A Declaration of Civil Disobedience

[Marko Kloos]

A Declaration of Civil Disobedience

I will not register my guns. If such a law is ever enacted on the federal, State or municipal level, I will choose to ignore it. I was required to leave my personal data with the gun dealer when I purchased each of my guns legally, and this data is doubtlessly on record already. Let law enforcement look it up if they choose, but I will not register my guns: not now, and not in the future. Registration of handguns, or any other firearm, will not prevent a single crime from happening. It only serves to harass the law-abiding citizen for the sole offense of owning a politically incorrect item.

I will not surrender my guns voluntarily, ever. If the possession of handguns is declared illegal by any legislative body, I will choose to ignore it. If the owners of newly or soon-to-be illegal weapons are asked to turn them in for compensation, I will not comply. Let them try to enforce a law that is not enforceable, and declare a war on guns that will be no more successful than the war on drugs that has eroded most of our civil liberties in the last two decades. If they go from door to door to ask for guns, I will deny ownership; if they break down doors to search for guns, I will do my best to make their mission difficult. Confiscation of firearms will do nothing to make society safer. It merely takes away an essential basic right from the peasantry: the right to self defense. Without the means to it, the right itself is nonexistent except on paper.

I will never again concern myself with concealed carry laws. I will carry my sidearm as I see fit, and wherever I choose, whether I am in Wyoming or New York City. I will ignore unjust laws denying me the right to determine my own fate while exempting friends and cronies of the legislature and the executive from the same laws. I will try to comply with the law whenever possible and obtain a permit whenever given the opportunity; I do not wish to be a lawbreaker if I can avoid it. But I will no longer comply with the demands of legislators who want to leave us defenseless against those who will always prey on others with the help of guns no matter what the law says.

I know that I am not alone. I am part of a growing group of citizens that are fed up with being painted as radical, violent, ignorant and bigoted. Most of us are not camouflage-wearing conspiracy theorists. We are doctors, lawyers, soldiers, carpenters, nurses, computer programmers and convenience store clerks. We are fathers, mothers, grandparents, brothers, sisters and colleagues. We are "the American people" so often quoted and invoked by politicians. We come from all walks of life, all levels of income and education, all faiths and non-faiths. We share a common anger at those who want to take our self-determination away from us, those who blame us for every senseless and over-publicized act of gun violence in this country, those who are more than willing to trade an essential liberty for the illusion of safety. We are tired of politicians who create law after law to fight actions by people who by definition do not obey laws, in order to pacify a vocal and ignorant portion of the population. We also share the belief that the responsibility for our safety is up to us, and can never be completely entrusted to an understaffed, underpaid and overworked police force that is mostly tied up in an unwinnable battle against drugs.

We do not ask for special rights, we merely ask that our right to self-defense and self-determination is respected and not undermined. We wish to be left alone, and we do not want to surrender our integrity and our means to enforce our right to life and liberty for a social experiment that has already been a massive failure in those countries who attempted it. We are citizens, not peons. We are free men and women, not serfs who exist to provide taxes to the ruling caste.

We have tried to play by rules that have turned more pointless and nonsensical by the year. We have paid the fees, filled out the forms and subjected ourselves to the background checks. We have been fingerprinted like common criminals. We have tolerated the insults and the scapegoating of some of our fellow citizens, and that of the mass media. We have, where we could, taken all the steps necessary to go armed and obey the laws at the same time. Here we draw a line in the sand. Stop harassing us, for we are not the problem. Taking our rights away from us will not solve your problems, or make us all any safer against crime. We have done what we can to work with you when you came after us year after year. We gave up our military-style sporter rifles, and society did not turn any safer. We were forced to purchase guns with crippled magazines that limited their functionality, and yet society did not turn any safer for it. Yet you come back with sure regularity, asking for more of what is ours, in return for the promise of a safer society. You pass laws because it is the only thing you can do in the face of outraged soccer moms demanding that something be done to "stop the violence'. You cater to ignorance, and you willingly chip away at the rights of a group that is perceived to have little public support--minimizing the risk of election day backlash. Everything you have done has failed to improve society, yet you return and ask for one more restriction, one more "common sense" gun law, arguing that the last round of restrictions was just not severe enough.

