The questions that are never asked, Part I

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 10:03:10 GMT
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JAN. 3, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
The questions that are never asked, Part I

The day-after-Christmas shooting spree by bearded 42-year-old misfit Michael McDermott in Wakefield, Mass. will doubtless bring early calls for more and harsher "gun control."

In fact, Massachusetts already has among the harshest "gun control" laws in the country. McDermott (don't get me wrong -- what he's accused of doing was evil and unjustified and wrong) appears to have blithely violated many of those laws without experiencing any noticeable impediment to his plans. Massachusetts, you will remember, is the one state in the nation (so far as I know) where the "welcoming" billboards on state highways depict a handgun with the huge legend: "Have a gun, go to jail."

Virtually every firearm in the Bay State must now (by law) be registered, the most noticeable effect of that law to date being that the commonwealth's cops are now months or even years behind in processing all those hampers full of registrations, to the point where they started whimpering more than a year ago that without federal help and manpower (which would be unconstitutional, as though that stops anyone, any more) they may simply never catch up.

Actually, I misspoke -- there are two other results of such feel-good laws. 1) They do take cops off the streets to handle all the paperwork. Confident you don't need a gun in your workplace because you can always dial 911? Workers at Edgewater Technology -- McDermott's ill-fated workplace -- dialed 911. Wakefield isn't way up in the Berkshires, either -- it's in the densely populated silicon suburbs of Boston. Yet it took cops so long to respond that Mr. McDermott had finished killing everyone he was after, and was calmly sitting in the reception area waiting to be arrested, when police finally finished donning all their fancy SWAT gear and stormed in. (See "Dial 911 And Die: The Shocking Truth About The Police Protection Myth," by attorney Richard W. Stevens, www.libertymall.com.)

2) The second result of Massachusetts "gun control" -- which would thus be better dubbed "victim disarmament" -- is that McDermott was virtually assured none of his law-abiding victims would be armed in their own self-defense.

The Wakefield shootings prove "gun control" will never work, unless advocates believe they can eliminate guns as thoroughly as the king eliminated all the needles from his kingdom in the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty." The problems with that scheme being: 1) the king failed; 2) real-life bad guys never live up to such agreements (see "The Rhineland, 1936"; "Poland, 1939"); and 3) I keep asking gun control advocates if, as an initial three-year experiment, they'll agree to start by taking all the guns away from the police, the army, and the FBI. They never respond.

Meantime, the Wakefield shootings do raise one other, more important issue. Most folks are wailing, as usual, that there was just "no imaginable reason" for this poor nut to go off the deep end.

Leave aside the question of whether McDermott had recently been under psychiatric treatment with mind-altering drugs (like one of the shooters at Columbine High School, as well as that Kip Kinkel kid in Springfield, Ore.)

More importantly, McDermott bypassed several other possible targets to single out and kill seven members of the firm's accounting department. That accounting department had recently informed McDermott they would start seizing his paychecks and sending them to the IRS for "back taxes." The AP delicately reports the IRS had issued a "request to garnishee his wages" and that the firm had "agreed not to begin taking money from McDermott's paycheck until after the holidays."

That's bull. The IRS does not "request"; it demands. Employers do not merely "take" a little extra from each paycheck; under the "Notice Of Intent To Levy" (Form 668-W) they routinely seize and send to Washington every dime of a working man's living -- the very thing the Constitution with its careful limits on "direct taxation" (not to mention the Fourth and Fifth amendments) was designed to prevent the government from ever doing.

Imagine being told that -- no matter how hard you work -- you'll never see another dime of your own earnings. The miracle is not that an occasional IRS victim goes homicidal here and there, but that so few of them do.

These thoroughly illegal paycheck seizures are done to create an "incentive" for the worker to crawl on bended knee to the local IRS office, where he's expected to bare his financial soul (bringing along a year's worth of utility and car repair bills, grocery receipts, etc.)

At that point, supercilious IRS drones will decide how many of those expenses to "allow." (In my case -- they were after me, long after both the 6- and 10-year statutes of limitation had tolled, for 1983 "assessments" against a weekly newspaper which folded in Providence, R.I., in 1985 -- they actually refused to "allow" me to keep as much money as I could document I'd been spending for repairs on our 12-year-old cars. Recall that those subject to IRS liens can neither buy new cars "on time" for a decade, nor save up any money in a bank account for that purpose -- their bank accounts being regularly cleaned out and seized.)

These posturing IRS toads -- one pretending to be the victim's "advocate" -- then determine how much of his paycheck the worker "needs to live on" and draw up a formal, written agreement allowing him to retain only that amount ... the final goal of any socialist system of income redistribution.

Thereupon, these simpering weasels require the "taxpayer" to "voluntarily" sign a waiver of his or her right to ever contest this "agreement" or the underlying assessments -- along with an arbitrary extension of the statute of limitations which would normally allow him to go free after a mere decade. If he fails to sign he will be dubbed "uncooperative," and the seizure of every penny from his bank accounts and paychecks can continue indefinitely.

During this entire process, are either bookkeepers like those at Edgewater Technologies of Wakefield, Mass., or "taxpayers" like Michael McDermott, told that wage and employment taxes are voluntary in America -- that there's absolutely no statutory or legal requirement that in order to assume employment in this country a citizen needs to "request" withholdings by applying for a Social Security number, or filling out a W-4 "request for withholding"?

Were the Edgewater Technology bookkeepers -- who have now paid the ultimate, pathetic price for their ignorance -- aware that IRS "notices of intent" to seize paychecks or bank accounts are not legally binding unless accompanied by a court order signed by a judge?

Did they bother to ask why "paragraph A" of the legal code citation is always deleted from the "authorizing" fine print on the back of the IRS' standard "seize-his-paycheck" Form 668W (it starts with "paragraph B") -- the reason being that paragraph A specifies that said law authorizes the use of such methods only against employees of the federal government?

NEXT TIME: WHEN DOES "THE UNITED STATES" CONSIST ONLY OF "THE COMMONWEALTH OF PUERTO RICO, THE VIRGIN ISLANDS, GUAM, AND AMERICAN SAMOA?"

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (952-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 800-244-2224; or www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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