An Open Letter to the Men and Women of the Connecticut State Police

An Open Letter to the Men and Women of the Connecticut State Police: You are NOT the enemy (UNLESS YOU CHOOSE TO BE.)

The following letter was sent via email to members of the Connecticut State Police, Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection. There are 1,212 email addresses on the list. There were 62 bounce-backs.

To the men and women of the Connecticut State Police and the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection:

My name is Mike Vanderboegh. Few of you will know who I am, or even will have heard of the Three Percent movement that I founded, though we have been denounced on the national stage by that paragon of moral virtue, Bill Clinton. Three Percenters are uncompromising firearm owners who have stated very plainly for years that we will obey no further encroachments on our Second Amendment rights. Some of you, if you read this carelessly, may feel that it is a threat. It is not. Three Percenters also believe that to take the first shot in a conflict over principle is to surrender the moral high ground to the enemy. We condemn so-called collateral damage and terrorism such as that represented by the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Waco massacre. We are very aware that if you seek to defeat evil it is vital not to become the evil you claim to oppose. Thus, though this letter is certainly intended to deal with an uncomfortable subject, it is not a threat to anyone. However, it is important for everyone to understand that while we promise not to take the first shot over principle, we make no such promise if attacked, whether by common criminals or by the designated representatives of a criminal government grown arrogant and tyrannical and acting out an unconstitutional agenda under color of law. If we have any model, it is that of the Founding generation. The threat to public order and safety, unfortunately, comes from the current leaders of your state government who unthinkingly determined to victimize hitherto law-abiding citizens with a tyrannical law. They are the ones who first promised violence on the part of the state if your citizens did not comply with their unconstitutional diktat. Now, having made the threat (and placed the bet that you folks of the Connecticut State Police will meekly and obediently carry it out) they can hardly complain that others take them seriously and try by every means, including this letter, to avoid conflict.

Some of you are already working a major case on me, trying to figure out how I may be arrested for violating Conn. P.A. 13-3, which bears the wildly dishonest title of "An Act Concerning Gun Violence Prevention and Children's Safety." (What part of "protecting children" is accomplished by sparking a civil war?) Not only have I personally violated this unconstitutional and tyrannical act by smuggling and by the encouragement of smuggling, defiance and non-compliance on the part of your state's citizens, but I have further irritated your wannabe tyrant bosses by sending them standard capacity magazines in my "Toys for Totalitarians" program. I further have annoyed them by pointing out -- and seeking more evidence of -- the existence of Mike Lawlor's KGB file (as well as his FBI and CIA counter-intelligence files). In short, I have made myself a nuisance to your bosses in just about every way I could think of. However, their discomfiture reminds me of the wisdom of that great American philosopher of the late 20th Century, Frank Zappa, who said, "Do you love it? Do you hate it? There it is, the way you made it." Whether you will be able to make a case on me that sticks is, of course, problematic for a number of reasons which I will detail to you in the letter below. I have already done so to your bosses and include the links in this email so that you may easily access them.

But even if you are not working on my case you will want to pay attention to this letter, because tyrannical politicians in your state have been writing checks with their mouths that they expect you to cash with your blood. We have moved, thanks to them, into a very dangerous undiscovered country. Connecticut is now in a state of cold civil war, one that can flash to bloody conflict in an instant if someone, anyone, does something stupid. So please pay attention, for Malloy and Co. have put all your asses on the line and are counting on your supine obedience to the enforcement of their unconstitutional diktat.

I apparently first came to your attention with this speech on the steps of your state capitol on 20 April 2013. It was very well received by the audience but virtually ignored by the lapdog press of your state. If I may, I'd like to quote some of the more salient points of it that involve you.

"An unconstitutional law is void." It has no effect. So says American Jurisprudence, the standard legal text. And that's been upheld by centuries of American law. An unconstitutional law is VOID. Now that is certainly true. But the tricky part is how do we make that point when the local, state and federal executive and legislative branches as well as the courts are in the hands of the domestic enemies of the Constitution. Everyone who is currently trying to take away your right to arms starts out by saying "I support the 2nd Amendment." Let me tell you a home truth that we know down in Alabama -- Barack Obama supports the 2nd Amendment just about as much as Adolf Hitler appreciated Jewish culture, or Joseph Stalin believed in individual liberty. Believe what politicians do, not what they say. Because the lie is the attendant of every evil. . .

