Category: Good News for a change!
by Patrick Carroll
Americans have long been concerned about government surveillance, and rightly so. Being watched by the government is incredibly disconcerting, especially when government agents are probing into your private life.
The rise of drone technology has not helped on this front. Whereas before a government would need a plane or helicopter to get aerial views of you or your property, now they just need a small remote-controlled device.
The issue of governments spying on Americans using drones has come up in some recent court cases and legislative disputes. One recent case involves Todd and Heather Maxon who live on a rural five-acre property in Long Lake Township, Michigan. Todd likes to fix up cars, and he keeps a number of vehicles on his property.
For years the Township has been going after the couple for zoning violations, accusing them of illegally storing “junk” on their property. But here’s the kicker. The cars can’t even be seen from outside the property…that is, unless you fly a drone overhead. And that’s exactly what the Township did.
Without even attempting to get a warrant, the Township hired a contractor to fly a drone as low as 150 feet over the Maxons’ property multiple times over two years. The Township is now trying to use the pictures taken by the drone as evidence that the Maxons are violating a local zoning ordinance.
“If the government wants to conduct intrusive surveillance like this, the Fourth Amendment requires that it get a warrant,” said Institute for Justice Attorney Mike Greenberg regarding the case. “The zoning authority’s failure to even try to get one shows their indifference to Michiganders’ constitutional rights.”
New York City has also come in the crosshairs in recent years for its decisions on this front. In 2019, the New York Police Department acquired 14 drones for “monitoring giant crowds, investigating hazardous waste spills, handling hostage situations and reaching remote areas in crime scenes, among other tasks.” Though the NYPD insists the drones won’t be used for warrantless surveillance, many are worried that putting this technology in the hands of police is just asking for trouble.
Citing these fears, privacy advocates pushed for legislation known as the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act (“POST Act”), which requires the NYPD to release information about how surveillance tools are being used and creates an annual oversight system to audit compliance with department policies. The Act was passed in June 2020 after gaining momentum following the death of George Floyd.
The Legal Issue
The legal issue with warrantless government surveillance revolves around the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which states the following:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
In plain language, governments aren’t allowed to conduct searches and seizures as they please. They need to get a warrant.
In the more than two centuries that have passed since this amendment was adopted in 1791, mountains of case law have built up establishing precedents for what exactly constitutes “unreasonable” and what qualifies as a “search” or “seizure.” Other related questions have also been extensively litigated, such as whether evidence collected in an unconstitutional search (such as pictures from a warrantless drone flight) can be used in court. On that issue, there is a long-standing precedent. “For more than a century, the remedy for a Fourth Amendment violation has been suppression of unlawfully obtained evidence,” the Institute for Justice notes.
Whether the Maxons win their case remains to be seen.
What’s clear, however, is that drone technology provides governments with unprecedented spying capabilities—capabilities they would gladly use against Americans if they could get away with it.
The Philosophical Issue
For many topics addressed in the Bill of Rights libertarians are firmly in favor of the right being recognized (for example, freedom of speech and gun rights). With the Fourth Amendment, however, there are some philosophical problems.
The economist and political philosopher Walter Block addresses the “right” to privacy in the Peeping Tom chapter of his book Defending the Undefendable 2. “According to the libertarian legal code,” Block writes, “we may do anything at all to each other, whether they like it or not, provided, only, that in so doing we not violate—not their privacy ‘rights’ which do not exist, but rather—their property rights in their own persons and justly owned physical possessions.”
As Block correctly points out, spying on people isn’t technically a rights violation from a libertarian perspective. Indeed, a “right” to privacy, consistently recognized, would lead to all sorts of absurd laws, such as banning detectives or prohibiting most journalism and gossip.
Should we let governments spy on us at will, then, and never push back through legal channels? Of course not. There is a sound philosophical case to be made against government surveillance—it just doesn’t rest on a supposed “right” to privacy.
The most fundamental point to be made in this regard from a libertarian framework is that government surveillance is funded by taxpayer dollars, which are taken coercively. This alone makes the practice immoral in the libertarian view.
