See? No black helicopters here. Just the innocent sharing of data between states and the federal government. For the children! “MO Secretly Shares Entire CCW List With Feds Against State Law”:
Missouri State Senator Kurt Schaefer confirmed today that the Missouri Highway Department did in fact share confidential CCW lists with the federal government in violation of Missouri law.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol has twice turned over the entire list of Missouri concealed weapon permit holders to federal authorities, most recently in January, Sen. Kurt Schaefer said Wednesday.
Questioning in the Senate Appropriations Committee revealed that on two occasions, in November 2011 and again in January, the patrol asked for and received the full list from the state Division of Motor Vehicle and Driver Licensing. Schaefer later met in his office with Col. Ron Replogle, superintendent of the patrol.
After the meeting, he said Replogle had given him sketchy details about turning over the list, enough to raise many more questions. Testimony from Department of Revenue officials revealed that the list of 185,000 names had been put online in one instance and given to the patrol on a disc in January.
Asks Dana Loesch, who has been following the story closely:
How is it that agencies who answer directly to Governor Jay Nixon were allowed to repeatedly break Missouri law unless sanctioned by the governor himself? Missouri state law prohibits the full compliance with the Real ID act, so who gave these departments the go-ahead and will Attorney General Chris Koster uphold Missouri law and take action?
Good question. As Loesch also reminds us, “Missouri is the same state that issued a report naming tea partiers, libertarians, and anyone who flew the military authorized Gadsden Flag as potential domestic terrorists.” And now, it seems, they’re especially concerned, in concert with federal authorities, about MO’s CCW holders — which of necessity includes those who have already gone through rigorous background checks and finger printing, the very kinds of measures the national Democrats (along with Pat Toomey, John McCain, and some other Republicans) are currently claiming will make the country safer from “gun violence.” Raising the obvious question, if any of this is about truly about gun safety, rather than a precondition for eventual confiscation, as many of us know it to be, than why is MO working with the feds to track those who are already the most scrutinized of all legal gun owners?
And the answer is simple: the federal government wants to know who is armed, and some state governments are willing to sell out their citizens to help the larger gun-grabbing agenda that can only strengthen a centralized authority. These are, whether they present themselves to voters that way or not to, fellow-travelers of the statists.
And if there isn’t a criminal investigation into this kind of behavior, we’ll know for certain that the practice is more widespread than merely a single state entering into such an agreement with federal authorities. In fact, every state will be suspect — and if we had a responsible press, investigative journalists would be salivating to take their cues from the growing scandal in MO to look closely at the practices of the states in which they live and report.
(h/t JD)
If there isn’t a criminal investigation
We’ll have yet another confirmation that there are two sets of rules, that further, we can trust to no set of rules, that rules are for chumps [that’s us, folk], that arbitrary powers applied arbitrarily has become the new rule, that the citizens of Missouri can comfortably look upon themselves as subjects, and therefore go back to watching their reality tv.
This one pisses me off and hits rather close to home. They want to know why they can’t be trusted? Really?
FWIW, When Jay Nixon was Missouri AG he ran to court as fast as he could to get an injunction to prohibit concelaed carry when it was state law, not that it slowed anything down. Concealed carry and guns in general are very popular in Missouri. When he decided to run for governor he wanted to make nice and say he changed his mind about all that since he needed the votes of some of those crazy gun people. We see where his heart is and where his deviousness will take him. I want to know why state employees who knowingly violated state law have not been fired and are not being prosecuted. I’d also like to know what the feds have done or are doing with this data.
One pedantic point, I’m not certain they care about firearms as much as they care about squashing the people who have them. Or want them. Or pretend that partially eaten pop tarts are guns.
From another thread, shsuld the feds be more worried about people who are taking anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medications, or those who prescribed them but aren’t taking them?
Sometime soon, somebody in government with even a smidgen of responsibility needs to understand that if they won’t abide by the rules, we the governed won’t feel bound to do so. And if that happens, really bad stuff will come about.
There are the other obvious questions; what has the Social Security Administration Office of Inspector General done with the data? Are the data recoverable? Can an injunction be issued whereby the data are preventing from being stored and used by the federal government?
Pulping politicians and bureaucrats — while it may appear a satisfactory solution — wouldn’t in truth be a terribly useful response. In the first place, paper is readily available at a reasonable price, and in the second place, politicians and bureaucrats don’t contain much in the way of fiber in any event. Boffer Bings had a better idea.
In related news: Separated at Birth: Pat Toomey and…?
MO is to data what CO was to top-down lobbying. Not a secret but an overt test case. A template.
Both worked.
—-
In my medium-sized burg the annual display of dozens of 10’x20′ politically-correct taxpaid banners created by juvenile products of the government academy has been installed on the choicest public land in town. Among the many tolerant demands and excoriations to be colorblind by celebrating color in the post-racial age comes this observation:
The nice thing about standards is there’s so many to choose from.
And the sheeple grazed on, secure in the niceness of it all.
Namely, that I’m discerning, thoughtful, capable of objectivity, willing to do the hard work of beating back institutionalized relativism (which is a scourge to any well-kept civilization), and should never, ever, have to be governed by someone so sophomoric as you.
Just Be Nice.
Nice ate the good and shat out an Obama.
And the answer is simple: the federal government wants to know who is armed…
One hopes they take a look at the list and say “185,000? In Missouri alone? And those are just the ones who bothered to file paperwork? Shit. These people really are ungovernable.”
Still no text to be had. How will an unpublished bill be debated?
With Nice™ as their guide, progg liberalism wins this planet’s Darwin Award. Regularly.
And aren’t I one son of a bitch for judging it all so. They having offended the Nice™ faith, now I shall pluck out mine eyes.
Be nice? What is this, a bad Patrick Swayze movie?
Ah, but we do have a responsible press –just not a press responsible to ordinary citizens like you and me.
Nice is the mask cruelty wears to murder kindness.
NICE is British for euthanasia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Hideous_Strength#N.I.C.E.