Gun Control? Let’s Start With the Feds

It’s no wonder that so many citizens in the Western United States are seeing black helicopters and United Nations plots behind every federal government initiative. It’s no wonder Mel Gibson’s “Conspiracy Theory” is near the top of the box office. We’re not paranoid. They really are after us.

Who is “they”? In the past couple of years, we have witnessed the biggest arms buildup in the history of the federal government. I don’t mean the Defense Department; that would actually be constitutional and might even make sense.

No. The kind of arms that are proliferating in Washington these days are the kind pointed at our own civilian population and carried by a growing number of federal police forces with ever-larger budgets and ever-deadlier arsenals. It’s the militarization of the federal government.

In 1996 alone, at least 2,439 new federal cops were authorized to carry firearms, according to the General Accounting Office and congressional documents. As a result of that record one-year surge, there are nearly 60,000 armed federal agents representing departments as diverse as the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Postal Service.

The Environmental Protection Agency? I suspect that most Americans would be shocked to learn that agents of the EPA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers are packing heat. Has the protection of spotted owls and kangaroo rats become a matter of life and death? Why do EPA agents need to be armed? Well, if you were in the business of seizing people’s personal property in the name of saving endangered species, you might want to be armed, too. But is it wise policy? Is it in the spirit of the Constitution? Where do we draw the line?

A few months ago, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt tried to arm the Bureau of Land Management, thus forming yet another division of enviro-cops. Only a flurry of controversy has stalled the move at least until next March.

To justify its need to carry weapons and exert police authority over its 268 million acres of land in the Western states, the BLM has cites the long and growing list of other federal agencies--like the EPA and Fish and Wildlife--that have criminal law enforcement powers. In other words, Pandora’s box already has been opened. Following such logic, I figure, it’s only a matter of time before officials at the National Endowment for the Arts are authorized to carry guns. Art cops--is that any harder to believe than envirocops?

But the arms proliferation at the federal government level is no joke. Innocent people are dying because of its abuses, people like Donald Scott, the Malibu millionaire gunned down in his home in a bogus marijuana raid by at least five federal agencies, among others. Lots more are living in fear, as a recent report by the Western Journalism Center illustrates--in fear of their own government and its virtual standing army of 60,000. Where is the American Civil Liberties Union when you need it?

The founders of this country never envisioned the need for a federal police force. They saw the inherent dangers in such ideas. Recent leaders like Bill Clinton and George Bush, who have overseen this domestic arms buildup, seem to think there are no limits to federal authority or government intrusion into our daily lives.

Most of the growth in government militarization is not, ironically, in the large, traditional agencies such as the FBI. Rather, it is among the agencies you would never guess have anything to do with guns. The ranks of armed enviro-cops, for instance, have soared from 2,471 in 1987 to 4,204 as of last September, a 70% increase. Do you feel safer now?

Those who have been watching such developments over the past few years say that all this is leading to the establishment of a genuine national police force. You can see it in the way the FBI now routinely interferes in local law enforcement affairs. You also can see it in the plans of big government architects like Vice President Al Gore, who has urged that Treasury Department police agencies--such as the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms--be placed under the control of the Justice Department.

I’ve got a better idea. Let’s disband BATF. That would be a good start. Then Congress should take a look at this whole issue and reevaluate the police powers of every single federal agency.

Before our legislators pass one more law restricting the right of law-abiding citizens to carry firearms, tighter controls need to be placed on the proliferation of guns in government. That would be meaningful--and constitutional--gun control.