Do You Really Own You Home?

 

Kelo v. City of New London was the test case which now is the frame for the law of the land on private ownership of property. This case went to the Supreme Court of the United States where there was a conservative court of five Republican appointees and four Democrat appointees in 2005. As expected, the final vote was five to four but we will keep which way the vote went until later. First, let us review the particulars of this case. The plaintiff was Susette Kelo who owned a private home and sued the city of New London, Connecticut, over their use of Eminent Domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner in order to further economic development. The city posed the argument that their transfer of these lands, which included the home of Susette Kelo, to a private developer would expand the tax base plus provide economic development and jobs which would benefit a much larger segment of the people making the taking of the homes of these citizens worth doing in order to promote the general good. The citizens represented by Susette Kelo based their claim that their homes, as private property, were a sacred trust protected which was a superior claim and that the claim to use Eminent Domain was not a legal use as the transfer was not for a public use building and that Eminent Domain was solely applicable to public works such as roads, schools, hospitals, libraries and other such structures and not for providing the lands to a developer to build which was referenced as a “Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan.”

 

We remember when this case was being discussed on talk radio and in many of the nation’s newspapers. The breakdown on which side was supported was predictable. The mostly older citizens represented by Susette Kelo were supported by the conservative and right wing media while New London, Connecticut, government representing the developers was supported by the liberal and leftist media with a few notable exceptions who were true liberals with a very libertarian outlook. The arguments went as expected. Those supporting Susette Kelo held that personal property rights were superior to granting a big developer use of these lands over the individuals whose families had lived in this neighborhood for decades. The leftists and many liberals supported the “Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan” as it would provide increased revenue for the city of New London, Connecticut, thus benefitting the entire city over the few people. This was the public debate and that was a heated debate for that time. One need remember that the Internet was still young and social media was still to come so this debate took place in the old school arenas, that being radio, television, cable TV, newspapers and magazines. As we have stated, it was straight-forward individual citizen’s rights who owned their property over the designs and dreams of a developer and the greed of city administrators licking their chops at the increased tax base. But there was a surprise waiting to take the day in court.

 

Susette Kelo and House (top)
New London, Connecticut Kull Property Development Plan (bottom)

 

The argument in the court found their trumping argument, they portrayed the remaining homeowners’ properties as eyesores, rundown, in need of repair and every other degrading description they could imagine, and they were imaginative. They had bought the majority of properties and either leveled them or left them to fall into disrepair. This furthered their insistence that these properties were eyesores and many below standards for viability. One look at the residence of Susette Kelo shows a well kept and very livable condition, but there were sufficient other residences which were available for the city and the developer to make their case for demolition of the remaining residences allowing them to receive the orders for destruction in order to upgrade the entire area. The combined arguments and predominance of evidence supporting that this was an old and run down area played a main role in allowing the decision to leave the longtime homeowners with nowhere left to turn. Additionally, their losing the case meant they were forced to accept the city’s low figure for buying their homes. The homeowners who fought city hall did so out of a deep family attachment to their homes which many of the residents had grown up in as children and inherited from their parents who in some cases inherited them from their parents. When you live in a multi-generation house, the attachment is deep and often will lead one to become overly emotional. These homeowners would very likely had received a far greater amount for their homes had they simply taken the developers final offer rather than fight them in the courts. Such a fight is unfortunately a losing fight which the homeowner will lose, if not in the near time, then in the long-term, as was the case here. Going to court is always a last resort and even if you win the initial case, the developer has attorneys on their payrolls so it does not cost them anything but time to appeal and appeal and eventually they will find a sympathetic judge and once they win, the homeowner is highly unlikely to get that decision reversed as the higher court will defer to the judgement of the lower court as to the conditions at the local level. This was a case, pure and simple, of you cannot fight city hall. Apparently, the Supreme Court agrees with that adage.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The Overriding Lie Ignored by the Gun Grabbers

The one thing you can be assured of is that after any shooting which provides great emotional drama usually due to the vulnerability or the complete innocence of the victims and the ability to paint the perpetrator as uncontrollable evil loosed upon an unsuspecting society to wreak havoc. The same week as the tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut there were almost twice as many murders throughout the United States perpetrated throughout the inner cities of the country. Most of the victims of the shootings in the inner cities were also somebody’s baby, there precious young child yet they did not present the sympathetic victim scenario that the gun banning politicians wait for with an almost salivating anticipation. The espousers of banning all firearms are silent on the slaughters that make up the vast majority of those injured or murdered by firearm violence because there is no real sympathy content to be exploited. If the anti-gun proponents were to be honest we would hear about these murders and not a day could go by without their expressing their great sorrow for the loss of life across the lands. The choices of which victims of gun violence the grabbers choose to utilize as their inspiration to maximize societal outrage speaks volumes about both the people who wish to deny guns to all and their target audience. Their selective sympathies leave me suspect as the largest number of victims of firearms misuse are completely ignored except when utilized as cold statistics.

