Grab the Guns & Then Worry About Due Process! Seriously?

I made no secret of the fact that I thought Barack Obama was a wannabe dictator. I believe he thought the presidency gave him unlimited powers to do whatever he wanted and he entered office thinking that is exactly what he would do. I think he got real-world woke-up by incidents like Fast and Furious (otherwise known as the Gunwalker case) and he adjusted his tyranny accordingly, realizing that he needed at least to pretend to pay lip service to the Constitution.

I haven’t gone after President Trump for his many forays into unconstitutional rule because he’d had plenty of detractors and I prefer to focus on the underlying principles of liberty rather than the politics of a particular policy.

Until today.

Apparently, in an Oval Office meeting with Congressional Democrats and Republicans, the Dictator in Chief announced that, for the good of everybody, he believes we should “go after the guns first and worry about due process later.”

Wow! I surely hope his base supporters are stunned and gathering rocks to begin the stoning. This has much further-reaching implications than just gun control. He’s proposing to violate the 4th, 5th and 6th amendments. Private property rights and due process are the backbones of American liberty and what sets us apart from many other countries. Lose those rights and … well, you haven’t got any rights left at that point.

So, folks, Trump supporters, wake up and smell the coffee burning. This guy that you elected hasn’t got a clue what rights mean. He’ll reach into your lives and take your means to defend yourselves — to defend your right to freedom of speech, religion, conscience, association and he’ll do it without ever going to court. Oh, yeah, he’s paying lip service to court at some point after he’s violated your rights … after your means to resist has been taken away.

The logical process here is evident. It’ll start with people who are actually dangerous, but it won’t stay there. President Obama wrote an executive order that said that anyone who received any sort of guidance in managing their disability benefits could not own a gun. It didn’t matter why and there are a whole lot of conditions where perfectly sane and safe people need help managing their disability benefits. He at least allowed for some form of due process, but you were disallowed from owning a gun until you’d been through the process. Trump rolled that back in the early days of his administration, but not because he cared about natural rights but because he had advisers who were pushing him to do it as an indication to his voter base that he actually cared about their lives.

So the die was already cast. First it starts with legitimately dangerous people. Their private property will be seized from them and they’ll have to fight through the courts to prove they should get their personal property back. Unlike a very difficult system where you wait to prove you can exercise your rights before you are allowed to, your property has been stolen and your rights suppressed and good luck getting either your property or your rights back. Anyone who has studied civil asset forfeiture knows that’s a fool’s errand.

But governmental mission creep never stays where it starts, so the administrative state will then start defining the meaning of dangerous downward. We saw that with Obama. If you need help with your benefits, you shouldn’t own a gun. Really? You have no right to the means to protect yourself against violent assault by criminals? Wow, way to make yet another disenfranchised victim group. Thank the Constitution he’s not our president anymore, but unfortunately his anti-rights stances still taint the Executive Branch. Under his administration, if you were a combat veteran, you were considered a potential terrorist. Ditto if you were a member of an evangelical church or someone who had espoused libertarian beliefs. And, trust me, the administrative state agrees with that assessment because it serves their purposes. It is a whole lot easier to control a disarmed country than a personally armed one.

But more than that – it starts with guns being taken without due process (and due process after the fact NEVER works out well for the poor person caught in the system) and then it grows from there. Houses, cars, children — we already have that going on at the state level, but this has the potential for rendering the Constitution null and void.

Come on, folks, remember why you voted for Trump in the first place? You didn’t want Hillary to continue the Obama era oppression and she was promising that she would. I suggested at the time that Trump was play-acting being a conservative and that we would regret that you voted him in.

We’re there now.

So don’t allow President Trump to get away with this. Call him on it! Demand that he protect our natural right to self-defense or promise him he’ll be out on his ear come 2020. He is under the mistaken impression that the voters will reward him for gun control and also violating our 4th, 5th and 6th amendment rights. Don’t let him get away with it.

Remember, there will be third parties running in 2020. You’re not stuck with two bad choices. Think out of the box and you might be pleasantly surprised at the benefits your rebellion fosters.