IN PRAISE OF OUTLAWS

by Ernest Partisan

I choose to be an outlaw. There was once a time when a majority

of American Citizens understood this and approved. True, there

were probably numerically more Tories residing in America at the

time, but by definition one who chooses to be the subject of a

ruler is not a Citizen, and of no consequence to anyone

honorable. America was a nobility-free republic – a

revolutionary creation of outlaws. A land of honorable outlaws

who agreed upon a minimal set of laws that even an outlaw could

abide and grudgingly lend a tiny fraction of their natural

sovereignty and reclaimed liberty to the obvious mutual benefit

of all.

Not all criminals are outlaws, and not all outlaws are

criminals. An outlaw lives by a moral code, but blithely ignores

absurd laws designed to suppress dissent and control private

personal behavior. A criminal lives by no code, external or

internal and is an animal to be mistrusted or destroyed. A

criminal ignores whatever is inconvenient at the moment while an

outlaw often chooses a personally inconvenient and sometimes

dangerous course in the name of principle and honor.

A criminal has absolute freedom, while an outlaw has personal

liberty and spiritual freedom. A criminal will steal food from a

working man, while an outlaw will refuse to pay child support to

a welfare agency. A criminal will lobby into existence a law

putting the cash of ten million laborers into his pocket, while

an outlaw will refuse to file a tax return. A criminal will

carry a gun to intimidate victims, while an outlaw will carry

his gun as a symbol of his liberty and to defend against all

aggressors.

Our Bill of Rights is a relic of our outlaw past. It is a set of

codes written by free Citizens who understood the necessity of

controlling the monster they knew they were creating. They knew

that there can be no words so offensive that they dare not be

spoken or published. They knew that if anyone had that power to

suppress, all had it and no one would dare speak freely, just as

it had been in the ugly old world order they had fled. They

understood the necessity of faith as well as the

irreconcilability of conflicting dogma. They had seen firsthand

the use of official religions to control outlaws, and didn’t

much care for what they saw. So they penned the First Amendment

to the Constitution.

They understood that the right to be armed, and to be a threat

to the ruler simply by being, was an absolute. They codified

this very clearly in a sentence ending “shall NOT be infringed”

which contains not a single allow or permit. They understood

that any compromise on this principle of freedom deeded the

power of life and death over them to some unaccountable other.

The right to be armed guarantees not bravery, nor victory, nor

nobility, nor honesty nor honor, nor even safety, but merely the

right to honest respect and a fair fight. And so the Second

Amendment came to be written down.

They had seen the tyranny and felt the violation of having the

government put soldiers and officers into their homes to keep

dissent minimized and politically correct. An outlaw knows this

is no longer necessary, of course, since electronic monitoring

can work more effectively and less personably in all cases. But

they didn’t have electronic magic at the time, so the founding

outlaws only prohibited the quartering of troops in private

homes in peacetime. This was the genesis of the Third Amendment.

Many of the founding outlaws had felt the humiliation of being

routinely searched in hopes of finding something illegal to be

used against them or to turn them against their fellow outlaws.

They knew of such outrageous offenses as random roadblocks, home

invasion searches, searches through bank accounts and payrolls,

and the ultimate humiliation of personal body searches. They

knew how much could and would be made illegal and used to

wrongly label them criminal, when the Tories eventually

insinuated themselves into the newly created governments. They

knew that actual criminals would use a Citizen’s cloak of

privacy to conceal misdeeds, and that this privacy must be

protected from casual intrusions and mandatory disclosures. For

all of this, the Fourth Amendment was drafted.

The founding outlaws also knew well the coercive and dishonest

tactics and abusive methods of executives and prosecutors, and

so the Fifth Amendment was written to provide a tool to use

against the excesses of the law. Remember, these were our

founding outlaws! In the same vein, they knew the Tories would

try to render these weapons ineffective in different kinds of

legal maneuverings, so they enshrined some more protections,

especially the right to trial by jury in the Sixth Amendment.

And to avoid end runs around these protections by incorrectly

labeling a dispute between law and outlaw as a contractual

dispute, they enshrined the same jury trial provision in the

Seventh Amendment. The founding outlaws finished up their magnum

opus by providing a way for an outlaw to get out of jail in the

eight amendment, and specifically prohibiting the creation of

most of the laws of which Tories are so fond in the Ninth and

Tenth Amendments.

So what is the point of this little history lesson? I’m one of

the proud breed of modern outlaws. For a while, I thought we

might be an endangered species. Now, however, thanks to the

excesses and impatience of the Clinton Regime, our population

has made a tremendous comeback, with our numbers increasing

tenfold in a single generation.

Do you remember the first point about how not all criminals are

outlaws and how not all outlaws are criminals? The Tories in

their twentieth century guises have been allowed to prey

increasingly on the individual outlaw in the name of fighting

crime. Every one of the protections in the Bill of Rights and

the original Federal Constitution have been violated repeatedly

in spirit and in letter. The Bill of Rights is simply the agreed

upon part of the outlaw’s code. And the government has itself

become not an outlaw, but a criminal, by repeatedly proving that

it follows no code at all.

And so, since the outlaw lives by a code, there are government

laws he must break and not be silent about, while a criminal

lives by no code and can always beat the law. The result is lots

of criminals, lots of Tories, and a few angry outlaws. This same

situation prevailed at the beginning of this country – Criminal

rulers, Tories obeying, and outlaws standing with manly firmness

at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. And since the code or

covenant has been broken, the response is and will be to avenge

the wrongs, since avenging the wrongs is one of the most sacred

items in the outlaw’s code.

This article appeared in THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE. Permission

is further granted to reprint articles from The Libertarian

Enterprise, provided that the article is printed in full,

recognition is given to the author, and TLE is cited.