The End of Gun Control: 7.1 Law of Contract, Not Status
Equality under law affords no privileges to the political caste. Property & voluntary exchanges with due process for each case is the standard, yielding a scientifically consistent legal environment.
One of the most aggravating factors that sparked the American Revolution was British issuance of ‘general writs’ wherein political enforcers, because of their appointment to public office, could invade the homes and offices of settlers for mere suspicion of possessing certain classes of property. It was an example of violating some people’s property (average colonial citizens) because other people (king, court, clerics, sheriffs, and soldiers) claimed entitlement (a status) to search for and seize any property holding arbitrarily chosen characteristics.
In practice, general writs violate the principle of due process, the fundamentally individual right to noninterference in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and, most importantly, property that can only be overcome by probable cause of involvement in a crime. To formulate probable cause, there must be supporting facts and circumstances that would lead a reasonable and prudent person to conclude that an offense has been committed. General writs dispense with the particulars of specific cases and sweep broadly over entire categories of people and classifications of property.
General writs are a legal regression away from contract and toward status. Instead of examining cases writs are based on classes, they are a regression of law toward atavistic primitivism. They assume a divine right to rule and arrogate authority over other people and their property without validating the claims. Every infringement on the right to keep and bear arms is, in effect, a general writ against a category of property that ignores the need for due process afforded to individuals in Anglo-American legal tradition tracing its origins to the Magna Carta of 1215.
Any law of equal liberty rightly dispels any notions of some select persons dictating what property any other person can own. This speaks to the impossibility of slavery and, indeed, while the ideal of equality under the law has existed for a long time, human societies have yet to fully realize it. There is more work to be done and the solution is to further advance toward legal systems based on contract while stomping out the lust for status.
The contract for governmental services needs greater specificity, to be sure, yet the real problems currently do not reside so much in the contents but in the enforcement. The framers of the US Constitution understood that words on paper were ‘fragile bulwarks’ against the ambitions of the political caste.
While peace is preferred, ‘domestic tranquility’ cannot be claimed amid rampant violations of due process and the integrity of private property. Further, peace will not be restored through submission or toleration of perverted law that affords entitlements based on status.
A system of equal justice must extinguish all legal privileges to invade other people’s property, currently afforded to ‘public officials’, especially the two most important categories of property relative to the maintenance of a free society, namely, money and arms. As detailed in my Money, Militia, and the Market, the integrity of property rights, which implies voluntarily chosen, arms and money, along with a free market in which to trade such properties are essential, and mutually reinforcing, components for securing the blessings of liberty, now and into the future.
Once eradicated, the cronies and cheerleaders for tyranny may still exist, yet all their cackling and howling will be for naught without the centralization of political power (which grows from the barrel of a gun) required to carry out their plans.
Again, a system of natural liberty requires equal justice under the law and is characterized by scientific analysis using a common denominator, and only private property boundaries fulfill this criterion. Self-ownership and unassailable rights to the material objects human beings come to own is the only standard that can be applied to all people, at all times, without affording privileges to an elite few. All infringements on the right to keep and bear arms, as well as the choice in currency, erode the property integrity principle foundational to having a ‘common’ law for everyone and are, in fact, a regression to status.
People yearning for justice, equality, and peace need to recognize the need to redistribute the orchestration of legal force in society, rebalancing the lopsided order that allows the corruption of justice and leaves the average citizen subject to abuse from every form of crime. The right to keep and bear arms will never be secure so long as the political caste, those that derive their sustenance through taxation, ‘pronounce’ innovative constructions of what law is while simultaneously wielding the power to enforce and interpret all applications of it.