We are tired of it. We know that if you made all guns illegal, it would have no effect on crime and violence, but we also know that you would not turn around and return us our rights and our guns after you are proven wrong by reality.

As an individual, I will choose to disobey whenever you enact a law inconsistent with my basic right to self-defense. Try to force us into registering our guns, or giving them up altogether, just so you can garner support for your next election, and you face the responsibility for whatever happens next. Many of us will refuse to obey, and then you will have a choice between trying to enforce this law or silently ignoring those who choose to disobey it. A law that is not obeyed, and cannot be enforced, does more harm to you than it does to those you try to govern. As Albert Einstein said after the repeal of the Prohibition laws, nothing will cause more disrespect of government than the enactment of laws that cannot be enforced. And make no mistake, a general gun registration or outright ban can only be enforced by sending the police from door to door, forcefully entering those homes which refuse to cooperate. How many dead citizens are you willing to tolerate before you repent? How many police officers are you willing to sacrifice? More importantly, how much of this is the general population willing to take? The war on drugs has brought about the demise of most civil rights, a war on guns would bring society to its knees. You've declared drugs illegal, yet they are available on most every street corner in this country. What good will a ban on guns do?

Law is law, but a bad law is just that. It was the law in Germany to refuse Jews access to public air raid shelters during World War Two, and many people chose to ignore that law. I am glad they did. I value my conscience and my integrity over your seat in Congress. Therefore I declare that I will no longer obey laws that are an affront to my humanity, laws that are nothing but elitist arrogant attempts to keep arms out of the hands of the unwashed masses. Pick another group for your social experiments, like the criminals for example.

We have no intention to commit crimes of violence with our guns, and we are deeply offended by the notion that you alone can make the decision who can be trusted with a gun, and that we serfs just cannot act in a responsible fashion when given access to guns.

No registration, no confiscation. Ever. If I should ever break your laws and get caught, you can arrest me. I'd rather live in jail with the knowledge that my spirit is free, than on the outside as a tax-paying serf knowing that I only serve as a worker bee with no rights and little personal freedom. I know that I am not alone, and let's see just how many jails you can build to accomodate all those who have had enough of your failed and unjust policies.

[Brent]

Amen!

[Morgan]

A similar, and perhaps even more daring and damning, treatise by J.D. Tucille, from http://civilliberty.about.com/ .

Declaration of Noncompliance

We have seen our nation turned from one based in liberty to one
based in expediency. We have seen Constitutional protections for
fundamental individual rights eroded by government that is actively
hostile to the legacy of individual sovereignty we inherited from the
American Revolution, and abandoned by countrymen who have
surrendered to fear, laziness, and complacency. We are entangled in
laws that portray natural rights as vices and attack them in the name of
false security, and by government that grows like a cancer until it
occupies every area of human life. We find our speech threatened, our
communications spied upon, our privacy violated, our finances probed,
our bedrooms monitored, our bodies controlled, our businesses
regulated, our property stolen, our income taxed into nonexistence, and
ourselves disarmed by officials who find comfort in the thought of
prostrate subjects. We have seen people fined, imprisoned, and even
murdered by officials for doing no more than acting on their liberty in
ways that draw the displeasure of those who treat independence as a
threat and the coercive power of the state as a plaything.

To our neighbors who have lost their faith in freedom, we quote
Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." The trade of
liberty for promises of security is always a bad one, for it exchanges a
priceless necessity for a hollow comfort that can not be guaranteed.

To the politicians and officials who treat our rights as if they were
privileges that they might limit or remove at will, we say that we have
had enough. You have overstepped your bounds and cut away at that
which no government, no legislature, no agency, no referendum, no
quorum, no majority, and no power of any sort may trespass against
except at its own peril. By your actions, you have deprived the
institutions in which you do your worst of their legitimacy.

From this day forward, we vow that we will no longer be bound by
statutes, edicts, judicial decisions, or administrative regulations that
violate our inalienable rights. We pledge to practice principled
noncompliance with such impermissible restrictions on our liberty, and
to encourage others to do the same.

