Democrats, the ruling party in NJ, need to stand up for police

By Rubashov
 

Police officers are wage-earning, blue-collar members of the working class.  They enforce the laws made by the Legislature, signed into law by the Governor, and upheld by the Judiciary.  The Legislature and the Governor are elected by the people.
 
Unfortunately, in New Jersey as elsewhere, wealthy elites who have the money to influence public policy have corrupted our elections.  Some elites, like Governors Corzine and Murphy, have used their vast wealth to get their hands directly on the levers of power.  The result of this corruption is summed up by that famous Princeton University Study into whether our nation was still of democracy.  It concluded… 

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

For more on this, we suggest you watch this short video from the reform group, Represent.Us:
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

 The wealthy elites who dominate this country are not content with simply owning everything and getting their way… they want to tell YOU how to live too.  And  because they always get their way, their censoriousness results in new laws to promote the things they like and ban things they don’t like.  

This results in hypocrisies like Tammy Murphy’s advocacy for a so-called “green” energy plan that will raise costs for working people while allowing her comrades at Goldman-Sachs to pocket billions. 

 Like Phil Murphy’s quarantine of fellow Americans who live in states he feels have too many cases of COVID-19, while adopting a no-questions-asked “Sanctuary State” policy for people coming from foreign countries with not only high levels of COVID but high levels of TB, which kills 1.5 million people worldwide each year (including 200,000 children). 

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis

In one of his most famous essays, writer George Will argued that political "overcriminalization" by a state legislature was responsible for the death of Eric Garner, a sidewalk merchant killed in a confrontation with police ordered to enforce a new law on sales tax scofflaws.  

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394392/plague-overcriminalization-george-will

 Will raised the question of how many new laws are created by state legislatures and by Congress in the rush to be seen to be "doing something"?  Will's brilliant column is a must read for legislators thinking about proposing their next round of ideas that will end up being enforced by men with guns.  Will, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist at The Washington Post, wrote his column before governors like Phil Murphy were sending police to break up church services and to arrest the owners of gyms and diners.  In his column, Will writes:
 
“Harvey Silverglate, a civil-liberties attorney, titled his 2009 book Three Felonies a Day to indicate how easily we can fall afoul of America’s metastasizing body of criminal laws. Professor Douglas Husak of Rutgers University says that approximately 70 percent of American adults have, usually unwittingly, committed a crime for which they could be imprisoned.
 
In his 2008 book, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law, Husak says that more than half of the 3,000 federal crimes — itself a dismaying number — are found not in the Federal Criminal Code but in numerous other statutes. And, by one estimate, at least 300,000 federal regulations can be enforced by agencies wielding criminal punishments. Citing Husak, Professor Stephen L. Carter of the Yale Law School, like a hammer driving a nail head flush to a board, forcefully underscores the moral of this story:
 
Society needs laws; therefore it needs law enforcement. But ‘overcriminalization matters’ because ‘making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it.’ The job of the police ‘is to carry out the legislative will.’ But today’s political system takes ‘bizarre delight in creating new crimes’ for enforcement. And ‘every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence.’
 
It’s unlikely that the New York Legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.”
 
Law enforcement actions will inevitably go wrong.  You can never mix men with guns – charged by the political class with preventing some form of human behavior – and humans under the influence or suffering from substance abuse or mental issues, without the possibility of something going wrong.  And every time some law enforcement interaction goes wrong, we can always count on the very same people who sent the police in the first place – the political class – to turn on them and “blame the police.”
 
The blue-collar police always get blamed – not the white-collar legislators or the governors who make the law and then send the police to enforce it.  The kick in the balls is that it’s some of those white-collar legislators who made the law who end up leading the protests against the police for enforcing the law they made.

In this moment of BLM/Antifa madness, many Democrat politicians are actively blaming the police who enforce the laws they made.  They are providing moral and legal support to those who target police officers and their families with acts up to and including terrorism.  Their friends in the economic elite are providing financial support to those who bear some measure of responsibility for incidents of  terror against the families of police officers, like the one below…

Police officers come in all races, creeds, and genders.  It is the best job available to folks of their class in a job market that has grown increasingly thinner (courtesy of the politicians and their paymasters).  If the politicians could find a way to outsource the work, they would... and maybe, they will, someday.  But for now, our police are our neighbors, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, moms and dads.  For now, they are just ordinary members of our communities called upon to do some very important and often unpleasant work.  Blue-collar work at blue-collar pay. 
 
How many of Phil Murphy's One-Percenter neighbors would perform CPR on a homeless man if he needed it?  A cop will. 

"Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered…History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell
(Eric Arthur Blair)

Police response time shouldn't determine life or death

The police work very hard to do a good job for the citizens who pay them.  But many people fail to understand that the police are crime orientated.  They stop it if they see it, respond when it is in progress, investigate it after the fact, and help prosecutors convict and punish the bad guys.  That's a lot to do-- in addition to maintaining a general level of public safety (on highways, at crosswalks, crowd control and the like).

