AmmoLand.com

Early Returns – A Move Toward Smaller Government & Less Gun Control?
By Chris Knox

FirearmsCoalition.org

Phoenix, AZ --(AmmoLand.com)- It’s a Republican sweep in Virginia. Bob McDonnell has the election locked up along with fellow Republicans winning the Lt. Governor and Attorney General offices. The Republican victory in Virginia was overwhelming, with the GOP netting a combined 60 percent of the vote over Democrats in the three races.

In New Jersey, an unpopular (and Brady Bunch-endorsed) Democrat lost to what passes for a conservative Republican in that part of the world.

Meanwhile in New York’s 23rd District, the Republican leadership had an opportunity to learn something about party discipline when their anointed candidate Dede Scozzafava, a genuinely liberal Republican, was pushed out of the race by an upstart conservative candidate who claimed Glenn Beck as his mentor. The Democrat appears to have won, but with the upstart Hoffman making a splash. The chin-stroking started immediately that the New York results are the harbinger of a gathering “civil war” within the Republican Party. Maybe.

The really good news is that this election may be the first green shoots of a renaissance of republican (lower-case R) politics. By a “republican renaissance” I mean that classical republican ideas like the rule of law, limited government with checks and balances, as laid out in the U.S. Constitution, may be gaining a new currency in the political marketplace.

It was Gerald Ford who accurately noted that, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.” A smaller government promises less, but it is also less of a threat to individual liberty. A small federal government is not something that will happen overnight – frankly I doubt that I’ll see it in my lifetime. Even the “cuts” of the Reagan Revolution were only modest decreases in the rate of growth. The key questions moving forward are whether the Republican Party can field candidates to satisfy the growing demand for limited government, and whether Democratic voters are willing to support candidates who will rein in government expansion, reversing the trend toward federal control. Few viable limited-government candidates have appeared from either party, but demand should eventually generate supply.

To make sure that yesterday’s election results become an ongoing trend in the right direction, GunVoters must get involved now. The first place to start is www.GunVoter.org. See what information is there for your state and what is missing and then start trying to fill the gaps. Get together with your club or state association’s political guy. Take him to lunch and ask questions. Find out who’s running, who deserves help, and whose balloon needs popping. Get involved with your local political party of choice so you can participate in selecting candidates from the ground floor. When you find answers, the next step is to go back to GunVoter.og and build the knowledgebase so others can be more effective.

Keep in mind that although federal elections are important, it’s in state legislatures and city councils that tomorrow’s senators and representatives are groomed. You can wield much more influence in those races and with those candidates than you can in federal campaigns.

As my brother Jeff likes to say, little politicians grow up to be big politicians – catch them while they’re small.

“The Belgian Corporal,” the story I chose as the prologue to the recently released compilation of Neal Knox’s writing, Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War, is a wrenching story of a Nazi atrocity in Belgium and a cautionary tale regarding the dangers of gun registration. The story was told to Dad by a Belgian-American corporal who was with him in the Texas National Guard. We released the story on the Internet (www.NealKnox.com) when the book came out and it has gained a gratifying amount of circulation.

While the praise has been overwhelming, there are some dissenting voices suggesting that the massacre in the story never happened – at least not in Belgium. We have no way of knowing for sure, though I continue to research into it. What we do know for certain is the impression that the story made on a young (just turned nineteen) Neal Knox. For him, the Belgian Corporal’s story rang true. He believed it in his bones and it changed his life.

If you haven’t ordered your copy of Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War, I hope you will. It’s raw history written as it happened by someone who was often a key participant. I can’t promise you’ll read a story that changes your life, but I’ll bet you’ll learn something. To order a copy, go to www.NealKnox.com or www.FirearmsCoalition.org.

To receive The Firearms Coalition’s bi-monthly newsletter, The Knox Hard Corps Report, write to PO Box 3313, Manassas, VA 20108.

Neal Knox Associates – The most trusted name in the rights movement.

About:
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement.

