playing-field leveling attempts by statists and liberals who believe that competition itself is indicative of unfairness and must be disallowed. The process of removing competition is seen most clearly in our schools and athletic programs, where children in many schools are not even given a “pass/fail” grade, much less a letter grade or class ranking. In athletics, many youth soccer teams no longer even keep score out of fear of bruising some poor little kid’s psyche by making them feel bad about losing.

But competition is the only thing that drives people to overcome their faults and improve their performance. Without the negative consequences of losing a game, or missing the mark on a competitive examination for promotion, not only is the loser denied a rational and necessary assessment of his relative strengths and weaknesses, from which he can seek to improve himself, the entire system loses its motivation for excellence and the employees sink into mediocrity.

While this may be acceptable to socialists, whose entire social agenda depends on enforced mediocrity, when it comes to liberty-loving Americans who still value excellence and are willing to face challenges and overcome them in order to better themselves, such mediocrity is anathema.

And when it comes to firefighters, whose very lives depend on the integrity, judgment and knowledge of their fellow firefighters and particularly their commanders, mediocrity is an unpardonable sin and a clear and present danger to everyone, firefighters and citizens alike.

The Supreme Court’s duty in this matter is to determine only if the test itself was deliberately constructed to prevent minorities from obtaining passing scores. It’s hard to see how this could be possible unless some blatantly discriminatory criteria that excludes minorities exists in the testing system, which would be illegal in any case. It’s the same test New Haven has been using for years, it’s just that this time no blacks had the requisite knowledge and skill to pass it. That may be an indication that some individuals need to apply themselves and learn what they need to know to score highly on the test, but it’s no reason to deny the citizens of New Haven the very best commanders available.

If the test involves only detailed knowledge of firefighting and administration, then those who score highest deserve promotion, irrespective of the race of the applicants. Anything less is unreasonable, unfair, discriminatory and endangers the public by fostering mediocrity.

© 2009 Altnews

Obama’s apologist David Axlerod tries to spin the Tea Party protests

By Seth Richardson

Political pitchman and presidential adviser David Axelrod is puzzled by the recent Tea Party protests. “The thing that bewilders me is this president just cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. So I think the tea bags should be directed elsewhere because he certainly understands the burden that people face.” Axlerod said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He went on to say “I think any time that you have severe economic conditions, there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy.”

Axlerod’s bewilderment is either indicative of a degree of ideological blindness to reality and a gross misunderstanding of the moral and ethical underpinnings of this nation, or it is dissimulation typical of the Statist Left, meaning he understands all too well the import of the Tea Parties but is trying to “Astro-turf” the protests as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did. The latter is most likely.

But let’s assume for a moment that he’s just an ignoramus and really doesn’t understand what’s going on and explain it to him.

Mr. Axlerod, there’s nothing “unhealthy” about the disaffection manifested in the Tea Party movement. It’s an example of the most fundamental and sacred liberties we Americans enjoy; the right to speak out against wrongdoing by our government. Far from being misdirected, the ire is being directed exactly where it belongs and for exactly the right reason.

The reason that people are responding negatively to your suggestion that Obama just cut taxes for 95 percent of American citizens is that Obama has done nothing of the kind just yet. He doesn’t cut or impose taxes, Congress does, and Congress hasn’t done much of anything but throw good money after bad, in the process burying the nation in debt that our grandchildren will be paying off.

That “95 percent” of the American people you refer to are also not the easily deluded proletarian idiots you think they are, to be shown a trough full of government swill and deluded into believing that feeding at it is sustainable. They understand full well that what Obama says today is a lie, and that down the road we will all end up paying through the nose for this out-of-control tax and spend Democrat orgy of fiscal destruction that Washington is engaged in right now.

We know that whatever Obama says about tax cuts for the middle-class, it’s all a tissue of lies and empty rhetoric because we see the massive, unprecedented debt being piled on the backs of all Americans that will eventually require raising taxes on everything just to try to keep the country solvent.