The police are not personal security guards for each and every citizen.  They will certainly respond if called, but it is not their job to ensure your personal safety.  You cannot sue the police in civil court if they fail to arrive in time to prevent you from being harmed or worse.  As long as they reasonably attempted to respond to a 9-1-1 call they have done their job. 

In America, individual citizens are their own first line of defense.  That's been the idea since the founding of our nation.  We are responsible for protecting ourselves until the cavalry -- the men and women in blue -- get there to secure the situation, investigate what happened, and so on.

Those who wish to do away with legal firearm possession (because they will have as much success with illegal firearm possession as they have had with illegal drug possession) had better be prepared to formally change this concordat, placing the police firmly in charge of the personal protection of every resident, vastly increase budgets and taxation to pay for this, and allow individuals to bring civil actions against government when it fails to protect them.  This would be a reasonable starting position in any discussion about "swapping" government protection for the rights and duties under the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Unfortunately, this is not the starting position advanced by those who profess "gun control."  They are fixated on the bad that firearms can do and ignore their necessity as part of that first line of defense, possibly because they mistake what the police are there for.  As the number of lawsuits brought against government for "failing to protect" (all tossed by the courts) shows, many do not understand the role of the police and what the citizens' role is in his or her own self-protection.

Like the automobile, the firearm is a piece of technology -- a tool.  It should be used safely, but how it is used depends on the user.  Misuse either and you can lose your freedom.  But some in the so-called "gun control" movement would extend "misuse" to simple possession, ignoring the absolute need for firearms as the best means of self-protection, the duty of which falls to all of us as individuals.

CongressmanMacArthur.jpg

Unfortunately, in New Jersey the state has thrown up regulatory and legal hurdles to self-protection -- while its courts have insisted that state, county, and local governments are not responsible for the lives of the people who live there.  There have been a number of well-publicized cases where vulnerable members of society have been denied the right to protect themselves or the implementation of that right was held up in red tape, and they ended up as victims of homicide.

That is why new federal legislation is so important.  Introduced in the US House of Representatives as HR38 and the US Senate as S446, these bills will allow people licensed to carry a concealed firearm in their own state to do so legally in all states.  Among New Jersey's congressmen, Tom MacArthur is taking the lead.

Legislation proposed in the New Jersey Legislature by Assemblyman Parker Space,  AR-221, memorializes Congress and the President of the United States to enact HR38.  Space and Assemblywoman BettyLou DeCroce are the prime sponsors of this legislation.  Joining them are Assemblymen Anthony Bucco and Ron Dancer.   Below is the text of the Space-DeCroce legislation:

An Assembly Resolution memorializing the Congress and the President of the United States to allow reciprocity for the carrying of certain concealed firearms.

Whereas, There exists a public interest in individuals maintaining the ability to protect themselves and their families from violence; and

Whereas, The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution and recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States; and

Whereas, The ability of law-abiding citizens to legally carry concealed firearms to defend themselves is a fundamental right; and

Whereas, It is in the best interest of our nation that citizens be able to travel freely from state to state without sacrificing the right to protect themselves and their families; and

Whereas, States currently may decline to recognize permits to carry concealed firearms issued by other states, thereby causing our citizens to forego the ability to protect themselves and their families when traveling outside of their home states; and

Whereas, Requiring all states to recognize a concealed carry permit issued by another state would rectify this inequality; and

Whereas, H.R. 38 of 2017-2018, the “Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017,” has been introduced in the United States Congress in an effort to protect our citizens’ Second Amendment rights, allowing them to travel between states without sacrificing the ability to protect themselves and their families; and

Whereas, H.R. 38 permits a person carrying a valid identification document containing a photograph of the person and a state concealed weapons permit to carry a concealed handgun in any state, so long as the individual is not prohibited from possessing a firearm under federal law or from carrying a concealed firearm in the individual’s state of residence; and

Whereas, At present 22 states recognize other states’ permits to carry concealed firearms or allow law-abiding non-residents to carry a firearm without a license; and

Whereas, Enactment of the “Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017” will enhance citizens’ Second Amendment rights by permitting reciprocity among all the states for the carrying of concealed firearms; now, therefore,

     Be It Resolved by the General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:

     1.    The Congress and the President of the United States are respectfully memorialized to enact H.R. 38, the “Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017.”

     2.    Copies of this resolution, as filed with the Secretary of State shall be transmitted by the Clerk of the General Assembly, to the President and Vice President of the United States, the Majority and Minority Leaders of the United States Senate, the Speaker and Majority and Minority Leaders of the United States House of Representatives, and each member of the United States Congress elected from this State.