We pledge to monitor the activities of politicians and government
bureaucrats who threaten liberty, and to share such information as we
gather with others who also value freedom so that those who engage in
abuses can not hide behind official anonymity.

We pledge to treat our presence in the jury room as an opportunity to
engage in the ancient right of jury nullification, by avowing the
innocence of those who have run afoul of one of the multitude of
statutes and regulations that infringe liberty, for such people are truly
innocent of any real crime.

We pledge to otherwise assist those who have incurred official wrath for
doing no more than exercising their rights in ways that are forbidden by
the whim of the state.

We further pledge, to the best of our abilities, to obstruct continued
intrusions by the state upon our liberty, and to impede the enforcement
of such violations of our rights as are already in place.

We make this declaration only after due consideration, and after
long and continued provocation. We do this not to turn our backs on
our friends, relatives, and neighbors who have been duped into
abandoning liberty, but to defend the rights whose value they have
forgotten for them as well as ourselves. We hope that our example will
serve as an inspiration.

[Jason Demond]

You know it!

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ACCEPT NOTHING LESS THAN FULL VICTORY!"

General Dwight D. Eisenhower-- June 6,1944
------------------------

http://www.homestead.com/gunrights/G...Gunrights.html

[scud]

As bad as this goverment is there is no other solution but to ignore the oppression that they call the law. Good article.

[foxfire]

lendringser,

Thank you for sharing the 'Declaration'.
I wish it could go immediately into TFL's Library, for posterity.
Yours and Jeff White's current post in the Legal and Political Forum, certainly have made my day and give me hope.
Maybe the DCD is finally something we can all rally around...




------------------
...defend the 2nd., it protects us all.
No fate but what we make...

[Outlaw1]

Great posts guys!


------------------
Did I say "republic?" By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn Democracy.
It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often used by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, miscegenation, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive.
-Westbrook Pegler 1951

[loknload]

Two very well written posts

------------------
We preserve our freedoms by using four boxes: soap,ballot,jury, and cartridge.
Anonymous

[Tamara]

...a copy of this for a friend, and figured it deserved a BTT.

[Keiller TN]

What guns?

[guerilla1138]

Thats nice.
I will be willing to bet you that the ATF or whoever Feds patrol this board have already read this, and already have it on file.
And they will be more suspicious of you than of me for it.

Thanks for being willing to sacrifice all that so that the ones who dont post their plans on a PUBLIC board will have a little more time if TSHTF.


Myself I would never make it publicly known my plan or how I was going to break such laws were they enacted, because I feel its almost like walking into your friendly local ATF office and yelling "Hey you suckers, I dont like you, and I am a gun law breaker, I break gun laws and have illegal guns!!".

Sorry but thats how I feel. But everybody got the right to freespeech, or so they tell us.

[Robert Teesdale]

Guerilla1138:

If there are Federal agents trolling the board looking for people to put on a list...

they can put me on it first.

Our rights - and the preservation of our Republic - are FAR more important than worrying about some list somewhere.

Screw 'em.

MOLON LABE!

And furthermore...

I know not what course others may take, but as for me... give me liberty, or give me death!

Patrick Henry got it right.

Best regards,

Robert Teesdale
[email protected]
http://www.teesdale.com

[dZ]

yep, it would have been so much easier not to dump that tea...

IMHO, the roaring of Lions chases the jackels away.

It is working!

LIBERTY!

The Second Amendment is not about caching Liberty's Teeth,
It is about bearing them.

dZ

[Robert Teesdale]

DZ:

And it's about baring them sometimes, too....

Best regards,

Robert Teesdale
[email protected]
http://www.teesdale.com

[Parke1]

Lendringser,

This post is, without a doubt, the most sincere, heart-felt post I have ever read on TFL. I commend you on this essay, and believe me, it will be posted wherever I can.

Thank you.

-Parke1

[Marko Kloos]

I will be willing to bet you that the ATF or whoever Feds patrol this board have already read this, and already have it on file.
And they will be more suspicious of you than of me for it.

