As I have said before, a lot of crime is created by the government. Here is a great article with the details of one such area.

As street values rise, gun thieves get bolder

Most of us know the gun debate as a war of words – a battle of sound bites between this side and that.

The real front lines are on the streets, where good guns try to hold back the bad ones, and no one takes the time to hold rallies, give speeches or argue about the Second Amendment.

There, the struggle is as intense as ever.

“In so many murders and robberies, the weapon of choice is a gun,” said Norfolk Police Chief Bruce P. Marquis. “Millions are being manufactured every year, and we know a lot of them end up in criminals’ hands. We put a higher priority on taking guns off the streets than we do drugs.”

But clamping down on firearms can have an unintended effect.

“You create a market when you tighten things up,” Garfield Headlam said.

He should know. Headlam is serving a 10-year prison sentence for operating a gun-running ring out of Norfolk in the late 1990s. His customers lived in Washington, D.C., where handguns have been outlawed for more than 30 years. Saturday night specials were Headlam’s bread and butter.

“You could make a 300 percent profit on those,” he said. “Buy ’em from the gun shop for $89 to $150. Cheap quality. That’s what they wanted up there.”

Money like that has made gun runners bold. Fourteen Virginia gun shops were burglarized last year, including six in Hampton Roads. In two of the cases, thieves sawed a hole in the roof and used ropes to drop inside. In another, armed men forced a clerk to the floor and walked out with 75 handguns.

An ATF whistle blower got demoted and had other problems:

Edgar A. Domenech says he thought Justice Department officials would welcome information about mismanagement at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Instead, the 23-year ATF veteran says, Justice officials ignored his complaints and later retaliated against him by demoting him, denying him a bonus and attempting to give him a poor job review.

“I realized I was committing career suicide at the time, but I felt I had a moral obligation as the deputy director to protect the agency and the men and women of the agency,” Domenech said in an interview yesterday. “In retrospect, I was naive to believe that the department would welcome my honesty.”

Domenech filed a 13-page complaint yesterday with the Office of Special Counsel, saying that ATF and the Justice Department punished him for raising questions about the performance of former ATF director Carl J. Truscott, who resigned in August 2006 while under investigation for alleged financial mismanagement.

I know from personal experience that people in power do not follow the rules and will find a way to harm you if they decide that is what they want to do. We do not have a “Justice System”. We have “Legal System”. It will not protect you. At best it will give you an opportunity to compensate you for your losses.

In larger terms what this means is that abuse of power is seldom prevented by the legal system. Only when it becomes egregious and a large majority of people demand the abuse stop will it actually take place. Case in point is the ATF and their abuse of firearms owners and dealers. ATF Special Agents who read Brady scripts to the press should be prosecuted for violation of 18 USC 242 but what Federal Prosecutor is going to take on that case? The prosecutor who should be building a case to put the agent in jail is a work associate of of the ATF agent. It’s no different than law enforcement and prosecutors not caring if a few blacks get lynched every once in a while. It may be against the law but, basically, their reasoning will go, the people that did it are “good people” and don’t deserve to have their careers ruined over something like that. “It just doesn’t matter, it’s only about about 10%” (inside “joke” for people that know my sociopathic ex-friend Walter).

In most cases law enforcement will not protect you from government abuse of power. Only you can protect yourself. Naive people believe we have a system of laws that will protect us. But the examples of this not being true are too numerous to even attempt to count.

That is why we have the 2^nd Amendment. It is the last ditch guardian of inalienable rights.

Since the Federal government has a huge regulatory agency charged with the regulation and taxing of a right guaranteed by the 2^nd Amendment why not expand it or create a new agency charged with regulation and taxing of the 1^st Amendment? It seems entirely in line with those that admit we have an individual right to own firearms but claim that right can be restricted. Those same type of regulations should be considered “reasonable” when applied to the 1^st Amendment, right?

Doesn’t having to get a license involving fingerprints and a background check before you can attend church sound like a good idea? Opening a new church would, of course, require a license, an environment impact statement, and noise abatement plans. And no churches could be located within five miles of a school or public park.

You should fill out the equivalent of a 4473 and get a NICS check before you can write a letter to the editor. And of course there would be a government mandated 10 business day waiting period before it could be published.

All the complaints about the lies by the media would all be solved if we just had better government regulation. Reporters and editors of all media types would be required to keep meticulous records in bound books showing they had properly researched each story. The books could be viewed by government inspectors anytime there was a claim of a falsehood in a story. The entire news organization would have all their computers, printing presses, and printed material seized before they even heard the specifics of the “Federal Press Laws Violations” let alone had their day in court.

“Free-Speech Free Zones” would extend for 1000 feet around schools and in our National Parks. Anyone with a pamphlet, newspaper, magazine, voice or music projection device, Bible, or any other religious printed matter or symbols within ready access of an occupant of a vehicle could be charged with a crime.

That’s just a very, very small sample of what would be possible if the analogs of the laws and regulations imposed on the 2nd Amendment were imposed on the 1st Amendment.

Remember what Alan Dershowitz had to say:

Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture.  They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.

Alan Dershowitz
Quoted in Dan Gifford
The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason
62 TENN. L. REV. 759 (1995)