Before this year no one thought that other firearms and related items would ever be banned -- but they were, they have been. No one thought that the authorities of your state would pass laws making criminals out of the previously law-abiding -- but they did. If they catch you violating their unconstitutional laws, they will -- when they please -- send armed men to work their will upon you. And people -- innocent of any crime save the one these tyrants created -- will die resisting them.

You begin to see, perhaps, how you fit into this. YOU are the "armed men" that Malloy and Company will send "to work their will" upon the previously law-abiding. In other words, this law takes men and women who are your natural allies in support of legitimate law enforcement and makes enemies of the state of them, and bully boy political police of you. So you all have a very real stake in what happens next. But let me continue:

The Founders knew how to answer such tyranny. When Captain John Parker -- one of the three percent of American colonists who actively took the field against the King during the Revolution -- mustered his Minutemen on Lexington Green, it was in a demonstration of ARMED civil disobedience. . . The colonists knew what to do and they did it, regardless of the risk -- regardless of all the King's ministers and the King's soldiery. They defied the King. They resisted his edicts. They evaded his laws and they smuggled. Lord above, did they smuggle.

Now we find ourselves in a similar situation. The new King Barack and his minions have determined to disarm us. We must determine to resist them. No one wants a new civil war (except, apparently, the anti-constitutional tyrants who passed these laws and the media toadies who cheer them on) but one is staring us in the face. Let me repeat that, a civil war is staring us in the face. To think otherwise is to whistle past the graveyard of our own history. We must, if we wish to avoid armed conflict, get this message across to the collectivists who have declared their appetites for our liberty, our property and our lives -- WHEN DEMOCRACY TURNS TO TYRANNY, THE ARMED CITIZEN STILL GETS TO VOTE.

Just like King George, such people will not care, nor modify their behavior, by what you say, no matter how loudly or in what numbers you say it. They will only pay attention to what you DO. So defy them. Resist their laws. Evade them. Smuggle in what they command you not to have. Only by our ACTS will they be impressed. Then, if they mean to have a civil war, they will at least have been informed of the unintended consequences of their tyrannical actions. Again I say -- Defy. Resist. Evade. Smuggle. If you wish to stay free and to pass down that freedom to your children's children you can do no less than to become the lawbreakers that they have unconstitutionally made of you. Accept that fact. Embrace it. And resolve to be the very best, most successful lawbreakers you can be.

Well, I guess at least some of my audience that day took my message to heart. As Connecticut newspapers have finally begun reporting -- "Untold Thousands Flout Gun Registration Law" -- and national commentators are at last noticing, my advice to defy, resist and evade this intolerable act is well on the way. The smuggling, as modest as it is, I can assure is also happening. This law is not only dangerous it is unenforceable by just about any standard you care to judge it by. Let's just look at the numbers mentioned in the Courant story.

By the end of 2013, state police had received 47,916 applications for assault weapons certificates, Lt. Paul Vance said. An additional 2,100 that were incomplete could still come in.

That 50,000 figure could be as little as 15 percent of the rifles classified as assault weapons owned by Connecticut residents, according to estimates by people in the industry, including the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation. No one has anything close to definitive figures, but the most conservative estimates place the number of unregistered assault weapons well above 50,000, and perhaps as high as 350,000.

And that means as of Jan. 1, Connecticut has very likely created tens of thousands of newly minted criminals — perhaps 100,000 people, almost certainly at least 20,000 — who have broken no other laws. By owning unregistered guns defined as assault weapons, all of them are committing Class D felonies.

"I honestly thought from my own standpoint that the vast majority would register," said Sen. Tony Guglielmo, R-Stafford, the ranking GOP senator on the legislature's public safety committee. "If you pass laws that people have no respect for and they don't follow them, then you have a real problem."

This blithering idiot of a state senator is, as I warned Mike Lawlor the other day, extrapolating. It is a very dangerous thing, extrapolation, especially when you are trying to predict the actions of an enemy you made yourself whom you barely recognize let alone understand. I told Lawlor:

You, you silly sod, are extrapolating from your own cowardice. Just because you wouldn't risk death for your principles, doesn't mean there aren't folks who most certainly will. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but folks who are willing to die for their principles are most often willing to kill in righteous self-defense of them as well. You may be ignorant of such people and their ways. You may think that they are insane. But surely even you cannot be so clueless that, insane or not from your point-of-view, such people DO exist and in numbers unknown. This is the undiscovered country that you and your tyrannical ilk have blundered into, like clueless kindergarteners gaily (no pun intended) tap-dancing in a well-marked mine field. The Founders marked the mine field. Is it our fault or yours that you have blithely ignored the warnings? If I were a Connecticut state policeman I would be wondering if the orders of a possible KGB mole throwback were worth the terminal inability to collect my pension. Of course, you may be thinking that you can hide behind that "thin blue line." Bill Clinton's rules of engagement say otherwise.

