No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without
the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be
prescribed by law
-US Constitution, amendment III-
Of course our bill of rights is always being twisted by the perpetual state of hyperbole according to which we're always at war
with drugs, poverty, crime, fear and moral decay. Whether or not Osama
Bin Laden hated us for what we're told is our 'freedom,' his attack on
New York has been a gold mine for authoritarianism and the security
state. Our conflict with Islamic terrorists has encouraged, as many
'paranoids' like me have warned, authorities of all types to trample all
over our constitutional guarantees, whether it be searches and seizures
without probable cause or, the right to confront our accusers, the
right to a speedy trial, to know the charges against us and believe it
or not, the right to be free from the quartering of troops in private
homes.
One doesn't hear of many court cases involving the Third Amendment
although it was important enough to the American colonists and it's
been a basis of the implied right to privacy that the Roe Vs. Wade
decision is based upon. Back in 1965 Justice William O. Douglas opined the amendment's implication that " an individual's home should be free from agents of the state" That followed the 1952 decision that inferred from the third amendment, the framer's intent: "to constrain executive power even during wartime."
As
far as I know, there is no law allowing a police department to
commandeer one's residence and quarter policemen there in order to
conduct surveillance to see if there was domestic violence going on next
door and gather evidence thereof. If there is, I would suspect it would
run afoul of the third amendment, yet so confident were the suburban
Las Vegas police that they could do any damned thing they wanted, that
they blew open one Henderson, Nevada resident's front door with a
battering ram, screaming obscenities at the unarmed man in his living
room as the police are wont to do, pointing firearms at Anthony Mitchell
whom they addressed as "asshole," forcing him to grovel before them on
the floor while they fired several rounds of painful but non-lethal
shotgun ammunition at him and his dog at point blank range
and demanding that they occupy his house. As though this weren't
enough, they continued on to occupy the victim's parent's house on the
same street, rummaging, ransacking and arresting and forcibly removing
everyone in manacles.
Oh it gets worse, but you can read about it yourself
-- violations of the third, fourth and 14th amendments and of every
principle of justice common to civilized societies. It's not unique and
it may wind up in the same limbo or wind up in some dark corner of
oblivion as the many cases I've read over the years where police have
entered the wrong house and murdered the occupants who were trying to
defend themselves against what they thought, perhaps correctly, were
armed invaders.
For all the public knows in the age of cringing cowardice and lapdog obedience, an age where liberty be damned, when you can be locked up indefinitely without charges, where your possessions can be searched, where you can be beaten, tortured, tazed, roughed up and have your home and possessions trashed by brutal, obscenity-screaming, uniformed thugs without any recourse -- where for all the public is likely to know or hear in the 'reality show' media, what happened in Vegas never happened at all or at best might be an uninteresting crawl beneath the Snowden Story, or the Zimmerman story or some celebrity scandal or other Fox News fabrication.
So
you want to tell me an armed citizen is a ridiculous idea, that the
government can't be opposed by force and won't ever need to be? Yes, I
know, talk is cheap, but when to talk back to the police results in
things that would make the KGB or the Gestapo veterans long for the good
old days, what's a man to do? How does the law and how does that
blindfolded lady with the scales treat the man who defends his home
against armed and rabid berserkers with no regard for the law or human
life? How does a man decide whether it's worth taking up arms when the
law fails and nobody cares - decide between dying with dignity and
groveling on the floor of his own home while he and his family and his
dog are being shot and beaten and robbed and hauled away in chains.