President Obama is playing a shell game with the public. He’s promising middle-class tax cuts to gain political coinage while minting money at a record rate, which will devalue the actual coinage of the realm and cost even the middle-class trillions of dollars in inflation, which is nothing more nor less than a hidden tax on everyone that could amount to a fifty-percent tax on every dollar on the planet.

The Tea Partiers also understand something called “fundamental fairness” and “capitalism,” which is something that the Statist Left and Democrats don’t. They understand that cutting taxes for “95 percent” of Americans means that the burden of paying for massive new social entitlement programs is shifted onto the backs of the remaining five percent, and they believe that this is unfair, unreasonable and unjust.

You see, Mr. Axlerod, most Americans are fair-minded people who, unlike the Statist Left, don’t wallow in class envy and jealousy, and don’t have the abiding hatred for those who have been successful under capitalism that the President and the Democrat party does. Most Americans revel in the successes of those who work hard to create actual wealth, and actual companies, and actual jobs that create an economy that lifts all ships. They understand that Obama’s make-work social engineering programs create nothing and only shuffle extracted taxes from one place to another and will work no better than the massively wasteful and fraudulent WPA and other Depression-era socialist government entitlement programs worked in the 30s.

Most Americans want to preserve their opportunity for success, and they don’t mind if others succeed because it’s an indicator that their opportunity remains available to them. They understand the falsity of the Statist Left lie that equality of opportunity requires equality of outcome, and the falsity of the socialist precept that one man’s success diminishes the opportunity of others to likewise succeed.

That, Mr. Axlerod, is why they protest the massive, uncontrolled government spending that is going to destroy our entire economy and our nation. They demand fairness in taxation. They demand that all Americans, not just the wealthiest among us, share the burdens of operating our government equally. They understand that binding the mouths of the kine that grind the grain and killing the goose that lays the golden egg out of a misplaced and ignorant desire to impose socialist playing-field leveling is not going to help our economy recover, and will in fact destroy it utterly.

And what is manifesting itself in the Tea Party protests is not “unhealthy,” it’s the very essence of liberty and a healthy disrespect for governmental excess. It is we, the People exerting our ultimate and plenary authority to control our elected representatives and public servants. You are correct in saying that the protests are peaceable exercises of our right to petition our government for redress of grievances, and President Obama and Congress would be wise to pay careful attention to those grievances rather than trying to denigrate and dismiss them as Speaker Pelosi so arrogantly did last week. Remember where the root of government power lies in this nation. It lies with the People, who have the power to revoke the grants of government authority if they find it necessary to do so.

What you saw on April 15th was a peaceable and polite request for reconsideration of the president’s policies that is bound to be repeated with an ever-louder voice the longer it is ignored. Please pay attention and amend your behavior so that things can remain that way.

© 2009 Altnews

The Tea Party, Colorado Springs, Colo, April 15, 2009

All Photographs © 2009 Altnews/Seth Richardson

hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their  just powers from the consent of the governed,

— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

ABC News’ “20/20″ disinformation and deliberate distortions don’t qualify as journalism

By Seth Richardson

I don’t know if it’s possible to stuff a single one-hour TV program with more bogus experiments, falsehoods, evasions, obfuscations, alarmism and ideological rhetoric disguised as “news” than Diane Sawyer and David Muir did on ABC’s “20/20” on Friday, April 10th, but I don’t really want to find out. It was undiluted anti-gun disinformation and propaganda of the first water.

In “If I Only Had a Gun”, Sawyer and Muir presented their clearly biased opinion on the effectiveness of personal defense firearms in a manner calculated and scripted to demonstrate only the worst-case scenarios in ways that set the participants up for failure in such an obvious sham that it would have been laughable if it wasn’t such a serious matter.

Sawyer tried to demonstrate the uselessness of carrying a concealed handgun by concocting, among all manner of other alarmist and deliberately deceptive examples, a demonstration using novices who had little to no firearms training or experience in situations designed to create failure. In a series of fake classroom invasions, the subjects were given a gun firing paint pellets and were told it was for use later. While the instructor was demonstrating safety equipment to a group of “students” who were actually police officers, a “bad guy” came in to the room and began shooting. The purported intent was to show how difficult it is to respond to such a stressful situation.