Filed under: Gun Rights News by Ammoland No Comments »

Prosecution as Punishment The Troubling Case of Albert Kwan
By Jeff Knox

Phoenix, Arizona --(AmmoLand.com)- People who “have nothing to hide” are often quite happy to answer any questions and consent to any intrusion a police officer might ask of them. They may even invite officers to “look around” if they want to. If you ask a good defense attorney how much you should cooperate with police, particularly when they are conducting an investigation in which you could possibly be a suspect, he will tell you “Not at all.” Don’t give them one word more than you must and never give them permission to search your car, look through your home, or examine any of your guns.

David Olofson took the “nothing to hide” approach. When the police confiscated one of his firearms from a friend he had loaned it to, Olofson freely chatted with police about how many guns he had, how many he has built, how he helps people to buy and assemble their own AR-platform rifles, and quite a bit more. David Olofson’s loquacious ways probably helped to put him in prison for 30 months for illegally transferring an unregistered machine gun – that was actually just a malfunctioning semi-auto – and his case has set a very dangerous precedent which threatens all gun owners.

On the other side of the coin is Albert Kwan. A Seattle Class III firearms dealer and collector, Kwan followed the path of minimal cooperation. When agents asked him about a pair of Makarov barrels they thought he might have bought and asked to examine any Makarovs or Makarov parts he might have, Albert told them he had only purchased one barrel and that they should get a warrant if they wanted to examine it or anything else he owned. Kwan says he wasn’t trying to hide anything; he just wanted to make sure his rights were respected and his privacy protected. Unfortunately, under-cooperating can be as problematic as over-cooperating.

Albert Kwan’s lack of cooperation “raised red flags” with agents investigating a murder case – the murder of a federal prosecutor. Albert was never a suspect in the murder, but agents thought he might have sold the gun, or at least the barrel, that the murderer used and they wanted to know where that barrel had gone. When he refused to let agents look at his guns and take his Makarovs, agents’ were peeved and they began trying to force Kwan to tell them what they wanted to hear – something Kwan has consistently maintained that he is unable to do because he says he never had a second barrel.

The persecution of Albert Kwan escalated from agents knocking on his door and asking a few questions, to agents serving a search warrant on his home and business confiscating firearms, ammunition, computers, and business records, to his arrest as a “material witness” in a murder investigation, and his eventual prosecution on trumped-up violations of the National Firearms Act. The ATF claimed that a legal, “de-milled,” semi-auto M14 was actually a machine gun, and that Kwan’s possession of a detachable shoulder stock for one of his legally owned submachine guns made a semi-auto pistol he owned, which could also accept the detachable stock, an unregistered “short-barreled rifle.” Both accusations blatantly disregarded ATF policy and established legal precedents.

When the jury learned that ATF had to extensively machine and add extra parts to Kwan’s M14 to make it fire full-auto, they rejected that charge, but prosecutors were able to convince them on the short-barreled rifle charge. Then the judge discovered that ATF and prosecutors had misled him and the jury about the stock and its multiple applications so he took the unusual step of overturning the conviction. But the government still didn’t want to let go of Albert Kwan so they appealed the reversal, but Kwan won the appeal in November of 2008. Since then Kwan has been going through legal channels trying to recover his property. The ordeal has cost him more than three years, his Army Reserve retirement, his firearms business, his commercial real estate business, his reputation, and tens of thousands of dollars above and beyond his life savings.

So, how much should one cooperate with the police? The principled answer remains the same – cooperate only as much as the law requires. But in a world where federal prosecutors are willing and able to use the system to retaliate against people who don’t cooperate, the principled response carries its own set of risks. That shouldn’t be the case in a nation based on laws. And it begs the question of just what kind of nation we are becoming.

Christmas is coming! Make sure the next generation fighting for our rights understands the struggles, successes, and mistakes of the last generation. Give the gift of knowledge; Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War. Available now at www.NealKnox.com.

Filed under: Gun Rights News by Ammoland No Comments »