<http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Mar-28-Sun-2004/opinion/23416639.html> Sunday, March 28, 2004 Las Vegas Review-Journal VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: You can't hide your lying eyes I see where the people of Haiti finally got sick of defrocked collectivist priest and all-around "necklace" killer Jean-Bertrand Aristide, took up arms, and kicked him out. So what are U.S. forces doing there now? About 1,800 of our guys have been sent in to -- in the words of Associated Press reporter Paisley Dodds -- "rid the nation of guns." Hey, good plan. In the great tradition of George Washington, Francis Marion, and young Jim Monroe, the Haitian people just used firearms to throw out a vicious tyrant, and the immediate goal of Big White Brother is to "rebuild a shattered police force and disarm militants who began the insurgency." At least back in 1994, when the freedom-loving Bill Clinton sent in 20,000 troops to install Aristide the murderous dictator, U.S. troops offered to buy these weapons of freedom in order to better enslave the natives. This time (Mr. Dodds reports) "Haitians ... are being asked to give up their guns with little or no incentive and in a very insecure environment." The only good news? U.S. forces, Mr. Dodds reports, have so far "recovered two shotguns. Their Chilean counterparts have confiscated three weapons." Washington City has no constitutional authorization whatever to spend our tax dollars sending troops into Haiti to disarm "uppity Negroes" who dared fight to win their own freedom. And also for the record, there were no organized police departments in this country until the 1850s. That's right: From 1776 until at least 1850 America was a nation of "armed insurgent militants" with no government police. And we got along just fine. How do you think the people of the proud, young, free United States of America would have reacted if some foreign army had arrived here in 1783 with the declared the goal of "ridding the nation of the guns" that had just been used to win America's freedom? Why does our Second Amendment say a well-armed citizen militia is necessary? That's right, it's "necessary to the security of a free state." After all, as early as 1785, our own Southern states were passing laws that "No slaves shall keep any arms whatever, nor pass, unless with written orders from his master or employer, or in his company, with arms from one place to another." Whereas, in his proposed constitution for the state of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government." Notice the definitive difference there between "free men" and "slaves"? In 1788, debating the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a great patriot and friend of Washington named George Mason stood in Richmond and recalled: "When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was Governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should do it not openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually. ... I ask, who are the Militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers." And it was no less a freedom-fighter than Mohandas Gandhi who said, in 1927: "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of its arms as the blackest." And this conspiracy to attack and remove the very tools of freedom is not isolated. There isn't even any Second Amendment in the new Iraqi constitution, according to World Net Daily. In a March 10 piece bearing the sub-headline "Colin Powell hails prohibition on arms while emphasizing 'liberty,' " WND correspondent Ron Strom writes: "Iraq's new interim constitution sounds many of the same themes as the U.S. Constitution in guaranteeing freedom of the people -- with one stark difference: There is no right to keep and bear arms in the new charter." The document does indeed promise a whole bunch of freedoms. (So did the Soviet Constitution.) But when it comes to civilian ownership of military-style arms -- which our founding fathers warned us was the last and only real safeguard of the rest of our liberties? The only reference to individual ownership of arms is in Article 17: "It shall not be permitted to possess, bear, buy, or sell arms except on licensure issued in accordance with the law." And Article 27 further addresses the formation of militias: "Armed forces and militias not under the command structure of the Iraqi Transitional Government are prohibited, except as provided by federal law." America's leading gun-rights organization quickly registered strong opposition to this nonsense. "It's a very big mistake," said Erich Pratt, director of communications for Gun Owners of America. "What an interesting contrast to what our Founding Fathers thought." Not that any of this should come as a surprise. Aaron Zelman's Milwaukee-based Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership recently noticed our own federal naturalization folks now require incoming citizens to study a booklet which claims our Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms "subject to certain reasonable restrictions." When JPFO contacted our duplicitous federal masters to ask where in our founding documents they found this "subject to certain reasonable restrictions" language ... they received no answer. Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'