It Can’t Happen Here: A blast from the past take two.

It seems that the same things keep coming around.  Now, the same people who were telling us that Trump was a new Hitler and his supporters all Fascists are screaming for Trump and his party to disarm the people.  Right, like having a Fascist (so they say) disarming the populace never goes wrong.  (Never mind that if Trump is trying to be Hitler, he’s doing it wrong.

But I’ve written before on the subject of “It can’t happen here.” I reposted it just this past December second.  But here we are again because people are making the same stupid arguments.

Nothing really needs to be changed about it except what I wrote last year about depriving people of their property without due process of law, Civil Asset Forfeiture.  I’ve added a few lines here and there, but that’s about it.

Note that this was originally written in 2015, before the current administration, when people were oh, so sure that “It couldn’t happen here.”

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The Second Amendment is Obsolete, some say.  The idea that the United States could ever turn tyrannical is pure paranoia, some say.  The thing is, there’s nothing but faith that that’s the case.  We’re not that far, as history goes, from the Wounded Knee and Sand Creek massacres.  And if you think that Ruby Ridge and Waco were okay because you don’t like the people who were targeted in those cases, I’ll remind you of Burkhead’s First Law of Government:  Anything government can do for you it can do to you.

So, let’s look at that. Rounding up people and sending them to concentration camps (whether called “reservations” or “relocation centers”). Check. (Treatment of Native Americans.  Japanese-American “Relocation Centers” during World War II).

Illegal medical experiments involving infecting people with diseases, not treating them, and observing the effects done on people without their knowledge or consent. Check. (Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment–and particularly interesting how that was “explained” to the victims as they were getting free health care from the US Government.)

Arbitrary searches of American citizens’ households aimed at the seizure of property without either probable cause or any kind of warrant. Check. (post-Katrina gun Confiscation)

Laws passed allowing the indefinite detention of American Citizens without due process of law. Check. (NDAA 2012) (Hasn’t been rescinded as far as I know.)

American citizens going about their daily business being stopped and searched again without probable cause or any kind of warrant (or even the “reasonably articulable suspicion” for a “Terry Stop”). Check. (TSA, not just at Airports, but at bus terminals, rail and subway terminals, highways, even High School Proms.)

“Can’t happen here?” It has and is happening here.

Tell me again how the Second Amendment is obsolete since it’s not needed to defend against tyranny.

Look, if you took all the homicides in America, not just those committed using guns but all of them.  It would take more than 5,000 years for that death toll to match the number of people killed by their own governments in the 20th century.

Our history is a drop in the bucket next to that.  If you have confidence that the people will never, not once in the next 5000 years, need the power to resist a government gone rogue, one that no longer responds to votes or any “will of the people” (for that matter, how sure are you that the “will of the people”, the majority, will have your interests at heart, will not decide that you need to disappear for the “greater good”?) then you are incredibly naive.

But “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Yet, still, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Addendum Chicago police are instructed to shoot people for obeying the law. Background:  Illinois, the last state in the Union with no provision for legal handgun carry for self defense, had its “no carry” law struck down and was given a timeframe in which to come up with some kind of carry law before the existing law went away entirely.  So, Illinois now has provision for concealed carry.  But the Chicago police Chief vowed to train his officers to shoot people obeying that law.

Addendum 2 EPA exposes people, without informed consent, to high levels of toxic chemicals to track the effects.