http://www.townhall.com/news/politics/200307/CUL20030724b.shtml

Former Watergate ‘Plumber’ Attacks Government Regulations
(CNSNews.com) – Government is taking away too many civil liberties, and college students gathered for a conference in Washington, D.C., this week were warned against future encroachments by broadcaster G. Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent who gained notoriety for his involvement in the Nixon-era Watergate scandal.

Liddy, who was one of the White House “plumbers” who spent about $300,000 on political schemes and the Watergate break-in, said his mission now is to educate young people about government restrictions stripping them of their rights.

At one time, Liddy, reminisced, people could rake the leaves and burn them in a barrel, ride a bicycle without a helmet, drive a car without a seatbelt and walk down the street holding a shotgun.

“All those liberties are gone,” Liddy said to a group of about 100 students at the 25th Annual Young America’s Foundation National Conservative Student Conference.

Liddy noted that such liberties of an earlier time in America didn’t disappear “in one broad sweep. They were salami-sliced off, one half after the other, always in the name of some perceived good or product.

“The message is, this process is still ongoing, and if we don’t stop it, young people are going to be telling their kids that ‘when I was a kid this was a free country,’ but they’ll mean the way it is now,” said Liddy.

Liddy said the loss of civil liberties compelled him to write his latest book, When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. “The intent of the book was to shock young people, and then it was to educate,” he said.

Liddy also singled out Second Amendment rights as being particularly at risk, noting that the nation’s founding fathers feared a strong central government and, having just “thrown off the yolk of a tyrannical government” in the American Revolution, didn’t want the government to have the power that it does today.

“The Second Amendment in the Constitution doesn’t say ‘we hereby give you the right to bear arms,’ but what it says is ‘this right will not be infringed,’” Liddy said.

The broadcaster noted that the idea of gun control is not a new trend started in the 20th Century, but in the colonel period because the slave owners didn’t want the slaves to be armed.

At that time, the courts even applied gun control to free blacks because “the next thing you know, black people will be able to say anything they want to say, just like white people, and go anywhere they want to go,” Liddy said.

Gun control emerged out of racism, Liddy claimed, calling it one of the “ugly legacies” from that period of history, and he argued that regulating guns is not necessary because there is any number of ways to kill someone.

During his four-and-a-half years in prison following his Watergate conviction, Liddy said he once saw a man injure several people using a table as a weapon.

“A guy could walk around with an ax and pound somebody in the head. What are we going to have ax control?” Liddy asked rhetorically.

Regulation of legitimate liberties is unjustified, Liddy said, telling young conservatives to work against increases in government regulation. “The best defense is a good offense,” Liddy said.