I can’t argue with the fact that a novice with a gun attempting to take on a professional armed assailant (the bad guy was a police officer) will likely have little luck, but Sawyer wasn’t satisfied with concocting an example guaranteed to produce a “loss” for the law-abiding citizen gun owner, she had the gall to put a “ringer” in the classroom as an accomplice who began shooting students too. Then Sawyer had the temerity to suggest that “tunnel vision”, which does occur, is justification for disarming citizens because, well, Joe Average Citizen is just not skilled enough to take on two armed professional assailants who both knew where the armed civilian was sitting in the room ahead of time, or so it appeared from the video. Sawyer railed on about the possibility of shooting an innocent bystander running between the armed citizen and the bad guy without acknowledging that in such a chaotic situation, that bystander was going to get shot anyway if nothing was done.

While most of the test subjects were shot multiple times (by a trained SWAT cop) they managed some hits too. But the most egregious failure in Sawyer’s rhetoric was her complete failure to mention the fact that while the bad guy and the armed test subject exchanged fire, other people were not being shot and were escaping from the room. Sawyer’s preferred alternative is evidently to just sit there and let yourself be shot, because you might miss and hurt someone if you try to save anyone’s life by returning fire.

This is a significant bit of journalistic malfeasance on Sawyer’s part. The assumption of the whole first half of the show was about the odds of the individual with the gun surviving the incident. But what Sawyer refused to acknowledge, evidently deliberately and to her journalistic discredit, is that many people carry guns not only to protect themselves, but to protect others, even at risk of death to themselves.

Consider Jeanne Assam, our own Colorado Springs heroine, who selflessly ran towards the sound of gunfire and attacked and disabled a mass-murderer before he could kill hundreds of people at the New Life Church as the quintessential example of a responsible armed citizen. Assam didn’t think of herself, she thought of the men, women and children behind her who did not have guns as she stepped out with unparalleled courage from behind a concrete pillar and faced a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle and handgun. And she prevailed. She prevailed because she was courageous, and because the attacker was a coward, who, as soon as he was fired upon tried to take cover, and as soon as he was wounded by Assam, killed himself in a penultimate act of cowardice. That’s significant. Real mass-murderers aren’t expecting resistance and they mostly don’t know how to react when faced with a determined defender shooting back at them.

Do you think Sawyer bothered to mention this incident? Of course not, because that would require journalistic ethics and dedication to objective reporting, something neither Sawyer nor Muir, nor the show’s director George Paul or producer Muriel Parson have. They’re ideological hacks unworthy of the title of “journalist.”

Sawyer’s bit of pseudo-journalism pitted a well-trained SWAT cop against a neophyte in a worst-case scenario where the cop knew what was coming and who to shoot at, under circumstances where all that was being fired were paint pellets. This doesn’t begin to be a valid experiment to determine the actual effectiveness of an armed citizen responding to a classroom invasion because everybody knew up front it was a fake. To discover what actually happens, you have to look at actual armed encounters, and when you do, you find that armed citizens are quite effective at stopping killers and preventing mass murders. But Sawyer won’t even look for that data.

For Sawyer to imply that the presence of an armed citizen in such a scenario is useless, and in fact may do more harm than good is reprehensible and some of the worst, most biased “journalism” I’ve ever had the displeasure to experience. And taking a swipe at credible researchers from John Lott to the U.S. Department of Justice, Sawyer arrogantly said, “We could not find one reliable study” about the successful defensive use of firearms by armed citizens. This is a particularly odious bit of pettifoggery by Sawyer, since even the federal government concedes that firearms are used at least 80,000 times a year to thwart crime, most of the time without ever being discharged.

Not satisfied with this bit of political theater, David Muir takes us to Pahokee, Florida to exploit a ten-year-old black child who lives in a crime-ridden town in a nauseating appeal to pity. Pahokee, a town of about 6000, it seems is stuffed with gang-bangers and drug dealers who fire guns off in the air on the weekends just for fun and shoot everybody in sight the rest of the time. And none of the residents will report shootings to police or cooperate in putting criminals away, whether out of fear or because they’re all criminals is uncertain.

