Government Gunslingers

The United States military, Secret Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation are not the only government entities packing heat nowadays. Far from it; America has become a police state and that means that there are government gunslingers just about everywhere.

That’s right. Today there are at least 70 federal government entities which have armed divisions employing about 120,000 full-time officers authorized to carry guns and make arrests according to a June 2012 Justice Department report.

Now even the Library of Congress, National Institute of Health and Federal Reserve Board, among several other non-law-enforcement type agencies, are employing armed gunslingers ready to riddle the sheep with bullets at the slightest perceived provocation.

In short, our government has armed itself for protection against the very people it is charged with serving and protecting.

That is the hallmark of a police state.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, is just another fully armed federal police force. 

Recently they descended in full force and body armor upon the tiny Alaskan gold mining town of Chicken, together with a team of several other armed federal and state officials, including the FBI, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Coast Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Park Service.

It was part of an Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force investigation to look for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.

EPA officials deny that the operation was a “raid.”

“Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say "POLICE" emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms,” said one gold miner of the incident.

These pollution police are treating clean water violations nowadays in the same fashion as bank robberies or kidnappings.

"Environmental law enforcement, like other forms of law enforcement, always involves the potential for physical, even armed, confrontation," said an EPA spokesman in defense of the Chicken Alaska raid.

Of course; when government goons engage in violent physical armed confrontations with people, they should expect some level of physical violence in return. On the other hand, if they would simply investigate peacefully and issue court citations to violators, they would have no need to arm themselves to the teeth.

Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell has ordered an investigation, saying: "This level of intrusion and intimidation of Alaskans is absolutely unacceptable."

Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Republican, and Mark Begich, Democrat, have also inquired about the incident. “This seems to have been a heavy-handed and heavy-armor approach. Why was it so confrontational? The EPA really didn’t have any good answers for this,” Murkowski observed.

North Carolina resident Larry Keller was visited by armed EPA agents in May 2012 after sending an email complaining to the regional administrator who was video-taped saying his enforcement strategy was to "crucify" executives from big oil and gas companies. "The charter of the EPA is to protect the environment and public, not to act as a quasi federal police department," Keller told them after they challenged his conduct as suspicious.

You see, in a police state, such as what we have in American today, the police will come to your door fully armed to investigate and intimidate you for the suspicious “crime” of registering a complaint against one of them.

Our nation has become a government of gunslingers.