If The Public Shouldn't Have Them, Why Does The IRS Need AR-15s?
by Tyler Durden
Jun 24, 2016 8:10 PM
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Here we go again. Stuck in the aftermath of a horrific shooting and all politicians think to do is scheme about how to take more rights from the citizenry. There are no good guys here. The Democrats want to railroad over due process by denying firearms to people on Orwellian watch lists, while Republicans plot to give the FBI more warrantless surveillance powers. This is the authoritarian knee-jerk response to tragedy we get from the U.S Congress.
Hypocritically, when it comes to foreign policy, all we hear are incessant calls for more militarism, more war and more regime change. As I warned in yesterday’s post, Is the Syrian War About to Experience a Major Escalation? — 51 State Department officials just issued a cable calling for the bombing of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. An event likely to lead to direct confrontation with Russia.
As Adam Andrzejewski of Open the Books and former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:
Open the Books is a nonpartisan, non-profit organization focused on providing transparency in government.
Here we go again. Stuck in the aftermath of a horrific shooting and all politicians think to do is scheme about how to take more rights from the citizenry. There are no good guys here. The Democrats want to railroad over due process by denying firearms to people on Orwellian watch lists, while Republicans plot to give the FBI more warrantless surveillance powers. This is the authoritarian knee-jerk response to tragedy we get from the U.S Congress.
Hypocritically, when it comes to foreign policy, all we hear are incessant calls for more militarism, more war and more regime change. As I warned in yesterday’s post, Is the Syrian War About to Experience a Major Escalation? — 51 State Department officials just issued a cable calling for the bombing of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. An event likely to lead to direct confrontation with Russia.
While all of that is bad enough,
the U.S. government continues to eagerly and aggressively arm
non-defense federal employees with weapons of war.
The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000).For more, let’s take a look at a few excerpts from their piece, Why Does the IRS Need Guns?
Special agents at the IRS equipped with AR-15 military-style rifles? Health and Human Services “Special Office of Inspector General Agents” being trained by the Army’s Special Forces contractors? The Department of Veterans Affairs arming 3,700 employees?
The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20 years, the number of these federal officers with arrest-and-firearm authority has nearly tripled to over 200,000 today, from 74,500 in 1996.
What exactly is the Obama administration up to?
On Friday, June 17, our organization, American Transparency, is releasing its OpenTheBooks.com oversight report on the militarization of America. The report catalogs federal purchases of guns, ammunition and military-style equipment by seemingly bureaucratic federal agencies. During a nine-year period through 2014, we found, 67 agencies unaffiliated with the Department of Defense spent $1.48 billion on guns and ammo. Of that total, $335.1 million was spent by agencies traditionally viewed as regulatory or administrative, such as the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Mint.
• The Internal Revenue Service, which has 2,316 special agents, spent nearly $11 million on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment. That’s nearly $5,000 in gear for each agent.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs, which has 3,700 law-enforcement officers guarding and securing VA medical centers, spent $11.66 million. It spent more than $200,000 on night-vision equipment, $2.3 million for body armor, more than $2 million on guns, and $3.6 million for ammunition. The VA employed no officers with firearm authorization as recently as 1995.
• The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service spent $4.77 million purchasing shotguns, .308 caliber rifles, night-vision goggles, propane cannons, liquid explosives, pyro supplies, buckshot, LP gas cannons, drones, remote-control helicopters, thermal cameras, military waterproof thermal infrared scopes and more.For more detail, check out the full report here: OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – The Militarization Of America.
People from both ends of the political spectrum have expressed alarm at this trend. Conservatives argue that it is hypocritical, unconstitutional and costly for political leaders to undermine the Second Amendment while simultaneously equipping nonmilitary agencies with heavy weapons, hollow-point bullets and military-style equipment. Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders have raised civil liberties concerns about the militarization of local police with vehicles built for war and other heavy weaponry.
Our data shows that the federal government has become a gun show that never adjourns. Taxpayers need to tell Washington that police powers belong primarily to cities and states, not the feds.
Open the Books is a nonpartisan, non-profit organization focused on providing transparency in government.
I would like to think that the government is my friend although it has occurred to me that this might not be the case. Here is another opinion on this matter.
ReplyDeleteOrlando Shooting: The Cold, Cold Monster Strikes Again
By James Ostrowski
ArtVoice
June 25, 2016
I could write a book about the Orlando shooting, its antecedents and its exploitation by the Progressive State of America. Alas, that won’t be necessary. If you understand two key concepts, you can unravel the whole puzzle very quickly. If you don’t understand them, you will be quickly swept out to sea by a progressive rip tide, not ever knowing what hit you.