“Mr. President,” says Damon Weaver, “what can you do for Pahokee?”

I’ll tell you what he should do, Damon. He should send the FBI, the BATFE, the U.S. Marine Corps and the NRA to Pahokee, where the FBI will assist the local police to arrest criminals using guns, the BATFE will issue surplus military arms from the Civilian Marksmanship Program to the law-abiding citizens of Pahokee, the U.S. Marine Corps will assist in training law-abiding citizens in small-unit tactics and patrol techniques and the NRA will teach the citizens how to shoot.

Then the citizens of Pahokee who are not criminals, drug dealers and gang-bangers can form militia units and retake their community from the bad guys. They can take a page from the Black Panthers, who in 1967 marched on the California state capitol to protest police attempts to disarm blacks in Berkley and patrolled their neighborhoods openly armed with shotguns. But rather than confronting the police, the law-abiding citizens of Pahokee should work with the police to track down, arrest and bring the criminals to justice, or shoot them dead if they are fired upon.

That’s what the President should do for Pahokee. Or more properly, that’s what the citizens of Pahokee must do for themselves, even if the President turns a blind eye towards them and tries to disarm them instead, which is what he most certainly will do.

© 2009 Altnews

Obsequious fawning demeans the office of the President and the reputation of our nation

By Seth Richardson

If anyone had any doubts about President Obama’s abysmal lack of skill as a diplomat, his recent debacles in Europe should dispel them. As if it weren’t bad enough that he arrogantly returned a bust of Winston Churchill loaned to the United States after the September 11 attacks, and sent Prime Minister Gordon Brown a batch of cheesy DVDs in exchange for a priceless bit of nautical history, a pen holder carved from the timbers of the HMS Gannet, sister ship to the HMS Resolute, from which Obama’s Oval Office desk is carved, he compounded his diplomatic ignorance when he gave the Queen of England an iPod. Worst of all, he did spineless obeisance to a Saudi potentate, bowing before him like some servile vassal.

Mr. President, you are the Command in Chief and President of the United States of America, and as our representative to the world, you bow down to no one. You meet them as equals, with your head held proudly high or you do not meet them at all.

But those are just social faux pas, though egregious ones. What you said in Europe last week was far worse and far more alarming. President Obama, you have a duty to represent our nation with pride and strength, and to present the American people as they truly are; a strong, vibrant, peace-loving and fair-minded people who wish harm to none and prosperity to all, but who take abuse from no one and will never seek to curry favor of anyone. If a nation or leader will not treat with us as equals in dignity and respect, then you must refuse to acknowledge them. And you have no authority whatsoever to so much as suggest that the United States will ever subjugate its sovereignty to any nation or league of nations.

In a recent speech in France, you said, “In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

You do not speak for me, Mr. President. Nor do I believe that you speak for the majority of Americans. Europe has a position in the world only because the United States prevented the Soviet Union from absorbing it. It is Europe that owes a long-unpaid debt of gratitude to us, not vice versa. How dare you suggest that we have not sought or appreciated partnership with Europe? This sort of rank revisionism is intolerable coming from anyone, much less the President.

Later, you said, “It is true that we have to change our behavior in showing the Muslim world greater respect, and changing our language and changing our tone.” Again, you do not speak for me, Mr. President, and I strenuously object to your obsequiousness towards Islam.

The United States has shown the Muslim world all the respect that it is due, and more besides. However peaceable the majority of Muslims are, rare is the Muslim voice raised against Islamo-fascism and radical Islamic terrorism. If we need to change our tone, we need to demand that “moderate” Islam decisively and without equivocation repudiate Islamic extremism and those tenets of Islam that call for Jihad against non-believers.

Unless and until the so-called “peaceable” Islamic majority not only volubly speaks out against Islamic terrorism, but actually stands-to and takes up arms against the radical elements of their ideology, the United States should not take a conciliatory tone towards Islam. Appeasement is not an option for you, Mr. President. We will not tolerate such behavior from our elected representatives.

