Don's Tuesday Column

        THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/07/2022

We’re mad as hell, not gonna take it

The FBI arrested former Trump trade official Peter Navarro as he was boarding a domestic flight, handcuffing and leg shackling him to a courtroom under threat of imprisonment. The putative crime? Defying a Congressional subpoena from the Democrat “kangaroo court” panel, aka Jan. 6 committee, which has no legitimacy as a congressional body, having violated clear rules requiring the minority party (Republican) to choose their members.

“San Fran” Nancy Pelosi rejected Republican leader McCarthy’s picks, unilaterally choosing RINOs (Republicans In Name Only): Trump-hating Liz Cheney (Fraud-Wyoming) and Adam Kinzinger (Never Trump-Ill). This illegal committee—illegal for any purpose other than issuing hysterical, disingenuous press fodder, as we’ll see this week—is Pelosi’s “star chamber” Jan. 6 panel with no authority to demand compliance with requests or subpoenas.

A legitimate, legal, rules-abiding body would have the authority to demand compliance from targeted government or private sector witnesses relevant to an investigation. “Contempt of Congress” charges would still have no legal power to punish, prosecute or convict—absent judicial rulings.

Hence, Biden directed A.G. Garland to act as if a major crime had been committed, dispatching armed FBI agents to arrest Peter Navarro. Deprived of his freedom to travel as if he was “guilty until proven innocent,” this political persecution mirrors proverbial “banana republics” where strongmen rule by force.

In 2012, a bipartisan “Contempt of Congress” citation was issued against Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, for refusing to provide subpoenaed documents over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running operation that resulted in the deaths of a Border Patrol officer and countless Mexicans. He ignored the request, and no further action was taken by either the DOJ or the FBI; they can’t be forced to criminally prosecute based on Congressional orders.

Navarro told Republican Americans, via the gathered press, “They’re not just coming for me, they’re coming for you.” “Outside the courthouse, he told reporters that he had offered the FBI a ‘modus vivendi’ of cooperation last week, but that they had arrested him at the airport instead, in the manner of ‘Stalinist Russia or the Chinese Communist Party.’ He described his treatment by the FBI as ‘terrorism’ and ‘coercion’ and as a form of punishment and intimidation.” (Breitbart.com)

We who patriotically revere the U.S. Constitution—and its First and Second Amendment prohibitions against “Congress” making any law “abridging” freedoms (speech, press, assembly) or “infringing…the right to keep and bear arms”—are “mad as hell” that a Congressional majority don’t take it seriously. While many of us are marginally religious, the blithe denigration of the inviolable words—“prohibiting the free (religious) exercise thereof”—defies the Constitution’s enshrining of each citizen’s (or believer’s) conscience. No mention of “misinformation” cancelling said freedoms.

Politicians and gun control advocates are on notice: We who live law-abiding lives, even shunning traffic infractions, are sick and tired of being “patsies,” presumed to be the “gun violence” problem when we’re just targets for yet more laws, prohibitions and restrictions criminalizing our weapons, magazines and sporting practices. Don’t pee on our leg and tell us it’s raining.

We know, and suspect you also know, that criminals 1) pay scant attention to said laws, 2) seek only to evade capture and jail, 3) know the de-incarceration-obsessed judicial system will eagerly process them with no/low bail and a return to the streets as heroes, and 4) love gun control and disarmament of citizens via “concealed carry” restrictions because bad guys mercilessly prey on vulnerable, disarmed folks.

Enforce existing gun laws by convicting criminals violating them to long stretches before telling us you need more gun laws for our own good.

As politicians ignore the above, we “normals” seethe as slaughtered innocents turn, within a news cycle, into fodder for those whose agenda and goals to disarm us have remained unchanged for decades, shelved only until the next mass shooting by someone already on the radar for aberrant, threatening words and behavior. Guns are inanimate tools, incapable of doing harm without evil hands wielding them, but obsessed over while multiple cultural, social and legal trends leading to these shootings are dismissed—“nothing to see.”

The President, leftist media and anti-gunners lie to our faces at every turn. “Out of 97 countries with data, the U.S. is 64^th in frequency of mass shootings and 65^th in murder rate.” Wyoming, for instance, has few gun laws, lots of legal weapons and a lower rate of gun crime than cross-border Canada. Agenda-driven news media choose to accentuate the gun crime in our nation of 330 million, while France has 4 times our per capita deaths from mass shootings; Norway has 21 times our rate.

Contributors to (mostly) young men’s psychotic killing sprees: the destruction of the nuclear family, particularly the denigration and marginalization of fathers and their essential role in turning unruly boys into responsible young men; the drug culture, especially the “gateway” drug of marijuana with its far greater potency than even 10 years ago, inducing psychoses and anti-social emotions among heavy users; deinstitutionalizing mentally ill who need care and treatment, not freedom, isolation and personal torment;

Social isolation—no church, neighbors, school counselors or extended family to take notice and provide positive replacements for bad company, gangs and obsessive video gaming; the news media’s infatuation with school shootings nearly assures us there’ll be more seeking such notoriety; the misguided attempts to break the so-called “school to jail” cycle, enabling, tolerating student perpetrators of violence.

Finally, armed and trained teachers and citizens stop killers; guns are used to stop criminals—often without a shot fired—up to a million times a year.