A police car, part of a paramilitary organization serving the executive branch of city government, runs its lights in Chattanooga. (Photo Wrcbtv.com)
Constitutional attorney Edwin Vieira says it is mistaken to argue that police departments be disarmed, as free market commentators such as Dr. Gary North have suggested.
Constitutional government has the solution to police executions, police slayings, police assaults and battery and police violations of constitutional liberty. Thus far this year, 533 people have been killed by cops, according to the Washington Post.
By David Tulis / 1240 AM Hot News Talk Radio
Demilitarization and disarmament don’t go to the root of the problem — rather, the independency of police departments into corporate standing armies is the root of the problem, Dr. Vieira says.
“The true source of the problem is to be found in the institutional separation of police forces from the American people as a whole, which has instilled in the police the perverse belief that they are independent of, autonomous from, superior to, and even antagonistic towards the people — and, with rampant para-militarization, that they are actually the enemies of the people (or the people are their enemies) in some sort of undeclared ‘civil war.’ This institutional separation and the malign attitudes it generates, rather than the mere equipment the police happen to wield, need to be changed.”
The U.S. constitution’s second amendment, if properly understood, would give to Americans the solution to the problems, violence and civil unrest caused by policing, Dr. Vieira says. He explores this solution in his CD-ROM book The Sword and Sovereignty.
“Here, the most relevant principles of organization of ‘well regulated Militia’ *** are: (i) the governmental nature of the Militia; (ii) the near-universal enrollment in the Militia of the able-bodied adults in the community; and (iii) the possession of and training with suitable arms by every member of the Militia with the exception of conscientious objectors. From his initial enrollment at 15 or 16 years of age, every member of ‘[a] well regulated Militia’ would recognize himself as serving in a governmental capacity among the primary guardians of ‘the security of a free State.’
“He would realize — because he would be taught again and again — that his most important duty was ‘to execute the Laws of the Union’ (the Constitution first among them) when ‘employed in the Service of the United States’ under Article I, Section 8, Clauses 15 and 16 of the Constitution, and otherwise to execute the laws of his State. And he would always possess the equipment, undergo the training, and especially be imbued with the legal authority necessary to perform those functions. Moreover, prior to enrollment in the Militia, as a legal requirement without exception every child would be instructed by his parents and the schools he attended to honor the Constitution and laws and otherwise to prepare himself to fulfill his duties as a good citizen in and to the Militia.”
Perhaps Dr. Vieira is daydreaming to think that young people, whose preoccupations are with digital devices, social media and irresponsibility, could accept or desire the sort of private discipline envisioned by a militia-favoring Spartan-like culture. Homeschool families, who marked an annual gathering in Chattanooga last weekend, are closest to his conception of a pro-constitutional government people. And these families’ lives are, I believe, remote from a militia as a ground for civil order and peacekeeping.
Cops unconstitutional
Dr. Vieira agrees with legal historian Roger Roots who says police are unconstitutional. They operate outside the scope of authority granted by constitutions to state governing authorities. “[P]rofessional police forces as America experiences them today can assert no constitutional claim to exist. They have no constitutional status, no constitutional provenance — indeed, the word “police” does not appear in the Constitution. No reference, explicit or implicit, to anything akin to contemporary police forces or other law-enforcement agencies can be found in the Constitution.”
Police departments would become subject to the people, not to mayors of municipal corporations, if the people came to call again for constitutional government.
“Rather than providing any legal basis for modern police forces — and especially the para-militarized forces that have taken it upon themselves to function as miniature ‘standing armies,’” he says, “often imposing what amounts to ‘martial law’ within their communities in violation of the Declaration of Independence as well as of the Constitution — the Constitution assigns to ‘the Militia of the several States, and only to the Militia, the authority and responsibility ‘to execute the Laws of the Union’ when “employed in the Service of the United States’ for that purpose, and otherwise to execute the laws of their states.
“That is, the Constitution itself instructs America that the ‘police’ function is to be performed by the Militia — and if the words of the Constitution are read as they should be through the lens of the legal principle expressio unius exclusio alterius, only by the Militia or only subject to the Militia.
“So, if the Militia were properly revitalized along strict constitutional lines, contemporary police forces and other law-enforcement agencies would become sub-organizations within the Militia[.] *** Being components of the Militia, the police would necessarily be armed—for everyone in the Militia, other than conscientious objectors, must be armed.”
Supervision by the people through ‘militia’
The militia would supervise police within its ranks, “deter ‘police brutality’ and other lawlessness, and where deterrence failed would punish such misbehavior swiftly, surely, and severely.”
Constitutional government is preferable to the modern corporate state government we endure today in Tennessee and the other 49 states. States were created in the transitional time when the state rose out of government and became effectively a separate religious corporation that assumes the aspects of God. Because we don’t have government as much as we have the state, the state is the chief victim in crime, and enforces positive law through commercial statutes that give it claim to virtually all of life in the state.
Rampant policing, law enforcement and surveillance are organic functions of the corporate state, and police violence against the rights of the people will continue as long as people in Tennessee and other states do not turn back toward self-government and independence of mind and habit.
Source: Edwin Vieira, “NO NEED EXISTS TO DISARM THE POLICE,” NewsWithViews.com, Dec. 27, 2014. http://www.newswithviews.com/Vieira/edwin270.htm. Dr. Vieira is author of the two-volume Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution (2002), the most comprehensive study of American monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective. www.piecesofeight.us