Well, they already have about thirty 4473 forms with all my vital stats,one for every handgun I purchased in the last fourteen months or so. If that doesn't get me on their list, I guess I'll have to earmark more money for guns. They know where to knock if and when they decide to check up on all them guns and all those troublemakers from the gun nut boards. They better start a hiring frenzy soon if that's in the cards: there aren't that many Booze-N-Gun feds out there. Compared to someof the resident TFLers, my gun collection is downright pathetic.

As far as opinions go: they haven't knocked on J.D.Tucille's or L.Neil Smith's doors yet, and those guys write stuff that makes my scribblings look like elementary school love letters to the Feds. If and when they cart those guys off, I'll allow myself a hint of worry.

Thanks for being willing to sacrifice all that so that the ones who dont post their plans on a PUBLIC board will have a little more time if TSHTF.

As far as a judge and jury are concerned, the above could have been written by a gifted German Shepherd named Rolf, who posts from an Ethernet-connected Etch-a-Sketch in a nursing home in Dusseldorf. They don't know Lendringser from Adam's housecat...or any of the other members on this board. Besides, they have too much to do with raiding legitimate gun dealers...they don't have time to track down every IP address on this board and try to match it with subscriber information. (But even if they did, that chain of evidence would get laughed out of every court between Miami and Anchorage.)

Myself I would never make it publicly known my plan or how I was going to break such laws were they enacted

And why not? As far as the passing of laws is concerned, silence is equal to consent. I make it clear that I will not consent to any future laws along these lines, and that I have no intention of obeying them. At least my future grandchildren will never accuse me of not speaking up. Moral laws derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and there are some laws that I will not consent to.

But everybody got the right to freespeech, or so they tell us.

If that was truly the case, and you truly believed that, you wouldn't be concerned about Big Brother reading what you post here...you would speak your mind freely.

"while u are burying your head in the sand i will be out doing something about the problem, excuse me if i tramp upon your skull." Guerilla1138

And what will you be doing about the problem, if you fear the other side so much that you can't even speak your mind on an anonymous gun board?

[loknload]

Very well written, Very well said. Amen to all of the above

[John/az2]

"When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..."

[WalterGAII]

Teesdale: By "baring" arms, do you mean wearing shortsleeved shirts?

[Robert Teesdale]

WalterGAII:

Actually, I was referring to DZ's comment about needing to bear "liberty's teeth" from time to time.

Such teeth ought to be bared from time to time as well....

Or is that arming bears? Or arming bares? Nudists with weapons?



Best regards,

Robert Teesdale
[email protected]
http://www.teesdale.com

[beemerb]

A law passed that is contrary to the consitution is not a legal law therefore need not be obeyed.

[7th Fleet]

Great post and that is probably the way it's gonna turn out. California is going through it right now and it just a matter of time until it's our turn in the barrel. In case you haven't noticed, we are living in a nation in a state of rapid decline.

7th

[Double Naught Spy]

While the sentiment is welcomed, there are just some things people should not commit in writing, especially to an open forum. Accolades from your peers may not offset whatever trouble such statements could potentially bring you in the future.

[AnotherPundit]

one thing to realize: there will never be a battle in the streets. There will be a thousand million lone arrests and lone confiscations, in a million different solitary pre-dawn homes, and each separate law-abiding citizen will in serial order face tens and hundreds of body-armored, full-auto-armed, paramilitarily trained SWAT/ATF troopsmen, coming into each separate homestead in the small hours of the night with all the power of helicopters and armored vehicles to back them up. It would be a war of highly trained, highly armed, highly organized forces against random assortments of unsupported, untrained, and lightly equipped civilians, and the civilians would lose, lose quickly, and lose badly.

If it ever comes to armed resistance, we will lose. Any such fight will be a fight for defiance, not for victory.

[SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI]

My hat's off to you, sir! That is one of the most eloquent and well-written posts I have ever had the privilege of reading. It explains our position perfectly. I wiil be posting copies of it in conspicious places. Thank you. You have my gratitude.