It’s also worth pointing out that the purpose of government surveillance isn’t necessarily protecting people. Sometimes the government uses drones because it intends to force its laws on people (such as in the case of the Maxons and Long Lake Township’s zoning laws) in which case the government is using surveillance as a means to a liberty-violating end.
In such cases, libertarians will often make a tactical move. While we may disagree with the Fourth Amendment philosophically, holding the State to its stated laws on privacy is often a more effective way of defending people’s liberties (property rights) than appealing to philosophical ideals. Just saying “it’s their property, they have a right to use it as they please” may be a more philosophically sound rebuttal to zoning laws, but it’s not particularly effective in court.
If appealing to the Fourth Amendment is what will convince the powers that be to respect property rights, there’s nothing wrong with that. We just need to recognize that, for libertarians, such an appeal is merely a practical tactic—the philosophical argument against the government’s actions is rather different from the legal argument.
Privacy in Libertopia
So that’s the argument against government drones, but what about private drones? Would libertopia have private drones flying everywhere, snooping on people constantly, seeing as libertarians don’t recognize a right to privacy? Of course not. Privacy is in high demand, so drones would almost certainly be regulated with voluntary contracts.
Responding to the Fourth Amendment at the end of his Peeping Tom chapter, Block summarizes the libertarian position on privacy as follows: “We have no such right. It is merely a privilege, one that, fortunately, the free market system can bestow upon us.”
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Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Robert “Jock” McLaren (center) was one hard-core veterinarian. Australian War Memorial photo.
As a species, we are enthralled with seeing people explore their limits. Sometimes it is in the small things. “Would you rather do this by mouth or take a shot?” I will not infrequently query at work.
Some folks will ask for a shot because they are in a hurry or want to get better faster. Others are not in such a rush and make a reasoned decision to take it slower. Then, there are the beefy 21-year-old college guys who get a little weepy and ask if they can call their moms and talk about it. That’s frankly just pathetic.
Many times when discussing hard medical things to come, I have had patients say, “Oh, I could never do that.” I beg to differ. Oftentimes folks just need to be properly incentivized.
It is amazing what the human animal is capable of if there is simply no alternative. Friday runs at Airborne school, 61 days of institutionalized pain and deprivation during the Ranger course, and the horrors of Hell Week during BUD/S that produces baby Navy SEALs are all designed to explore and define a person’s limits. Each institution is carefully crafted to motivate people to quit. Most commonly, a person’s limitations are defined by their circumstances.
In jump school, it is silly stuff like a funny hat and a shiny pin to put on your uniform. However, if there is a threat to a child, then suddenly, that petite 117-pound mom becomes the tactical equivalent of a raging grizzly bear. As the timeless axiom goes, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it is rather the size of the fight in the dog. It really does all come down to motivation.
Jock McLaren (left) is shown here in 1945 touring his old POW camp.
The Problem
The vermiform appendix is a most curious organ. Vermiform means “worm-like.” The appendix is a finger-like blind pouch that sprouts off of the cecum at the junction between the small and large intestines. For ages, we thought the appendix was just an afterthought, something that God inadvertently left in there while He was distracted by something else. In recent years we have come to appreciate that the appendix likely serves as a beneficial reservoir for good gut bacteria. It seems God actually never gets distracted.
The problem is that the appendix is bad to get clogged up and infected. Appendicitis is one of the most common indicators of emergency surgery. In 2015, there were 11.6 million cases of appendicitis and 50,100 deaths worldwide. If your appendix gets ripe, that thing has to come out. Now hold that thought.
Surgical procedures are tough enough with the proper tools under controlled
circumstances. Jock McLaren had to make do with slightly less.
The Manliest Man in the World
Born in Scotland, Robert Kerr “Jock” McLaren served as a grunt in Europe during World War I. After the war, Jock immigrated to Queensland, Australia, studied to become a veterinarian, and settled down to make a life for himself. When Australia was dragged into World War II, Dr. McLaren volunteered to go off and do his bit yet again.