The whole subject of gun violence in our societies has grown and matured completely in the past fifty or so years. Except for the spree of gun violence during the years of prohibition, gun violence was the exception rather than the rule and mass murders were virtually unheard nonexistent. The gun violence of the 1930s was directly tied to organized crime and mostly the result of turf wars between different gangs. This has once again become a prevalent problem with the growth of the drug trade and the developing of wars over areas of control by the different drug interests. The problem this presents to the gun grabbers is that the carnage resultant of the violent contests between different drug gangs and other illegal industries is they do not provide a sympathetic victim for them to exploit. That is why we only hear about gun violence when some usually disturbed your man who is most often found to be under care for some emotional or mental difficulties and often on psychotropic or other mental transformational drugs. If one of these disturbed shooters were to go on their shooting spree on a Saturday night in downtown inner city America we would likely hear about a rash of gun deaths and that the police were trying to figure out a common thread but we would not hear even one peep about the necessity of stronger gun laws. This little truth makes one wonder about the driving motivations of many of the gun grabbers, doesn’t it?

If the gun control supporters were really about preventing gun violence they would be addressing all violence but that is not their motivation. Their motivation is about control and they know that government can only control an unarmed people. The gun prohibition people are fully aware of the political science theory which states, “Where the government fears the people you have liberty but where the people fear the government you get tyranny.” They are also fully aware that the Second Amendment has absolutely nothing to do with hunting beyond putting food on the table, nothing to do with target shooting beyond mastering your accuracy, nothing to do with defending your home and life though that is a benefit of being armed, but is all about preventing the usurpation of power and the onset of a tyrannical government. The real motivation for the Second Amendment was directly related to, “The shot that was heard around the world.” With that shot and the rest that followed it were when the War for Independence began. But how many of you know why the American settlers were fighting the British troops that day and the mission given those British troops. The little secret that is rarely taught in history classes any longer is the British troops were dispatched that spring day of April 19, 1775, to go to Lexington and Concord and impound all the weapons from the American settlers’ armories. That’s right; the British were enforcing gun control and were out to grab the settlers’ guns in order to continue to exercise the tyranny of King George. That was the bases and inspiration that was behind the Second Amendment and not self-defense or hunting or any other gun related gun activity.

The above little fact is often countered by claiming that having any firearm that is readily owned under existing laws are hardly sufficient to fight a tyrannical government with a military that is fully equipped with modern weapons systems, tanks, jet fighters, bombers and other support units. The truth to that is that during the American Revolution the settlers fought against the most powerful army on the face of the planet, the English. The American settlers utilized the rifle over the hearth, so to speak. They augmented their armories by capturing support weapons such as during the battle for Boston when the settlers dispatched the Green Mountain Boys led by Ethan Allen and Colonel Benedict Arnold who defeated the English troops to capture and bring back the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga. These cannons arrived just in time to be placed on a hilltop overlooking Boston and the harbor forcing the British to flee to their ships and depart the field of battle that day. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising they had a collection of revolvers, three rifles with each of the groups with some homemade Molotov cocktails, and only two land mines and one submachine gun in the entire Ghetto with which to take on an entire Panzer Battalion. With this meager amount of armaments to begin the uprising they took out as many guards and German soldiers as they could without arousing any suspicions in order to attain more and superior weapons with which to fight what they knew was a futile but necessary resistance. They held the German forces off for almost an entire month and only lost when the entire ghetto was destroyed using Panzer tanks, poison gas, and setting one fourth of the city of Warsaw alight destroying everything by fire. Then there is the story behind the FP-45 Liberator and the French freedom-fighters during World War II. These one shot excuse for a firearm were produced by the thousands and dropped into the French countryside and used by the French resistance. They would take one of these single shot weapons and use it to kill one Nazi soldier and take his weapon. Then they could use that superior weapon to shoot the next Nazi soldier or group of soldiers and take those weapons. Eventually they would have sufficient weapons to take out a machine gun position and gain some really great firepower. That is what can be done with a gun that has one bullet in one primitive single-shot weapon and that once fired is made useless. To win a war it is not necessary to actually defeat the enemy, it is only sufficient to make their continuing to hold their position so expensive in men, material and other costs that it is no longer worth the efforts to retain or resist the opposition. That is the entire principle behind asymmetrical warfare. The people at the top of the organization fighting to take away all firearms from the people are never interested in controlling guns; they are simply interested in control, most often unchallenged, all encompassing, undisputed control of the populous. That is the real and hidden truth behind gun control, or should we simply call it by its real name, people control.

