The Chicago Times has this story, saying armed private detectives rang doorbells of voters who signed the Libertarian Party’s statewide candidate petition. The story says these detectives then tried to persuade the voters to sign affidavits, disavowing their signature.
As the voter quoted at the end of the story says, the experience will cause him (and surely others as well) never to sign a ballot access petition again.
Wow. When the incumbent parties resort to thugs with guns in order to win elections, does that mean we have won?
Those armed detectives ought to be charged with voter intimidation.
At least the signers were not instantly killed or put into a death camp (for the moment ?).
Wake up folks – ALL of the major regimes in the USA are EVIL and vicious ANTI-Democracy minority rule gerrymander regimes. — i.e. de facto Stalin or Hitler type terror regimes – regarding ANY opposition.
—
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
Just another reason I am a Independent. Richard, can the Libertarian file any charges here? This is awful. But this is, I am afraid, what it is coming to in the U.S.
Pinkertons, part 2.
From the Libertarian Party website:
Libertarians, like other Americans, want to be able to walk city streets safely and be secure in their homes. We also want our Constitutional rights protected, to guard against the erosion of our civil liberties. In particular, Libertarians want to see all people treated equally under the law, as our Constitution requires. America’s millions of gun owners are people too.
Law-abiding, responsible citizens do not and should not need to ask anyone’s permission or approval to engage in a peaceful activity. Gun ownership, by itself, harms no other person and cannot morally justify criminal penalties.
—–
Nothing in the article suggests that the guns were being used in a threatening way. So Libertarians, you want guns? You got guns. Live with the consequences of your philosophy without bitching wand moaning when it comes back to bite your own ass.
The Libertarian Party website only talks about gun ownership, not about whether strangers bearing guns ought to ring the doorbells of people who don’t know them and imply that the householder may have done something unethical or illegal.
Does or has the Libertarian Party support any gun regulation laws that would restrict one’s ability to carry a handgun?
What is the point of carrying a handgun if not to pose a potential threat?
Sorry, Richard, but you and your fellow Libertarians and other supporters of gun ownership and opponents of gun regulation just have to accept the unavoidable consequences of your misguided “frontier” philosophy. This is one of them. Occasionally you’re going to run into someone who’s packing, and if you have an ounce of sense in you you’re going to feel endangered by that, regardless of the circumstances. An annual headcount of about 40,000 ought to be evidence enough of that fact, but I guess it isn’t.
Your bad.
It is a mistake for anyone to attribute attitudes of any individual, based on that individual’s group membership. If you want to know what someone thinks, the only accurate way to find out is to ask that individual.
“What is the point of carrying a handgun if not to pose a potential threat?”
I’m no Libertarian (I’m actually a Green), but I think the question here is whether it is morally and ethically sound that private investigators, or any individuals really, should go up to a person’s door and “pose a potential threat” while ostensibly conducting politics. Frankly I consider this whole episode to be extortion and thuggery the likes of which one normally sees in nations even less democratic than our own.
Just because a person CAN do something, like carry a gun around out in open public areas, that doesn’t mean they ought to in certain situations. There needs to be a degree of sense and reason involved, although perhaps reason IS involved on the part of the Republicans: this may make it more difficult for third parties to collect signatures in Illinois in future ballot access petition drives, and the news article clearly shows this potential at the end.
How about show up at your own front door with a bazooka or submachine gun to deal with those armed stooges of the Donkeys/Elephants — using their tyrant terrorist routines ???
— and tell the stooges to go to HELL with their terrorist trespassing — do NOT pass GO! — do NOT collect their EVIL rotted fees from the D/R gangs.
—-
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
Joshua –
A nicely nuanced position. Now..tell me where in the Libertarian Party’s position on gun ownership I can find the same degree of nuance. Tell me where the LP states that they support the right of American’s to pack some heat EXCEPT in certain circumstances. Give me a web citation and I’ll retract my statements,
Personally, I think everything that uses gunpowder to deliver as much force or more than a track starting pistol ought to be outlawed, but I’m sadly in the minority. But since we do live in a gun-happy country, in which people are permitted to carry concealed weapons, and municipalities are prevented by the USSC from restricting that right, then we all apparently have to accept the fact that anyone who shows up at the front door, whether a paid political operative, the milkman, or a Seventh Day Adventist, may have a full clip ready to discharge. That’s their “right,” I guess. But no one who supports the right to carry can have a reasonable objection to any of them doing so.
Nothing in the article suggests these people brandished their weapons. Just that they were apparently in evidence. Don’t like that? Fine. You and I agree. But we don’t have the law on our side, and we certainly don’t have the LP on our side either.
That would cause me to inform the private dick that he’s committing armed trespass, and then stick a shotgun in his face while telling him to GTFO.
They would have to find a black person to file charges on who was approached by a white individual. Because the DOJ believes whites aren’t subject to intimidation and only whites can intimidate.
If Jewish households in Germany in 1933 owned guns in the same proportion that U.S. households own them today, they might have been better off. Swiss households are armed with guns to an even greater extent than U.S. households; so are Canadian households.
And in China, where private gun ownership is rare, there have been incidents of mass murder by individuals using knives.
The truth is that every individual in the world has the potential to do a great deal of harm, one way or another. Anyone driving a car has the potential to do great harm, and individuals piloting airplanes have even more potential to do harm, if they are suicidal. Even if the U.S. Constitution did make it possible for governments to outlaw private gun ownership, chances are private detectives would be exempt; certainly law enforcement personnel would be exempt.
When I can fly a gun to San Francisco or drive a gun to Florida, or when I read about some psychopath using a knife to kill twenty people in thirty seconds I might try to make some sense of that NRA slop you just served up, Richard.
Besides…who asked you for your opinion on guns? You’re a Libertarian, after all.