It is Time to Repeal the First Amendment

            It is time to repeal the First Amendment to the Constitution.  When the Founding Fathers penned the Constitution and later the amendments to the Constitution, they could never have imagined what speech would look like today.  Printing mass copies of newspapers and handbills was done by a painstaking process that required physically inking a pad, laying paper out on a press, placing type backwards in racks, and pressing the type down onto the paper.  Automation, even by rolling a drum with print on it over the top of paper did not exist.  It literally took hours and hours to print a newspaper.  Books were a relatively rare commodity at the time.

            Television, radio, motion pictures, amplified speech, phonographs, telephones, satellite communications, digital cameras, iPhones and Smartphones, the internet and all things digital were nonexistent.  Hate speech had not yet been defined.  Mass production of posters did not exist.  CNN, MSNBC, CBS, FOX, ABC, and NBC and their talking heads did not exist.  Late-night television entertainment morphed into political speech did not exist.  Live coverage of sessions of Congress did not exist.  Selective photographs of mass crowds in attendance of gatherings did not exist.  Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and even Snapchat did not exist.  Opinions spewed forth at the speed of light as factual news did not exist.

            The conditions surrounding free speech as exercised today were never conceived of in the late Eighteenth Century.  The Founding Fathers never foresaw rapid-fire newsprint or around-the-world and around-the-clock instant mass communication so rapidly delivered that the human mind can barely take it all in.  They never foresaw video games portraying mass murders nor could they perceive Grand Theft Auto as acceptable.  They never foresaw the time when people would use the media to protest and even assault those who chose to worship differently than they did all under the guise of free speech.  They never foresaw the unaccountability of the press even under the protection of the law.  They never foresaw the manpower and expense that it would take to preserve order when hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people gather to protest.  They were aware of the damage that could be caused by small crowds, but they never foresaw the hundreds of thousands of dollars or even the millions of dollars of damage that thousands of people could do during a protest.  They never even foresaw the litter that would be left behind at such events.  Incessant hounding and dogging of political figures consisted of an occasional reproach, not something that happened on a daily or even hourly basis.  They never foresaw the criticism of what a political figure’s spouse wore to an event or if a president rendered a proper military salute.

            No, what the Founding Fathers saw was a press that put out one single sheet of paper at a time after hours and hours of preparation.  They saw small groups of people assembled in churches or assembly halls who gave thoughtful consideration to issues, actions, and consequences.  They saw communication carried out by letter delivered on horseback or by days and weeks by sail to destinations overseas.  They saw an era or responsibility and accountability.  They saw free speech, freedom to choose a religion, freedom to peaceably assemble, and freedom of the press much differently than what those things mean today.

            The First Amendment is outdated.  It is time to repeal the First Amendment.

It's a Wrestle

As I sit and write this, it is two-thirty in the morning.  I suppose it is the wrestle going on in my mind that has kept me up.

We invested in Netflix and Amazon Prime as opposed to cable for the simple reason that we had no desire to pay the outrageous fees that come with cable TV.  The fee for having cable for the internet is bad enough, but the gouging that takes place for as much as we watch TV is unacceptable.  We had heard so many good things about Netflix and wanted some of the other benefits that came with Prime, so we placed our investments there.  I know there are other alternatives such as Sling and Hulu, and who knows?  Perhaps one day we’ll try them.

Here’s the wrestle.  So many of the movies are R rated and made-for-TV movies have the same functional equivalent.  I’m sure we miss a lot of really good content because of the decision we made to not view that kind of programming, but it is a decision we have made.  In short, we do not need to allow adult-content material to invade our home.  Adult language is anything but adult and sexually explicit or implicit scenes appeal to the basest of desires.  Likewise, I’ve found that excessive violence portrayed on any screen to have a numbing effect, and I think that is dangerous.

The first series we began watching was of interest to us for multiple reasons.  It was a murder mystery and was clean enough to be on family, prime time TV.  But, the season and episodes morphed into unacceptable content and we stopped viewing it half-way through the seasons.  We watched a second series and found it mostly acceptable.  There was no gratuitous sex, but I cringed when I heard the F-bomb once or twice throughout the entire short-lived series.  Surely, I thought, a BBC production would have higher standards, which it did through most of the first season, but as we watched an episode in the second season we were bombarded with more F-bombs and gratuitous sex.  The sad thing is that the series has an interesting story line. 

Yes, I can buy filters and yes, I can skip through scenes that I find offensive, but why should I have to do that?  Is anyone capable of creating a series that is a cut above everything else and yet is not Sesame Street or Sponge Bob?  Have we become so base that we find four-letter word vocabulary, nudity and sexual content, and extreme violence just another walk in the park?  Do screen writers and producers have to throw those in to hold our interest?  Are story lines and plots so weak that they have to be spiced up with these attention-getters?

