[117495] in Cypherpunks
Sept. 5 column -- refusing to be searched
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Sat Sep 4 09:13:58 1999
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Date: Sat, 4 Sep 1999 08:18:23 -0400
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From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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From: Vin_Suprynowicz@lvrj.com (Vin Suprynowicz)
Subject: Sept. 5 column -- refusing to be searched
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FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
EDITORS: A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS 1,250-WORD PIECE ALSO MOVES
IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED SEPT. 5, 1999
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Are we really free to assert our rights?
In early 1943, when the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto finally learned where
the trains were going and decided to fight back, did they go to their
oppressors and say "Remember a few years back, when we obeyed the law and
turned in our firearms? Well, we've changed our minds. We'd rather die
fighting, now, than go like sheep to the death camps. So, please, can we
have our weapons back?"
Of course not. It doesn't work that way. If you want your grandchildren
to have the means to successfully resist foreign invasion or domestic
tyranny, you must exercise our firearms rights today -- keeping up the
riflery skills only you can pass down to them (you thought they still had a
shooting coach down at the high school?) along with the hardware itself.
Once you've allowed such a right to evaporate through disuse, you can't
"ask for it back."
Folks back East imagine there couldn't be a better place to live -- when
it comes to shooting -- than the desert West. After all, drive half an hour
from almost any point in Las Vegas and you can be away in the naked desert.
But that's not the way Metro and the Clark County Commission look at
things. In recent years, more and more of the Las Vegas Valley has been
progressively ruled off limits to shooting. In the past year alone the wash
at the north end of Jones (an area where I was first taken shooting by a
county enforcement official) has been posted off limits.
It was also about a year ago that I was barred from a remote box canyon
off Lee Canyon Road -- a place that had been used for target shooting so
long that the rusted cases of the spent Russian cartridges crunched
underfoot -- by a BLM ranger in a truck so big I could only have climbed
into the cab with the aid of a stepladder. The officer informed me that
target shooting at this isolated locale is now banned (though hunting is
still legal -- go figure) because it now lies within the expanded
boundaries of the "Red Rock Conservation Area" -- 20 miles and two highways
north of anywhere a tourist ever went to gaze at the Red Rocks.
So, when I and a friend (a churchgoer and Boy Scout leader) decided to go
target shooting last weekend, the bulk of our first conversation was
devoted simply to figuring out a place that was safe, still legal, and
unlikely to produce any unpleasant confrontation with the Boys in Beige.
(No, there are no outdoor ranges generally open to the public here,
despite widespread reports to the contrary. I tried to join that Desert
Sportsman's outfit a couple of years back, but they sent back my money when
I refused to join the NRA, America's largest gun control organization.)
We finally decided to leave the Vegas Valley entirely, crossing to the
other side of Mount Potosi at Mountain Spring, and driving a ways out the
Sandy Valley Road -- itself a dirt thoroughfare -- before turning off to an
old dump where we could shoot away from the road, into a hillside, miles
from any occupied building.
We spent an hour or two, we 50-ish white guys, testing our pistols and
attempting to sight in a French rifle I've nicknamed Pat Buchanan, it
shoots so far to the right.
Finally, the sun sinking low, we packed to leave. At which point who
should drive up but a Metro cop in a white van, shining his spotlight in
our eyes despite the fact it was still daylight.
"I don't have any problem with you fellas target shooting out here, but I
just have to make sure nothing else is going on," the officer stated. "Mind
if I look in your car?"
"Actually, no, I do not consent to any search of my car," I replied,
politely but firmly.
Now the officer became visibly irritated. "I don't need your permission
to search your vehicle if you're out here shooting on BLM land," the deputy
said as he patted us down -- an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment
which would surely come as a surprise to many members of the current U.S.
Supreme Court.
The deputy then made a point of approaching my car and peering in the
open passenger-side door.
"So, you've got something in here you don't want me to see, like a fully
automatic weapon," the officer said. (No, we didn't.)
Growing bolder now that he was between us and our vehicle, the officer
then proceeded to lecture me that "I don't need any wise-ass answers when
I'm out here," referring to my calm statement that I would not waive the
right which protects all Americans against warrantless searches.
Is this now official Metro police policy? That an officer "doesn't need
your permission" to search without a warrant, when he has seen no
indication of a proximate crime? That politely stating "I do not consent to
any search" constitutes a "wise-ass answer"? That refusing consent for a
search is grounds for an officer to conclude you must be hiding illegal
contraband -- even though the courts have specifically ruled that such a
refusal does (start ital)not(end ital) constitute probable cause to presume
any crime?
Is this, perhaps, what happened when Metro Officer Bruce Gentner stopped
unarmed pedestrian John Perrin, 32, late in the evening of April 12, and
demanded that Mr. Perrin drop his basketball and raise his hands? Did Mr.
Perrin, perhaps, give the "wise-ass answer" that he was not going to waive
the rights that protected him from a warrantless search? Is that why
Officer Gentner found it necessary to empty his 14-round magazine at the
unarmed pedestrian, killing him with six hits, several in the buttocks?
In Austin, Texas, Colorado City attorney Pat Barber was charged with
violating the Texas Highway Beautification Act this spring when he put up
an 8-by-16-foot billboard urging motorists to "just say no" to police
vehicle searches.
Barber said he erected the sign -- with a phone number to access
information about the constitutional right to resist warrantless searches
-- "in response to the unprecedented numbers of interstate travelers being
pressured into searches of their vehicles by state police officers."
Since numerous other non-compliant signs are never cited, attorney Barber
thinks he knows the real reason authorities don't like his. And Judge
Suzanne Covington of Austin apparently agrees, having ruled Barber is
likely to win his case on grounds the statute "is an unconstitutional
infringement of his rights of free speech."
There seem to be two Americas developing, today. There's the make-believe
America imagined by our ivory-tower judges, where we still have at least
some of the constitutional rights guaranteed by the founders; where the
courts instruct us we have a right (start ital)not(end ital) to consent to
warrantless searches, a right to turn and walk away rather than answer
police questions (unless we've been formally placed under arrest); where we
don't even have to sit and wait in our cars under the threat that "we'll
send for the sniffer dogs if you don't consent" -- that we're in fact free
to tell the officer we'll hang around only as long as it should take him to
write up the average traffic ticket, at which point we're free to drive
away (and he can sit there and wait for his damned dogs as long as he
likes.)
But does that world described by our courts still match the real world,
as supervised by our real police? Will Metro's officers publicly
acknowledge all these rights? Or do we now stand a good chance of being
shot dead (or strangled in our homes, like the late Charles Bush) for
giving "wise-ass answers," should we assert them?
Some of us would like to know.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the
Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $21.95 plus $3 shipping
through Mountain Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127; through web
site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html, or by dailing
1-800-244-2224.
***
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John
Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and
thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