During one engagement with the Japanese in 1942, Jock McLaren was captured and remanded to the hellish Changi POW camp in Singapore. The Japanese viewed captured soldiers with particular disdain and typically tried to work and starve them to death. McLaren escaped in short order and, upon his recapture, was transported to another ghastlier camp in Borneo.
Jock escaped yet again along with a Chinese comrade named Johnny Funk and trekked 270 miles across the Pacific, hopping from island to island in a hollowed-out log. Once they arrived on the island of Mindanao, they realized that the Philippines had fallen to the Japanese … and that Jock McLaren had developed appendicitis. With the Japanese actively hunting for them, Jock now had a hard decision to make.
Equipped solely with a razor blade, two spoons, and a hand mirror, Jock McLaren removed his own appendix. He sort of sterilized his equipment by boiling water in a rice pot over a campfire. The operation took four and a half hours without anesthetic. He closed the wound with plant fibers harvested from the surrounding jungle. Two days later, he was on his feet and evading the Japanese yet again. Soon thereafter, McLaren was fighting alongside Philippine guerillas.
Jock McLaren commandeered an antiquated 26-foot whaling boat he christened The Bastard, festooned it with pilfered mortars and machine guns, and used the vessel to terrorize occupying Japanese troops. Despite a hefty bounty on his head, McLaren survived the war. Of his surgical ordeal in the jungle, he later opined, “It was hell, but I came through all right.” I suppose it really all comes down to your motivation.
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- More people own guns today than ever before. That growth continues a long-term trend that goes back several decades. In addition to that gradual increase, we’ve also seen extraordinary growth in new gun buyers in the last two years. We had to rewrite who owns guns and why they own them.
Today, about four-out-of-ten families have a firearm in their home. Despite the astounding changes in gun ownership, the way some politicians talk about guns and gun owners is out of date. New gun owners are subjected to a crash course in being misperceived and misrepresented by politicians and the mainstream news media.
What is real, and what is fantasy?
Sitting President, Joe Biden, echoed old myths about gun owners at a fundraising event in June. He said, “More people get killed with their own gun in their home trying to stop a burglar than, in fact, any other cause.. Think about that. Because it’s hard to do. It’s a hard thing to do.”
Mayor John Fetterman, the Democrat candidate for the US Senate from Pennsylvania, also felt the need to comment on guns and gun ownership. He said, “I have seen with my own eyes at the scenes in my community what a military-grade round does to the human body.” He said that rifles, particularly modern rifles, should be outlawed.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said, “This whole concept that a good guy with a gun will stop the bad guys with a gun, it doesn’t hold up. And the data bears this out, so that theory is over.”
Those statements don’t fit what we know. We know a lot about new gun owners because we talked with them. Gun stores asked new gun owners why they wanted a gun so the gun shop employee could direct the customer to the appropriate products. The industry trade group representing firearms manufacturers and distributors collected those answers.
The stereotypical gun owner used to be an old white man who bought a gun to go hunting. Several years ago, personal safety replaced hunting as the major reason new gun owners buy firearms. Today, gun owners are from every demographic group; male and female, rich and poor, urban and rural. Gun owners represent every ethnic and racial group. About one-out-of-four African-American adults own a firearm. It seems strange that the mainstream media and politicians have deliberately ignored that change.
We saw firearms ownership increase for many reasons. Concealed carry of a personal firearm is now common in all but a handful of states. Not only are tens of millions licensed to carry a personal firearm in public, but we also exercise those permits daily.
Today, about one-out-of-a-dozen adults carry a firearm in public when and where it is legally permissible to do so. We also stop most attempted mass murders when the government allows us to carry our firearms. Good men and women, ordinary civilians, use firearms to protect themselves and their families more than four thousand times a day. Excluding some politicians, more and more of us have concluded that armed defense works.
Another reason for increased gun ownership is the unusual increase in crime we’ve seen in the last few years. Our judicial system stopped removing repeat criminals from society during the Covid lockdowns. The resulting increase in crime touched our families and friends. Many of us discovered that the police will not be there to protect us. Millions of us responded by buying a firearm and protecting ourselves.