The odds are, and it gives me no particular satisfaction to say it, is that someone is going to get killed over your unconstitutional misadventures in Connecticut. And if not Connecticut, then New York, or Maryland, or California or Colorado. And once the civil war you all apparently seek is kicked off, it would not be -- it could not be -- confined to one state.

This is not a threat, of course. Not the personal, actionable threat that you may claim. It ranks right along with -- no, that's wrong, IT IS EXACTLY LIKE -- an ex-con meeting me in the street and pointing to my neighbor's house saying, "Tonight I am going to break in there, kill that man, rape his wife and daughters and steal everything that he is, has, or may become." I warn him, "If you try to do that, he will kill you first. He may not look like much, but I know him to be vigilant and perfectly capable of blowing your head off." That is not a threat from me. It is simply good manners. Consider this letter in the same vein. I am trying to save you from yourself.

For, like that common criminal, you have announced by your unconstitutional law and your public statements in favor of its rigorous enforcement that you have a tyrannical appetite for your neighbors' liberty, property and lives. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see that this policy, if carried to your announced conclusion, will not end well for anybody, but especially for you.

Now let's examine those numbers in the Courant story. You know the size of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection. Wikipedia tells us that "CSP currently has approximately 1,248 troopers, and is headquartered in Middletown, Connecticut. It is responsible for protecting the Governor of Connecticut, Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut, and their families." There are but 1,212 email addresses listed on the state website to which this email is going, which presumably includes everyone including secretaries, receptionists, file clerks, technicians, etc. Now, how many shooters for raid parties you may find among that one thousand, two hundred and forty eight that Wikipedia cites, or whatever number will be on the payroll when something stupid happens, only you know for sure. I'll let you do the counting. They are daunting odds in any case, and as you will see, they get more daunting as we go down this road that Malloy and Company have arranged for you. (By the way, don't forget to subtract those on the Green Zone protective details, for your political masters will certainly see their survival as your mission number one.) So, how many folks would your superiors be interested in seeing you work their will upon? And of these, how many will fight regardless of cost?

Let's assume that there are 100,000 non-compliant owners of military pattern semi-automatic rifles in your state. I think it is a larger number but 100,000 has a nice round ring to it. Let us then apply the rule of three percent to that number -- not to the entire population of your state, not even to the number of firearm owners, but just to that much smaller demonstrated number of resistors. That leaves you with at least 3,000 men and women who will shoot you if you try to enforce this intolerable act upon them. Of course you will have to come prepared to shoot them. That's a given. They know this. So please understand: THEY. WILL. SHOOT. YOU. (In what they believe is righteous self defense.) Now, if any of them follow Bill Clinton's rules of engagement and utilize the principles of 4th Generation Warfare, after the first shots are fired by your raid parties, they will not be home when you come to call. These people will be targeting, according to the 4GW that many of them learned while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war makers who sent you. This gets back to that "when democracy turns to tyranny, the armed citizenry still gets to vote." One ballot, or bullet, at a time.

This is all hypothetical, of course, based upon the tyrants' appetites for these hitherto law-abiding citizens' liberty, property and lives as well as upon your own willingness to enforce their unconstitutional diktat. And here's where you can do something about it. The first thing you have to realize is that the people you will be targeting do not view you as the enemy. Indeed, you are NOT their enemy, unless you choose to be one.

Again, an unconstitutional law is null and void. Of course you may if you like cling to the slim fact that a single black-robed bandit has ruled the Intolerable Act as constitutional in Shew vs. Malloy, but that will not matter to those three percent of the resistors -- your fellow citizens -- whom you target. They no longer expect a fair trial in your state in any case, which leaves them, if they wish to defend their liberty, property and lives, only the recourse of an unfair firefight. So to cite Shew vs. Malloy at the point of a state-issued firearm to such people is, well, betting your life on a very slender reed.

Thus, my kindly advice to you, just as it was to Lawlor, is to not go down that road. You are not the enemy of the people of Connecticut, not yet. The politicians who jammed this law down the peoples' throats are plainly flummoxed by the resistance it has engendered. In the absence of a definitive U.S. Supreme Court decision do you really want to risk not being able to draw your pension over some politician's insatiable appetite for power?

