The recent citizen rebellion in Miami-Dade county is a good lesson for America’s gun owners, that is, if they’re willing to learn how to effectively neutralize the steadily encroaching tyranny of the American central state.
Some background: Miami-Dade’s canvassing board refused to manually recount its ballots but reversed itself on November 17 because of threats of legal action by the Gore campaign. The Miami-Dade manual recount began on November 20. The following night (November 21) the Florida Supreme Court issued a deadline of 5:00 p.m. Sunday, November 26, for all manual recounts to be finished. The next morning, Wednesday November 22, the Miami-Dade canvassing board decided that it did not have enough time to meet the 5-day Thanksgiving-weekend deadline for hand counting 654,000 ballots. Instead, it decided it would hand count only 10,750 votes that had been rejected by voting-counting machines.
Keep in mind, there had been controversy about these 10,000 votes. One Miami-Dade poll worker insisted that these ballots had been discarded by voters who had been at first confused by the notorious “butterfly” ballot. These confused voters asked for another ballot, punched the new ballot correctly, and then left. Meanwhile, the old ballots were kept, and they accumulated into this pool of 10,000. Hence counting these double-punched and hanging-chad ballots was not an enfranchisement of confused voters but a double-counting intended to favor Al Gore.
Reinforcing this perception of a rigged process was the further decision by the Miami-Dade canvassing board to close the manual recount to the public. In an uncharacteristically courageous fashion, the county Republican party swung its phone bank into action, calling all their voters to swarm the Stephen C. Clark Government Center to protest the venal ruling. The staunchly anti-communist Radio Mambi drummed up an additional few hundred protesters.
The last straw for the inchoate junta came when Joe Geller, the chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, left one of the counting rooms with a disputed ballot in his pocket and proceeded to move behind closed doors. He was quickly surrounded by protesters and ordered to surrender the ballot. Police had to intervene to escort him to safety.
Upstairs the real revolution began. The protesters stormed the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. It took several minutes for sheriff’s deputies to restore order, but even they couldn’t stop the deafening pounding and chanting on the election supervisor’s doors: “Cheat, Cheat, Cheat, Cheat,…”
The three members of the canvassing board were then led under heavy police guard back to the original public recount room from the room where they were conducting their secret tally for the minions of Al Gore. They then voted unanimously to stop all further hand counts. Although the Gore campaign tried to force the Miami-Dade board to resume a hand count, on Thanksgiving the Florida Supreme Court denied it. It was a tremendous blow from which the incipient junta could never recover.
This local uprising by ordinary citizens backed into a corner by an insatiably corrupt establishment could be a valuable lesson for America’s gun owners, the group most loathed and despised by the establishment’s elite. Particularly backed into a corner are California gun owners. Under the recently passed law SB23, by December 31, 2000, if Californians own an “assault weapon,” they have to do one of three things: register the gun with the California Department of Justice as an “assault weapon,” sell the gun(s) to out-of-state buyer(s), or physically remove the gun(s) from the State of California. For “assault weapon” owners, failure to pursue one of these options is a felony offense.
Of course SB23 is just another chapter in the campaign against semi-automatic rifles. It was begun in January 1989 by George Bush Sr. who banned imports of semi-automatics after a school shooting in Stockton, California. The second major chapter was written under Bill Clinton in Title XI of the Omnibus Crime Act of 1994, banning further production of “assault weapons.” Gun producers found a way around the law by manufacturing guns with American-made receivers and imported parts sets. The price of semi-automatic rifles dropped precipitously, with AK-47s selling for just $286.00, down from $800-$1,200 in 1994. On August 18, 2000, a legal committee at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms put an end to this by forbidding further importation of parts sets.
The next chapter in the war on the semi-automatic rifle will likely be written by either George W. Bush or Al Gore since neither of them has an ounce of respect for the Second Amendment. George W. Bush is in favor of banning importation of foreign-made, high-capacity magazines. Al Gore, while mouthing a phony respect for hunters’ rights, would nationalize SB23. SB23 is only Title XI of the 1994 Crime Act in much more despotic garb. It even bans guns with thumbhole stocks (an artifact of the 1989 George Bush Sr. ban) and the capability of accepting detachable magazines. Even banned are rifles with fixed magazines that happen to be less than 30 inches in length.
In the most crime-ridden urban areas, semi-automatic rifles have never been involved in more than 2% of shooting deaths. Study after study has shown that the recent drop in violent crime has no correlation with recent gun control efforts, yet the campaign against semi-automatic rifles continues unabated and at a fanatical pace.
The ultimate intellectual origin of this push to completely ban the semi-automatic rifle is federal law enforcement agencies, most notably the US Marshalls, FBI, BATF, and DEA. The continued push to ban semi-automatic rifles by these agencies signifies a very sinister future they (and the elite they represent) have in mind for the rest of us.
Which brings us back to the Miami-Dade rebellion. California gun owners shouldn’t obey the registration requirements of SB23. Who owns which particular guns is none of the government’s business and registration is only a prelude to confiscation. In deference to states’ rights, California gun owners should vote with their feet, not just storing their guns at warehouses in Nevada or Arizona, but moving there as well.
The real problem is when the complete ban on semi-automatic rifles moves to the federal level. A George W. Bush presidency would help the process along while a Gore presidency would quickly complete it. Like the Miami-Dade rebellion showed, the solution is at the local level. Local officials must be made to understand that if they genuflect to the totalitarian agendas of outsiders they will pay a price.
Freedom-loving Americans in local communities must form a united front in large numbers to consistently impart this lesson to local officials.
Even citizens of other local communities could help out a community under siege. Quick mobilization efforts could take place over cell phones, faxes, e-mail, and local talk radio as happened in Miami-Dade. It’s doubtful that the 1993 federal massacre of 86 people at Waco or the wanton murder of Randy Weaver’s wife and son could have occurred with such impunity in an environment of quick and heavy local mobilization. Indeed, the feds and their propaganda arm in the national media could have been handily run out of town.
Three cheers to the patriots of Miami-Dade. Hopefully their model will inspire the rest of us.
November 25, 2000
Dale Steinreich, PhD, is a consulting economist. He is also a regular contributor to AgainstTheCrowd.com.