Beyond the Cusp

Gun Ban Whiplash Coming from Anti-Gun Progressives

The sides are being drawn and the arguments built with a generous assist from the Progressive mainstream-media along with anti-gun, anti-freedoms and anti-right NGOs with full intent of doing compromising damage to the United States Constitution. Even the spate of recent shootings in malls and movie theaters before the horrid event at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut had not raised the ire and expectations of the anti-Second Amendment forces to the point where they had visions of making the United States just like much of Europe with strident anti-gun laws in addition to the other areas where it appears that Europe is the perfect model that our government is attempting to emulate. But with the death by the most vile and heinous actions by a deranged and sick mind beyond the ability of most people to grasp and get their mind around is now going to be utilized by people who almost appear delirious in their anticipation of an opportunity to finally force their weapons restrictions on the rest of the country almost standing on the corpses of these children. They have not even been placed in the ground and their eulogies given and the mourning begun to wane and these vultures are already swooping in and taking advantage of the raw emotions of the moment. This is nothing more than a sick and revulsive opportunism using the tragedy of twenty innocent young children having been gunned down by a young man with deep mental problems who experienced something in his life that triggered his violent and hideous acts that resulted in the carnage of which we have seen too many photos and now our raw emotions are being leveraged to pass laws before reason and normalcy returns allowing for rational, logical, fully thought out debate to be possible. This is pure exploitation of the deaths of these children and is a more ghoulish perversion of the national mourning than polite and respectful people would ever consider allowing, but these people are willing to use any serious crisis and refuse to allow such to ever be wasted.

If people want to make sure catastrophes and crisis such as what happened at the Sandy Hook Elementary School from ever reoccurring, banning guns will not suffice and it would be more effective and equally effective to outlaw severe anger. It would be more effective to incarcerate people who have a likelihood of turning violent due to mental disorders, especially if they go off their medications. But that is no longer an option thanks to many of the same Progressives who are now decrying this tragedy and demanding we ban firearms and have argued starting in 1955 and continuing to the present that the vast majority of those we consider to have some form of mental illness or instability would be better served if allowed to live within our society, as being isolated in an institution removed them from examples of normalcy, making their opportunity to find role models impossible. They brought psychiatrists, psychologists and numerous other “experts” to testify that closing the mental institutions and other such facilities and placing the patients from these places into society where they would find role models and have to learn to cope with reality. The legislators were told that the institutions only served to guarantee that those with mental illness and related difficulties if left in institutions would likely never be cured and thus we were doing a great disservice to these unfortunate people by leaving them in a situation that simply reinforced their conditions and disallowed for recovery. The idea was put forth that if we simply treated these people as outpatients they would continue to receive the same level of supervision and care as they would in a State institution and even in the majority of the private institutions and their living in the real world would restore them to a normalcy unavailable in the accursed institutions. As a result, since 1960 we have closed in excess of 80% of the houses and institutions which held the mentally ill, mentally challenged, and the absolute psychotics and others who suffered from some form of mental troubles of maladjustments.

Some of those who were returned to the real world and were just dropped into society ended up living with relatives or others who attended to them and made sure their medications were kept up and that they visited their counselor, psychiatrist, or other care professional on a regular basis and were present to note any changes in their behavior and could arrange additional care when necessary. Others ended up in less appropriate conditions including a number who ended up being homeless and off of their medications and fell through the cracks and were no longer monitored. This is currently getting worse as President Obama has the Department of Justice applying a strict interpretation of the  Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision forcing states to work with the Department of Health and Human Services to move even more patients from being institutionalized into outpatient treatment programs. Needless to say, not just allowing but forcing the deinstitutionalization of people with mental disabilities and the placement of them into the society in an attempt to give them a more encouraging setting that would allow for easing their transition into societal normalized lives will have some failures which can have disastrous consequences. But woe be the anti-firearms proponents to even mention that this could possibly be a contributing factor. It is not the troubled individual who is the problem to these fanatics; it is a half-pound of metal formed, cast, bored and machined without a brain or any compulsions of its own that grabs these mentally unbalanced people and drags them into a target rich environment and makes them shoot people randomly and even possibly repeatedly.

The final item is the locations that these shooting take place. They happen in schools, movie theaters, malls, and other places where absolutely nobody except officials of the state, sometimes referred to as police, are permitted to have a firearm on their person. These bans include even those who are licensed by the state to carry a concealed firearm in public and force them to become as unarmed as everybody else who decides to make use of these premises. For reasons that escape my limited abilities in logic; I have never ever heard of one of these shootings taking place at a gun store or a gun range. I wonder why that is?

Beyond the Cusp