CITIZENS PROTECTION ACT OF 2011

The history of American Jurisprudence is fraught with expansion of government power and corruption. I have written numerous articles, and a book, on the rights we have lost to government corruption and expansion.

Most everyone, by now, has heard of the terms “general welfare” and “interstate commerce.” These are the two most widely used “excuses” for government expansion of power and abuse of the American citizen.

One such law passed under the guise of interstate commerce was the “Gun Free School Zone Act of 1990. The premise for this law was safety for the school children however the rationale for the federal government getting involved was that having guns near the school would put undue stress of the children, which would make it hard for them to learn and get good grades, which would affect the workforce which would impact interstate commerce.

Now if you are like me when I first read that I could only scratch my head and wonder what the lawyers who wrote that were smoking. Luckily in 1995 a very important case started to reign in the use of interstate commerce to expand the government’s power. This was the case of United States V. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995).

Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the opinion of the court stating that Congress had the power to regulate only the channels of commerce, the instrumentalities of commerce, or persons or things in interstate commerce, even if the threat comes from intrastate activities, and action that substantially affects interstate commerce. With the governments reasoning, Congress could be found to regulate anything. He further commented that since the Constitution created enumerated powers by which Congress was bound, they could not have such broad reaching powers.

He concluded that:

“To uphold the Government's contentions here, we would have to pile inference upon inference in a manner that would bid fair to convert congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the States. Admittedly, some of our prior cases have taken long steps down that road, giving great deference to congressional action. The broad language in these opinions has suggested the possibility of additional expansion, but we decline here to proceed any further. To do so would require us to conclude that the Constitution's enumeration of powers does not presuppose something not enumerated, and that there never will be a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local. This we are unwilling to do.

So here we can plainly see Chief Justice Rehnquist openly admitting to the expansion of government power outside the bounds of those enumerated in the Constitution and here we are sixteen years later and the law is still on the books.

Title 18, Section 922, paragraph (a), sub-paragraph (q) goes through the laundry list of connections between all the different dark alleys of logic used to connect Joe Citizen walking along the sidewalk legally carrying a defensive sidearm to the insane effect on interstate commerce and thus Congress’ power to regulate that action – Liberty be damned.

Today, however, we have a champion for truth, justice, and the Constitutional way by Representative Ron Paul who introduced on the floor H.R. 2613 – Titled the Citizens Protection Act of 2011.

Unlike the thousands of pages of legislation the communist liberals need to fool the American people into thinking they are doing something good; Representative Paul’s bill is a single page which would simply “Repeal the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990 and Amendments to that Act.”

I think it is quite simple to understand that if you disarm all the “law-abiding” citizens from defending themselves and their loved ones the only people who will have arms, and the will to use them, will be the bad guy. We have seen it time and time again – shootings in churchs where laws prohibit law abiding citizens from having firearms, shopping malls, schools, restaurants, and even on military bases. In each and every case the bad guy was able to kill with impunity because there was no one there that was armed to stop them.

People are killed not because they have a gun; people are killed because they have had the ability to defend themselves taken away, unconstitutionally I might add. It is time we stopped empowering the criminal and place the power back where it belongs – IN THE HANDS OF THE LAW ABIDING CITIZEN.