This feature appears in the October ‘15 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
Every day reveals new abuses of executive power by President Barack Obama and of lawless actions by a rogue administration that is systemically infected with a disdain for the rule of law.
Nobody has described the threat to our Constitution better than esteemed Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley, when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee: “The problem with what the president is doing is that he’s not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid."
“The problem with what the president is doing is that he’s not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He’s becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid.” Turley, who was among the first liberal legal scholars to recognize the primacy of the Second Amendment, rightfully fears for the future of our nation and destruction of the rule of law.
“I really have great trepidation over where we are heading because we’re creating a new system. … Within that system we have the rise of an über-presidency. There could be no greater danger for individual liberty, and I really think the Framers would be horrified by that shift,” he said.
Two recent examples demonstrate this seismic shift. They are diametrically opposed notions involving criminals—neither of which have any basis in law or authority. One releases violent criminals into our midst; the other manufactures criminals from ordinary, law-abiding Americans.
The first is endemic to immigration policies under which U.S. border security simply no longer exists. It represents Obama’s refusal to fulfill his duty to “take care that the law be faithfully executed.”
Under such policies, our country has been endangered by an influx of very violent criminals—including members of notorious gangs like MS-13—reportedly numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The result has been an unprecedented increase in violent crime in urban areas.
In addition, there is an ongoing effort by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release into the general population criminal aliens awaiting deportation or prosecution.
In fact, using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Judicial Watch discovered documents showing that in the last fiscal year DHS cut loose 165,900 alien criminals who had racked up 88,000 criminal convictions in American courts for crimes including murder, rape, assault and kidnapping. The previous year, DHS released another 30,000 criminal aliens.
That insanity is just half of the story. The other half is worse.
Enter Obama’s anti-Second Amendment bureaucrats, who are spreading their influence in agencies throughout the federal government.
They are expanding the definition of “prohibited persons” under the Gun Control Act. As most NRA members know, federal law lists classes of people for whom possession or acquisition of firearms is a felony, punishable by five years in prison. Convicted felons, fugitives from justice and individuals in the drug trade are among those prohibited persons.
There is also this category: “adjudicated as a mental defective.” Although somewhat vague, the qualifier “adjudicated” makes clear that such a status must be determined by a court.Real criminals vs. manufactured criminals: That’s the essence of the intentional chaos of the Obama “über-presidency”—chaos intended to destroy our liberty.
But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) has reinvented the statute, expanding “mental defective” to include law-abiding men and women who require assistance in their business affairs, such as those who have a fiduciary or “representative payee” assigned to their accounts. That means anyone who empowers others to cash their government checks—including Social Security payments or veteran’s benefits—is tagged as a “mental defective.” If they possess or acquire guns, they are now felons.
With that, Obama bureaucrats are now doggedly scanning lists of Americans to find this new class of prohibited persons. In this insanity, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has swept 177,000 veterans onto the prohibited list.
One decorated combat veteran summed it up: “The government trusted you with an M1 to defend against the Chinese hordes invading South Korea, but now considers you a ‘mental defective’ barred from owning guns because your daughter cashes your VA checks for you.”
But it could get worse. Obama’s Social Security Administration plans to include the names of 4.2 million Social Security recipients—elderly or disabled Americans—who would become felons if they possess or acquire firearms or ammunition. (Chris Cox gives a detailed account of this ongoing travesty, with directions on how we can stop it, elsewhere in this issue.)
This is a data-entry life sentence!
Real criminals vs. manufactured criminals: That’s the essence of the intentional chaos of the Obama “über-presidency”—chaos intended to destroy our liberty.
As the most politically savvy voters in the nation, we must assure in 2016 that the next president of the United States is committed to restoring our heritage of freedom and undoing the destruction wrought by Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America as we knew it.
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