Some government actions serve to annoy. Some work to bemuse. Confuse…
And some serve to churn up such righteous anger and indignation the power of thunder bellows through the mind, searching for release.
This is one of the latter moments.
According to WKTV, on Tuesday, May 28, 64-year-old Deerfield, NY, resident Ronald Stolarczyk shot and killed two suspected home invaders, 57-year-old Patricia Talerico and her nephew, 27-year-old Nicholas Talerico, possibly saving his own life, and saving his home from being robbed by the couple for what police report would have been the second time.
His reward for surviving the invasion and saving himself? The government has charged Stolarczyk with felony possession of an “illegal” handgun, and his home has been condemned.
Stolarczyk is charged with felony gun possession because investigators believe he used his deceased father's gun, which he never registered to himself, to kill the two suspected intruders.
The government says he had an “illegal” gun.
Allow that to sink in and boil for a moment.
An “illegal gun.”
Unless someone steals a firearm from the owner, there is no such thing as an “illegal gun”. Period. Not according to the US Constitution, not according to Common Law, and certainly not according to the Natural Rights principles that were supposedly the foundation of this not-so-ancient nation. And the last time I checked, New York State was not only one of the 50 states in the union, it was one of the original thirteen states that adopted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. To think that politicians, police, and legal bureaucrats in the Empire State could display the utter gall of not only writing statutes that completely contravene the right to keep and bear arms, but to act on them, and act on them in such an egregious manner as to arrest, prosecute, and humiliate a 64-year-old human being who used an inherited gun to defend his life, is to shake off any ghosts of complacency and realize that the status quo powers in NY are utterly beyond contempt.
Stolarczyk inherited the gun from his dead father. He had a right to own and use it in self-defense.
But he didn’t get a registered “permit” from the government, and, as in Hitler’s Germany, the government must know where all the legal guns are.
You know why -- to keep law-abiding people safe.
Because we all know, when seconds count, the cops are just minutes away. When a couple is suspected of burgling a home once, the justice system will definitely stop them from attempting to do so again.
And so you should just believe in the state, be ready to hand them your guns, and be ready to be arrested by armed agents of the state if you don’t comply. Everyone knows, only the state can have guns.
It’s a mindset that’s worked smashingly in the past.
Mark Wolber, Stolarcyzk’s attorney, described the attack on his client:
He told me that when they were coming up the stairs, that as they approached him, that he was scared to death and he thought they were going to kill him. One of the troopers said, ‘did you see anything in their hands?’ He said, ‘I didn’t look at their hands, I just saw them coming at me and I thought to myself, at that point, that it’s either them or me,’ and he just started firing.
And for not registering the inherited gun that he used to defend his property and his life, Mr. Stolarcyzk could be sentenced to one-and-a-third to four years in prison.
To cap it off, the District Attorney has labeled Stolarcyzk a “hoarder”, which, in the eyes of the government, somehow excuses the condemnation of his home, and the placement of the free-on-bail Stolarcyzk into the hands of “social services” because, of course, he now has no home, and it works to lessen the degree to which some might look at the robbers as in the wrong.
This is a vivid example of how platitudinous politicians and their herd of underlings, along with willing accomplices in academia and the pop media, with the able assistance of drone-like, slack-jawed surface-swimming US collectivists, all have served to undermine the integrity of the language and the principles of liberty that the language is supposed to describe.
It doesn’t matter if Stolarcyzk was a “hoarder”, or if he didn’t shave every day, or if he had broken shutters on his house, or liked to sleep late on Saturdays. The house and what was in it belonged to him, not the state, and certainly not the intruders who are alleged to have sought to rob him for a second time after the state didn’t catch them the first time.
Equally important, it doesn’t matter if Stolarcyzk’s gun was bequeathed to him, or it appeared out of thin air from another dimension. It’s his, and he has a right to it and to the use of it for defensive purposes. Rights are supposed to be inherent and mutually respected. Andrew Cuomo and the state of NY seem to not understand that most easily understood principle.
And the Second Amendment is supposed to stop oppression-avatars like Cuomo from infringing on people’s rights to possess and use firearms for self-defense.
But it’s not just Cuomo, not just the lower-level politicians and bureaucrats who are to blame here.
As I mentioned, the problem is much, much larger, and should serve to fire-up anyone who believes in principle.
The problem goes so far as to implicate even so-called “conservative hero” former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who, while ruling in favor of the defendants in the famous 2007 “DC v Heller” case, and supporting the idea that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, concluded by saying the right to keep and bear arms, like most rights, “is not unlimited.”
Which completely undercuts the very definition of the word “rights”.
Because rights are supposed to be unattenuable by the state. Period. That’s why they’re called “rights”.
This NY State case is simply another example of what happens when people in government and those who support them in society stray from holding onto the true definition of “rights”.
And it is something that ought to inspire us to reaffirm our dedication to defending that definition, and rights themselves, from attacks like this.
We know what has happened in history when people don’t do that.