Then you said, “And when you start sacrificing your values, when you lose yourself, then over the long term that will make you less secure. When we saw what happened in Abu Ghraib, that wasn’t good for our security — that was a recruitment tool for terrorism. Humiliating people is never a good strategy to battle terrorism.”

Mr. President, you slander the United States and its people, and you tarnish the reputation of the Presidency by your implication that the People of the United States were in any way responsible for or approving of the criminal acts of a few poorly-commanded soldiers in an isolated incident during a war. Wrongs were done, and those truly responsible, those in command, escaped punishment, but you have no business impugning the honor of the United States in this manner because it diminishes us in the eyes of the world and it encourages our enemies far more than the actual events did. It disgusts me that you have done so merely to curry favor with our European “allies.”

I use that word advisedly because most of our so-called “allies” in NATO have been avoiding and evading their responsibilities under the treaties for years. Some, like France and Germany, are actively working against NATO and American interests by continuing to trade with enemy nations like Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

We undertook the liberation of Iraq with minimal show-piece participation from our “allies” in NATO. Many nations who sent “troops” to Iraq would not allow them into combat for fear of angering the Muslim sphere. These are not the actions of allies and friends of America.

France has repeatedly maligned the United States and refused to honor its commitments to NATO. They have no honor, and are due but small regard and disdain until they choose to honor their commitments instead of demonstrating cowardice.

After more than sixty years of economic and social advancement under the wing of the American eagle, which protected them against Soviet domination and which cost the American people trillions of dollars, the French in particular are thankless ingrates and are owed nothing. Your Chamberlainesque approach to the Europeans and their one-world-government pretensions toys with treason.

Your duty as President is to stand for the United States of America and ONLY for the United States of America. Not the UN, not the European Union, not any transnational ideology or scheme. Your duty is to us, Mr. President, and no one else. Look first and always to the well-being and security of the People of the United States, and place their rights and interests supreme above all else, and keep them foremost in your mind.

You took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States to the best of your ability. We expect you to do so or we expect you to resign your office. No, we demand that you do so, as is our right. You, sir, are President, but you remain a servant of the People, not our sovereign, and certainly not a lackey of the European Union.

© 2009 Altnews

Federal judge orders Boulder County to approve church development

By Seth Richardson

Victories against zoning authorities are few and far between these days. The right of a citizen to the reasonable use and enjoyment of his property has been thoroughly suppressed by the creeping socialism of zoning and land-use controls in recent years.
The good news is that the galloping socialists in Boulder County have just lost a major case that may help turn the tide for religious freedom and property rights throughout Colorado.

On Tuesday, March 31, 2009, U.S. District Court judge Robert Blackburn ordered Boulder County to approve a development application submitted by the Rocky Mountain Christian Church in 2006, saying, “The record in this case does not demonstrate conclusively that RMCC’s special use application violates the land use code.” The judge’s ruling closed the case, decided in favor of the church by a jury in November 2008.

Zoning has a long and checkered history in America. Originally designed to separate incompatible uses such as heavy industry and residences, and to control the height, bulk and spacing of structures in urban environments, zoning law has morphed into a many-tentacled monster that today, in many places, invades the most fundamental uses of private property merely because it might annoy a NIMBY neighbor. Local zoning boards have created entire counties that are little more than enormous covenanted subdivisions that use the mace of state as a blunt instrument against property owners. And no place in the United States better exemplifies the overreaching, intrusive and offensive practice of micro-managing land-use than the People’s Republic of Boulder. In 1955, Boulder County’s land-use code was all of 16 pages long. Today it’s more than a thousand pages.

In Boulder County, there is almost no activity that the county Commissioners have not chosen to regulate. They can tell you what color your house can be, where exactly on your lot it may be built, the size and orientation of your windows, even the type of plants that you must put around your house and maintain in perpetuity. Nor is their development code the only grip they maintain on private property. Want to have a wedding reception or a party with more than 25 people? Beg a permit of the county. Want to hold a private religious service in your home? Nope, no way, not if your neighbors object.

