Those who trust the government implicitly, at least outside the government’s enumerated powers under the Constitution, are certainly bound to be disappointed. They are quite possibly, bound to be enslaved and probably deserve to be. That’s because, as George Washington explained, "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." However necessary and protecting, and at times comforting, if people become complacent about such "fire," its tendency is to consume them or their progeny. For as Ronald Reagan said, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same." Those of us who have served in or with the government are all the more skeptical about its intent, and quite sober regarding its frequent and inevitable expediencies. Government at any level is fundamentally no more effective, no more prescient, no more moral—and often very much less so, than the town and county in which you live. Indeed, sometimes the good folks in Middle America tend to mentally transfer or attribute their goodness to Washington, and that’s a huge mistake. Beltway bandits may or may not be well intentioned, but their lifestyle, pace, preoccupations and scramble—their function if you will, in political context, in order to be beneficial is predicated on sanity and stability residing at home. The good people of your town should never, ever defer to the government on matters of rights; rather, the federal government ought to and is obliged to defer to the people. The Bill of Rights in fact says so.

Someone living in an affluent and gated community, with armed private security and government security not far behind, may find his or her need for a private weapon incidental or even unimportant. The political class may be unbothered by the United Nations’ long-term agenda to outlaw civilian ownership of firearms in all member countries too. If it is good enough for Rwanda, it should be good enough for Vermont and Colorado! Of course most politicians aren’t that serious. They figure someone else with horse sense somewhere will cover for their incomprehensibleness. They are often surprised by the lack of interest, much less vigilance on the part of people, which lets them get away with nonsense after election. Take the government’s expansion of power under the Patriot Act. We may or may not be in for a long-term War on Terrorism, but the emergency situation per se, which gave rise to the legislation, has clearly abated. The prudent thing to do would be to place more oversight on, as well as to emplace a sunset provision so Congress would be forced to reconsider and to deliberate the need for such measure. Congress ought to debate its renewal, instead of establishing a legacy in perpetuity, of the accumulating accretion of power. The powers were, after all, supposed to be temporary and for a specific purpose. Everyone today still recalls that it was terrorism that gave rise to the Patriot Act and to new governmental powers, yet the powers have been used for law enforcement purposes unrelated to terrorism and no one in the government refutes it. In a political environment where we may reasonably discuss timed withdrawal of troops from Iraq, we ought to be discussing the timed withdrawal of powers that threaten our freedom far more than terrorists do.

Section 213 of the Patriot Act authorizes "delayed notification." People call it "sneak and peek" or "black bag" searches. It steps all over the Fourth Amendment by authorizing government searches without probable cause and without informing you—your home, your car, your business, and your papers. Federal agents simply tell the judge, "It would jeopardize our case if we notified John Doe about searching his home." Notice delayed; constitutional rights denied. Section 215 allows the government to go to a secret court called the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court and say to the judge, "We want to get some records on John Doe." The secret judge issues an order to collect your details, which could be about firearm purchases, medical history, library books or inter-net browsing, whatever. No reasonable cause is necessary either—only a government agent’s claim, that information may be relevant to an ‘ongoing anti-terrorism investigation.’ I suppose your shoe size is relevant, as well as the box cutter in your toolbox. I hope you didn’t get curious and read about militant Islam or American foreign policy. It is easy to link anything in a stupid game of sleuth.

We need to be concentrating on who our enemies are and creating an accurate list of terrorists, suspected terrorists and their associates. We ought to be killing terrorists dead. Instead, the government is using its powers under the Patriot Act as well as other legislation to collect information and to combine and compile it into a mega-computer database covering every single person in the United States. It isn’t about terrorists; it isn’t even about crime. It is about government control and the bureaucratization of life in America and reducing everyone to personal files that can be studied and ultimately monitored. You see it’s the government that doesn’t trust you.

Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary.

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