We should probably add a third factor that increased the rate of firearms ownership. The Covid lockdowns reduced the time we could spend with friends and extended family. We spent more time looking at our computers and our phones. During the lockdowns, the news media had a larger influence on our perception of what is happening in the world around us.
To deliver viewers to their declining list of advertisers, the news media fed us a concentrated diet of sensationalized crime reports. Crime indeed increased in the last few years, but the tiny screens brought crime to where we live as never before. In combination, factors like these significantly increased both the number and diversity of legal firearms owners.
We defend ourselves with a firearm between 1.7 and 2.5 million times a year. 44 percent of black gun owners reported using firearms to defend themselves or their families. Many of us know someone who used a firearm in self-defense. In contrast, I never heard the mainstream media correct President Biden’s statement that our guns kill more of us than they save. That leaves our personal experience in direct contradiction with the President’s claim and the media’s twisted narrative about gun owners.
Mayor Fetterman’s claim sounds strange to me as well. Looking at our history, even the ubiquitous 9mm handgun cartridge was first carried as a military round. Today, the 9mm is the most common handgun cartridge carried by both law enforcement and civilians.
When a policeman is carrying it, the modern rifle is called a “personal defense weapon” or a “patrol rifle.” The same gun made out of metal and plastic is relabeled by anti-gun politicians as an “assault rifle” and a “military-grade weapon” when our neighbors own one. The modern rifle is called a “weapon of war,” even though no modern military branch would field the semi-automatic rifles that US civilians are allowed to own today. Today’s military rifles are capable of automatic fire, and ours are not.
Fetterman’s gun-confiscation proposal might make some sense if we only looked at one side of the argument. Fetterman deliberately ignored the hundred thousand times a year that long guns were used in armed defense. We have about 25 million modern rifles in civilian hands here in the US. If these gun owners were a problem to society, then we would surely know it. Modern rifles save many more lives than they cost, but that isn’t what we see on television.
The news media sells sensationalized stories and leaves out the additional facts that put violence into perspective. About four times as many people are killed with knives than are killed with rifles each year. Drowning kills ten times more people each year than die from “assault weapons.” According to FBI homicide statistics, more people were killed with hands and feet than were killed with a long gun of any kind.
We agree that violent crime is shocking, but the mainstream news media never called out the distortions of these anti-gun politicians. The media often reports when a criminal uses a firearm. In contrast, the media seldom reports when our neighbors use their legally owned firearms to stop a crime.
Each time that a major US media outlet mentions an armed citizen using a legally owned firearm to save lives, the media runs hundreds of stories where criminals used a gun. That media bias turns the world upside down. In fact, armed defense is several times more common than a criminal using a firearm during the commission of a crime. This deliberate editorial policy misrepresents the news of armed defense by a factor of over a thousand to one. That is why we think that mass murder is common and that armed defense is rare.
If you only know what you’re told by the mainstream press, then you might believe the gun-control politicians too. One hint is that many Democrat politicians own guns even as they vote for ever more gun-control laws to disarm the rest of us.
The stereotype of gun owners is a lie. The media calls us male-pale-and-stale, and who cares if old white men are disarmed anyway. In fact, gun owners now look like a cross-section of the USA. Minority urban women are the fastest-growing segment of new gun owners. I think Democrat politicians are afraid that more women and minorities will decide to become gun owners. These new gun owners might enter the culture of armed America and protect themselves.
That fear keeps Democrat politicians up at night.
About Rob Morse
The original article, with references, is posted here. Rob Morse writes about gun rights at Ammoland, Clash Daily, Second Call Defense, and his SlowFacts blog. He hosts the Self Defense Gun Stories Podcast and co-hosts the Polite Society Podcast. Rob was an NRA pistol instructor and combat handgun competitor.