The county denied RMCC’s application in 2006, saying that the church’s plan to expand the current 106,000 square foot campus by an additional 132,000 square feet to meet the needs of it’s expanding congregation and ministries was “not in harmony” with the “character” of the rural area where the church was located and was an “over-intensive use.”

But throughout history churches have defined the character of a community, not harmed it. Most communities grew up with the church as the centerpiece of the town. In Europe, the very identity of many great cities is inextricably intertwined with the great and beautiful cathedrals and churches of antiquity. Saint Paul’s, Saint Peter’s, the cathedral at Chartres are all engineering and architectural wonders of the world, drawing millions of visitors each year. But in Boulder County, when Sacred Heart of Mary, the first Catholic church in Boulder County, built in 1873, applied for a permit to expand by about 10 rows of pews in order to meet the needs of a larger congregation in 1999, the Commissioners allowed the expansion, but then changed their mind after construction was completed and required the church to remove the new pews and turn the expanded area into a foyer, thus limiting seating to the original capacity. The excuse used was that the expanded seating might result in too many car trips on the adjacent South Boulder Road, now a 4-lane highway. New highway, no new pews.

Since the emergence of the “mega-church” phenomenon many zoning agencies nationwide have shown increasing hostility towards large church campuses, routinely describing them as “incompatible” or “over-intensive use,” along with other excuses used to deny religious freedom, even in private homes. The offenses became so egregious nationwide that in 2000, Congress passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) to try to control the abuse of land use and zoning regulations as a tool for religious discrimination and suppression.

Congress found a “pervasive pattern” of abuse of the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly for religious purposes by local zoning authorities nationwide, and that religious assemblies cannot function without the physical spaces and places of worship and congregation, and that the right to acquire such spaces is a core adjunct to the First Amendment. The law, 42 U.S.C. 2000cc, prohibits the imposition of a “substantial burden” through land use regulation on the religious exercise of a person, group or institution unless there is a “compelling government interest” for the regulation and it is “the least restrictive means” of achieving the compelling government interest.

The Boulder Daily Camera quoted Pearlman as saying, “This law, as written, may very well require us to elevate religious uses above everything else.”

Yes, Commissioner Pearlman, that’s exactly what it does. And rightfully so, as Gazette opinion page Editor Wayne Laugesen wrote in a column for the Boulder Weekly in 2007, “This country was founded as a place to freely pursue belief in a deity without fear of repercussion or obstruction. It was founded as a country in which belief in deity trumps secular government interests, such as “neighborhood character” and car trips—two local obsessions that appear as flotsam when contrasted with the intellectual integrity of First Amendment liberties.”

And the U.S. District court, along with the U.S. Department of Justice, which enforces RLUPIA, agrees. The DOJ filed motions in favor of the church in February. Acting assistant attorney general Michael Hertz wrote, “RLUIPA does not operate as an impermissible preference for, or endorsement of, religious organizations, as the county argues.”

Boulder County thinks that the aesthetic concerns of the County Commissioners and the few neighbors of the rural church are a “compelling government interest” which justifies interfering with First Amendment-protected religious worship. Responding to the judge’s ruling, Commissioner Ben Pearlman said, “I think we had a strong case and still do.”

The fundamental cognitive dissonance evidenced by the Commissioners is their complete failure to understand that there are things that are more important to the citizens of this country than three individual elected official’s aesthetic tastes. The core of the county’s argument was that the church was too big already and shouldn’t be allowed to expand. But religious liberty demands that places of worship be allowed to grow with the growing needs of the congregation, not be arbitrarily restricted by the tastes of  elected officials.

We can all be thankful that the overweening authoritarianism of public servants more concerned with car trips and aesthetics than fundamental civil liberties have been defeated, at least for the present. The Commissioners could appeal to the Supreme Court, and I for one hope they do, because of all the cases adjudicated under RLUIPA in recent years, this is one of the strongest, and I would welcome a Supreme Court affirmation of religious liberty over NIMBY neighbors and fascistic bureaucrats.

© 2009 Altnews