First, the government creates its own demand. Second, once you understand what progressivism is, you then immediately understand how progs robotically react to each new crisis.
The government is perhaps the least understood institution because so far as we are led to believe, it always existed, must always exist and no alternative to it can possibly be imagined. Further, the words used to describe it and what it does do not remotely convey the true facts. Because the state’s existence is never questioned anymore than we question the existence of air, water or soil, the plethora of problems caused by the state are rarely if ever recognized, let alone delineated and evaluated. We don’t even have a concept or a word for them, an oversight I hope to cure in my next book.
Presently, the state, especially “our” own, has the world at each other’s throats. The state, by its very nature, is continually at war with the innate desire of individuals to do what they wish with what they own: liberty! This creates continual conflict, micro, and macro, creates resentments and hostilities, reduces wealth, kills dreams and generates an endless supply of problems that would not otherwise exist. All that the state does creates winners and losers which are often grouped along racial, ethnic or religious lines. Accordingly, because of the state, different groups begin to view other groups as enemies or potential enemies. The state is the reason we cannot “all get along.” The brute force approach of the state in all it does makes peaceful, voluntary coexistence among disparate groups impossible.
ReplyDeleteCurrent Prices on popular forms of Silver Bullion
The American State has been at war with or monkeying around with the greater Middle East for about 100 years, not coincidentally, co-extensive with the era of progressivism, the belief that violent state action can cure all human problems. The Progressive State of America is currently at war with or in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. ISIS is a by-product of the Iraq War of 2003 and the Libyan intervention of 2011. Barack Obama has been the prime mover behind these wars which have killed tens of thousands and created thousands of terrorists bent on retaliation of the kind George Washington warned us about in his Farewell address.
Last week, Omar Mateen, a son of Afghanistan, speaking in Arabic, explained his terrorist attack in Orlando as follows:
“In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficial [said in Arabic]. Praise be to God, and prayers, as well as peace, be upon the prophet of God [said in Arabic]. I let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings. I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State. . . . “
ISIS is calling Mateen an “Islamic State fighter.” On Facebook, Mateen wrote:
“I pledge my alliance to (ISIS leader) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi … may Allah accept me,”
“The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west …You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance.”[1]
While the US is out and about in the world, manufacturing terrorists, it is busy at home making it more difficult for us to protect ourselves, for example, by making bars into legal gun-free zones. Of course, as the victims found out, bars aren’t actually gun-free. The state also extracts funds from us and promises police protection but in Orlando, the police arrived just in time to draw chalk lines around the bodies. They are often “crime historians” at such events in the words of Professor Thomas DiLorenzo.
Thus, based on what we know now, in this instance, the state pointlessly manufactured enemies for ordinary Americans, helped disarm them, and then failed to protect them as it promised to do. Alas, the government creates its own demand. The sociopaths immediately responded to their failure in Orlando by promising the solve the problems they created by, of course, grabbing more and more power and promising to use force against millions of peaceful and lawful Americans who own rifles.
Where does progressivism enter the picture? Progressivism is a form of self-help therapy whereby the patient prescribes himself the medication of more government force as the magical solution to whatever ails him. I have identified a formula for how progressive politicians and journalists respond to crises:
ReplyDelete1. The notion that government action itself caused the problem is ignored.
2. Non-governmental scapegoats for problems are sought.
3. Non-governmental solutions to problems are not considered.
4. Only governmental solutions to problems, even problems caused by government itself, are considered.
Thus, with Orlando, the alleged need for stricter gun control was discussed within a few hours of the shooting and before the details of the attack were known. Private gun owners are ideal scapegoats for progressives as they are non-governmental entities. There was virtually no mention in the mainstream media of how various government policies may have caused or contributed to the mass shooting, for example, American intervention in the Middle East for the last 100 years. Nor was there any real discussion of non-governmental solutions such as arming more citizens with handguns. Apparently, few of the people inside the bar were armed, a fact the shooter presumably counted on.
So far, the state and the sociopaths who run it have escaped all responsibility for their contribution to the tragedy in Orlando. On the contrary, they openly and brazenly blame those who played no role in the shooting at all, for the purpose of seizing ever more power and money from their victims.
I will let Nietzsche have the final word on all this: “A state? What is that? Well! Open now your ears to me, for now, I will speak to you about the death of peoples. The state is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’”
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
The Best of James Ostrowski