I do not care what kind of work it is. I am always appreciative of folks, that come to the job and then do it with style! Grumpy
“Somewhere, somehow, somebody’s going to pay,” was the tagline for the 1985 Schwarzenegger action movie Commando. This classic stylized bloodbath orbited around a retired special operator named John Matrix whose daughter is kidnapped. The archetypal evil mastermind takes the little girl in an effort at motivating Schwarzenegger’s super-soldier character to overthrow a small island nation-state on his behalf. The central theme, should you wish to think this deeply about it, explores the limits to which a devoted father might go to protect his child.
According to www.moviebodycounts.com, for his era, Arnold Schwarzenegger was Hollywood’s deadliest actor as determined by total on-screen kill count. Commando was his bloodiest movie by the same metric. His record has since been eclipsed by more modern fare, but he was the unchallenged 1980’s king of gory vengeance. As an aside, one scene that was proposed but later cut had Schwarzenegger chopping a henchman’s arm off with a machete and then beating him to death with it. His dialogue was to have been, “Thanks for lending me a hand.” Sheesh…
John Matrix logged seventy-four kills in Commando. Among them fifty-one people were shot, seven were blown up by emplaced explosives, and five others succumbed to hand grenades. Another five met their gory demise thanks to an M202 rocket launcher.
Two faceless disposable bad guys got cut into pieces by thrown circular saw blades, one person was stabbed to death, and one particularly unfortunate rascal was impaled on a hissing steam pipe. As an aside, Schwarzenegger’s youthful daughter Jenny was none other than 13-year-old Alyssa Milano, the modern face of the Me Too movement.
Commando was actually a pretty silly movie. The guns were cool, but the dialogue seemed like it was penned by a Third Grader, and the acting simply reeked of cheese. I’m nonetheless not too proud to admit that I had a life-size movie poster from the film plastered on my dorm room wall back when I was a college student. However, a year before Commando hit the big screen, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saw a very public example of just how far one real guy might actually go to avenge a crime committed against his child. That guy’s name was Gary Plauche.
The Setting
Leon Gary Plauche was born on November 10, 1945, in Baton Rouge. He served in the US Air Force and attained the rank of Staff Sergeant. After leaving the military he became a heavy equipment salesman and also worked as a cameraman for a local TV station. Though he had a temper, he was known for his affable demeanor and quick jokes. Plauche fathered four children—three boys and a girl. Gary was separated from his wife June in the early 1980s. This was predictably hard on his kids.
In 1983 Gary’s 11-year-old son Jody began taking Hapkido lessons from a 25-year-old ex-Marine named Jeffrey Doucet. Jeff Doucet had humble beginnings. He dropped out of school in Ninth Grade and, as a child, lost a sister to a rattlesnake bite. The discipline and exercise intrinsic to the martial arts seemed good for Jody. Doucet took the kid under his wing and cultivated a bond that appeared to be therapeutic given the circumstances. Doucet was a regular visitor at the Plauche home and frequently gave Jody a ride to the dojo for training.
Authorities later determined that Jeffrey Doucet had been molesting the young man for more than a year. In February of 1984, Doucet kidnapped Jody and took him to a motel in Anaheim, California, near Disneyland where he sexually assaulted the kid repeatedly. Meanwhile, the authorities scoured the country looking for them both.
Doucet eventually allowed Jody to make a collect call to his mother. The cops traced the call to the motel and staged a raid. Law Enforcement officers hit the hotel room, rescued the child, and took Doucet into custody without incident.
Jody was returned home on March 1, 1984. Once he was safe the details of the protracted abuse came to light. Gary, who was 39 at the time, was interviewed by a news crew in a ghoulish effort at ascertaining his feelings on the situation. He told the interviewer that he did not know what to do and just felt helpless.
The Setting
Two weeks after Jody returned to Louisiana, Jeffrey Doucet was extradited from California to Louisiana to stand trial for child molestation and sexual assault. Doucet’s Flight 595 out of Dallas landed at Ryan Field in Baton Rouge, and Doucet was led through the terminal in handcuffs. Meanwhile, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, the aggrieved father Gary Plauche stood nearby at a bank of pay phones speaking with his best friend. He cryptically whispered into the phone, “Here he comes. You’re about to hear a shot.”