You can tell me that these are all facts of life these days, that this is just the way it is in our society.  How sad!  But I know different.  I’ve lived and worked in both environments and I know that it does not have to be this way.  I can also tell you that choice of language, for example, is not dependent upon socio-economic status.  I’ve heard doctors and lawyers profane the name of God as good, hardworking men and women who get their hands dirty for a barely livable wage, and I’ve heard the exact opposite – people on the lower end of the socio-economic scale with much cleaner language and values than others who are higher on the food chain.  So, these facts of life in these days may be true in some elements of society, but they are not true in all venues of society.

Call me a prude if you wish.  Just keep in mind that I have my own sins and demons to contend with.  If you enjoy these types of movies and programming and the things I’ve talked about and they don’t bother you, then you are either stronger than I am or you have become so accustomed to it that you no longer find it offensive and perhaps you’ve inculcated it into your life.  Maybe you have an “offensive content radar” that blocks this material from your eyes, ears, and mind.

So, an hour later after I began putting my thoughts down on paper, you should have an idea as to why I’m awake at this unearthly hour of the night.  It’s the wrestle.  It’s not just about movies and programming on Netflix or Amazon Prime.  It’s about where we’ve come from since Andy Griffith, My Three Sons, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, Murder She Wrote, Home Improvement, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, and Laramie.  I’m not just talking about TV programming, movies and streaming TV series.

It’s the wrestle.

Why Did He Do It?

They were honest questions that went something like this. “Do they know why?” Did he leave a note or anything?”

In our quest to understand motivations we often want to rush through the facts and get to the answers. It reminds me somewhat of something a friend used to say: Everybody wants to be a racer but no one wants to run.

I suppose that television dramas have a role to play. It’s the instant gratification that comes at the end of the hour when the crime is solved. During the course of the hour viewers are fed a diet of criminalistics, criminal law, constitutional procedure, and criminology - most of it flawed.


Most of the time when something as horrific as a mass shooting occurs we want to know who and why. In a rush to judgment we tend to substitute “what” answers for “why” answers and then move on. Even then, the “what’ answers are not always clearly answered and defined.

Technology, without a doubt, has moved policing into the Twenty-first Century. Cameras at intersections, parking lots, banks, homes, and businesses make it easy for Big Brother to do his job. Facial recognition, DNA, 1’s and 0’s, have all contributed to the ability of police to do their work, but in spite of all these technological advances, the human element remains the one constant in crime solving. That one constant is the ability to reason - to sort through the technological conclusions and make one overarching determination about a crime.

Solving a crime does not necessarily mean determining why a crime was committed, yet criminal investigators often look to motivation to narrow their search of suspects.

In my world, motivation for committing a crime and why a person commits a crime are two different things. Motive may be determined within minutes or days at the most. Why a person commits a crime may take months or longer to determine, and even then becomes questionable. Making those decisions will first require finding all the relevant information, sorting through the data, and fitting the pieces together into some logical explanation. These days this means looking through information stored on computer hard drives, including the 1’s and 0’s that have been deleted, looking through mountains of photographs, retrieving text messages, obtaining DNA samples, talking to friends and relatives, visiting doctors and therapists, checking credit card purchases, examining travel, visiting bars frequented by a defendant, checking school records, checking intersection and parking lot camera recordings, looking at bank deposits and withdrawals, reviewing military records, digging through juvenile and adult criminal history records, and sorting through anything and everything that the foregoing leads one to. It can literally take months to do this and technology will be of very little assistance.

And after all that takes place, no one, not even the experts, will agree as to why a person committed a crime

I Own a Firearm

I Own a Firearm

I will not insult your intelligence and tell you that I do not own a firearm.  Don’t count on me telling you what type of firearm I own.  Whether or not I carry a concealed weapon is something only for me to know.  There are certain facts that I keep close to the chest. 

I would like to think that I don’t suffer from any mental disease or defect that would cause me to go off the deep end and walk onto a schoolground and start shooting innocent children.  I am not on any meds that would cause me to go bonkers and I’m not in therapy.  My doctor has no problem with me owning a firearm.  Moreover, my barber, who knows me better than my doctor, wants to go shooting with me.

My reasoning for owning a firearm is something that I am willing to share.

I Own a Firearm…

… because I carried one in the line of duty for 25 years.  It became a part of me.  More importantly, during that period of time I saw what people can do to others.  While there is much good out there, the ugly exists and it isn’t very pretty. 

… because my trust level is pretty low.  It has been violated enough over the years that I still sit with my back to walls in restaurants.

… because I sent a fair number of people to prison, some of whom promised retaliation.  I’m easy to find.

… for the defense of my family and for self-defense within the bubble I call home.  Home is more than four walls and a roof overhead.  There are nearly half a dozen police officers that live in my neighborhood.  After they got a phone call, got appropriately dressed, in their car and at my front door the shooting would be over.  Likewise, responding to our home from anywhere within the five square miles of our community would likely take seven to ten minutes.

… for the defense of others.  Among those others are police officers.  We see more and more where police officers are being attacked in their cars or on the street.  IF I was carrying a firearm with me and IF I saw a police officer being attacked by some thug I would not hesitate to aid that officer.  When I travel and IF I am traveling with a firearm, it is for that very reason that I have it with me, not to mention for protection of bubble I call home.

… because of international threats to our country.  No doubt, an attack on the United States would begin with massive bombing of our country, but someone’s troops would be on the ground doing the mop-up.  I would do my part to make sure that the threat of someone behind every rock, tree, or bush had a gun would be a promise and not a threat. 

… because of the other threats we face that come in the form of terrorism and drug cartels.  Those threats are ruthless and if you are my neighbor you will be glad that I have a firearm.  (Chances are pretty good that in Texas my neighbor will be standing next to me.)

… so I can feed my family.  In the unlikely event that chaos erupts and store shelves become empty I will have a fighting chance to put meat on our table.

… to protect myself, my family, and my community from right and left-wing extremists.  There are armed camps for both in this country and you should not think for a minute that they would hesitate to use deadly force if they thought their way of living and their perception of governing was challenged.

… because I have seen in history what happens to a people when they surrender their firearms to government, our own government included.  The benevolent United States of America has a history of disarming groups of people and then slaughtering them.  There is no doubt that the United States Government has bigger guns than what I own.  Tanks, RPGs, F-16s can do a lot of damage, but there are rocks and trees and bushes.

… because I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  I was not relieved of that oath when I retired.

… in defense of “our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.”  While I may depend upon government to provide these protections, ultimately it is up to me because a time may come when government will not.  It is something I cannot abdicate.

… because it is my God-given right to protect my family from any source that threatens it and because it is my Constitutional right to do it with a firearm.

Due Process for Temporary Firearm Confiscation

President Trump has suggested that when police have reason to believe that a person may pose a danger to self or to others that they should be allowed to confiscate the person's weapons and then follow with due process procedures.  This poses a few problems.  First, most guns a person has will be found in that person’s home.  There are exceptions to the warrant requirement for entering a home to search and seize.  But compared to other places that searches and seizures without a warrant are perfectly legal, searches of and seizures from a home without a warrant are relatively rare.  Police “might” be able to do a seizure of a person’s weapons from the home based upon some emergency or exigent circumstances.  Second, by police entering a home and searching for and seizing weapons presupposes a criminal justice matter.  The criminal justice system is not always the best solution to social problems.

The rationale for seizing a person’s guns before police obtain a warrant is that obtaining a warrant can be time consuming.

I suggest an alternative.

Make the seizure of a person’s weapons a civil procedure rather than a criminal justice matter.  Law Enforcement would still be the best resource to enforce a civil temporary forfeiture matter, but could be initiated by family, schools, friends, social workers, therapists, and doctors.  Set the bar low enough that firearms could be seized with little difficulty, perhaps at a preponderance of evidence.  That would mean that a person is simply more likely to commit a violent act with a firearm than not.  If you are into percentages, that would mean that there is a 51% possibility that a person would commit an act of violence based solely information available.  Then shift the burden to the gun’s owner to show that there is not a preponderance of evidence to seize the firearms.  The burden of proof belongs to the state in criminal matters; in civil matters the burden shifts to the respondent, in this case, the gun owner.  Give the gun owner three days to respond to the civil action.  Allow the respondent to have an immediate hearing at the end of that three-day period, but not require the respondent to have that hearing within three days.

Keep the proceedings at a low-level court like a magistrate court or other court not of record.  (A court of record is one that records testimony.  All courts maintain records of trial outcomes.)  Attorneys would not have to be involved but nothing would prohibit a gun owner from hiring an attorney.  If the gun owner is unable to overcome the preponderance of evidence burden, then allow the owner to return at a later date and attempt at a subsequent time or to appeal to a court of record, such as a district or superior court.  Protect those who make a claim against a firearm owner who acts in good faith, from civil action.

If the gun owner does not file a response within three days, then the firearms would remain with the police until the owner can show that there is not a preponderance of evidence to keep the firearms from the owner.  If after a year the owner cannot show cause to return the firearms, the owner would lose permanent ownership of the firearms.  The firearms would then be transferred to a licensed gun dealer who would sell the firearms at a fair market value to someone not prohibited from owning a firearm and the proceeds would then be given to the (former) owner, less a handling fee for the licensed gun dealer. 

During the period of time that the firearms have been seized, either temporarily or permanently, the owner’s name and identifying information would be placed in the instant background check database.

The idea is to protect people from acts of firearm violence while also protecting a person’s civil rights and guarantee constitutional due process rights.