In the immediate aftermath of what was to come it was assumed that local Law Enforcement officers had tipped Plauche off regarding the timing and location of the transfer. Plauche enjoyed friendships with many of the local cops, so this was not an unreasonable assumption. It was later determined, however, that a former co-worker from the local ABC television affiliate WBRZ-TV was Plauche’s source of intel. Then as now tragedy sells, so the media slathered the sordid story with attention.
This bit is all pretty unsettling when you think about it. Humans in the Information Age are drawn to calamity like politicians to other peoples’ money. Throughout this whole ghastly episode, TV crews hounded the major players in search of that Pulitzer-grade image that might graphically capture one man’s anguish in the face of something so epically horrible. At 9:30 pm with the manacled child molester Jeffrey Doucet passing just behind him, Gary Plauche gave the world those images.
The Killing
Plauche retrieved a small revolver of unknown make from his boot, stepped alongside Doucet, placed the gun to the right side of his head, and fired a single .38-caliber hollowpoint round. The cops subdued him immediately. Plauche’s friend Deputy Sheriff Mike Barnett can be heard on the tape asking him, “Gary, why? Why, Gary?”
Plauche tearfully answered, “If somebody did it to your kid, you’d do it, too!”
The Aftermath
The sex criminal Jeffrey Doucet fell into a coma and died in hospital the following day. Video footage of the horrific scene has taken on a life of its own. Michael Moore used it in his anti-gun documentary screed Bowling for Columbine. The clip also featured prominently in an unsettling compilation of real-life video killings titled Traces of Death 2 released in 1994. It was viewed more than 20 million times on YouTube prior to its removal.
Gary Plauche was charged with murder in the second degree but subsequently pled no contest to manslaughter. He was given a seven-year suspended sentence along with five years’ probation and 300 hours of community service. He completed all of this in 1989.
Opinions were mixed on the outcome of the Plauche case. Some felt that shooting a man in the head in cold blood in an airport warranted more than probation and community service. Others believed that the circumstances surrounding the crimes committed against his child absolved him of responsibility. Plauche’s defense team made a compelling argument that Doucet was a charismatic manipulative predator who had used Plauche’s family challenges to take advantage of his son.
Psychological assessments alleged that Plauche was so traumatized by these events that he was unable to discern the difference between right and wrong at the time of the killing. Any parent can imagine the unfettered anguish this might precipitate. The judge in the case, Frank Saia, ultimately agreed and opined that Plauche represented no risk of further criminal behavior. He felt that sending Plauche to prison would serve no material purpose for the state.
It was later revealed that Doucet and Plauche’s wife June were having an affair at the time. This revelation just served to muddy the waters further. However, forensics determined that Doucet’s assault on Jody occurred just as had been alleged.
In 2019 Jody Plauche released a book titled, Why, Gary, Why? The Jody Plauche Story. The book was described thusly, “Through his own incredible story of using his past for good by helping others, he shares how any reader who has suffered great trauma can move on and not let the past define him or her.”
I’ve not read it myself, so I can’t comment on its contents. However, the excerpts I have found do yield insight into Jody’s subsequent attitudes about the shooting.
He wrote, “I think for a lot of people who have not been satisfied by the American justice system my dad stands as a symbol of justice…My dad did what everybody says what they would do…Plus, he didn’t go to jail. That said, I cannot…condone his behavior. I understand why he did what he did. But it is more important for a parent to be there to help support their child than put themselves in a place to be prosecuted.”
In his final interview prior to his death, Gary Plauche showed no regret for killing Jeffrey Doucet and stated that he would do it again if given the opportunity. In 2011 Plauche had a stroke as a complication of diabetes and was placed in a nursing home. He died in 2014 at the age of 68.
Of his father, Jody wrote, “A lot of people remember the guy who shot somebody. I remember someone who would pick up stray animals…someone who was just a kind soul, a gentle person.”
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Bully for him!