There are many ways you can refuse to get caught up in this. Passive resistance, looking the other way, up to and including outright refusal to execute what is a tyrannical law that a higher court may yet find unconstitutional and therefore null and void. Do you really want to have to kill someone enforcing THAT? Just because you were ordered to do so? After Nuremberg, that defense no longer obtains. (You may say, "Well, I'm just a secretary, a clerk, you can't blame me for anything." Kindly recall from Nuremberg one other lesson: raid parties cannot break down doors unless someone like you prepares the list in advance. In fact, you have at your keyboard and in your databases more raw, naked power than any kick-in-the-door trooper. And with that power comes moral responsibility. Adolf Eichmann didn't personally kill anyone. But he darn sure made up the lists and saw to it that trains ran on time. When the first Connecticut citizen (or, God forbid, his family) is killed as a result of your list-making, do you think that because you didn't pull the trigger that gives you a moral pass?)

So I call on you all, in your own best interest and that of your state, to refuse to enforce this unconstitutional law. There are a number of Three Percenters within the Connecticut state government, especially its law enforcement arms. I know that there have been many discussions around water-coolers and off state premises about the dangers that this puts CT law enforcement officers in and what officers should do if ordered to execute raids on the previously law-abiding.

You have it within your power to refuse to initiate hostilities in an American civil war that would, by its very nature, be ghastly beyond belief and would unleash hatreds and passions that would take generations to get over, if then.

Please, I beg you to understand, you are not the enemy, you are not an occupying force -- unless you choose to violate the oath that each of you swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against ALL enemies, foreign and domestic. For their part, the men and women who will be targeted by your raids took an identical oath. Can you think of anything more tragic than brother killing brother over some politician's tyrannical appetite?

I can't. The future -- yours, mine, our children's, that of the citizens of Connecticut and indeed of the entire country -- is in YOUR hands.

At the very least, by your refusal you can give the courts time to work before proceeding into an unnecessary civil war against your own friends and neighbors on the orders of a self-anointed elite who frankly don't give a shit about you, your life, your future or that of your family. They wouldn't pass these laws if they thought that they would have to risk the potential bullet that their actions have put you in the path of. They count on you to take that bullet, in service of their power and their lies. Fool them. Just say no to tyranny. You are not the enemy. Don't act like one.

The patch of the Connecticut Three Percent, given me on the occasion of my speech in Hartford, 20 April 2013.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I have asked this question of several retired LEOs that I know. They, for reasons only known to themselves, have not answered. I have told them on many different occasions that I believe certain state and federal politicians are actively courting a civil war. Why, because they think they can win it. Wring, wrong, wrong.

All the crowned heads of Europe thought the same way in August of 1914 when the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie plunged all of Europe into World War I. Most of those responsible for the war were either out of power or dead four years later, along with 26 million other people.

The score in 1918 was: 1) Austro-Hungarian Empire gone and Hapsburg dynasty dethroned; 2) Ottoman Empire gone and a civil war brewing in Turkey; 2) Germany defeated and the Kaiser had abdicated the throne; 4) Russia wracked by civil war and the Tsar and Royal Family executed; 5) Italy bankrupted; 6) France bankruped and an entire generation of Frenchmen killed; 7) Britain lost the flower of its generation of young men and was bankrupted; 8) the might of the United States won the Great War, but America retreated into isolationism after war’s end.

The point is that all the best and brightest of the elite political class were predicting victory for their side and the boys would be home by Christmas of 1914. A great majority of those best and brightest souls were dead by Christmas 1918.

All our political best and brightest should remember that once the specter of civil war is loosed upon the land, all bets are off as to the victors. Death, suffering, and destruction are certain and no one can divine the outcome.

The law passed has created an estimated 350,000 armed felons in the state of Connecticut. Literally. These were law-abiding citizens before; now they are class D felons, for doing absolutely nothing. Before they could rest secure in their homes, at least insofar as the government of that state recognizes the 4th Amendment any better than the 2nd. Now they face five years' imprisonment. For doing absolutely nothing.

That works both ways, however. If the law enforcement officers of the state of Connecticut took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, then those who enforce this law are betrayers of that oath and by extension, traitors to their country. If that is an uncomfortable position for them to be in, I suggest that suddenly becoming a felon for doing nothing is far worse. This train is headed down a very bad piece of track and the brakemen are asleep.

This is all hot air and wishful thinking unless and until
badgemonkeys start bleeding in meaningful numbers. Till
that happens they will look at recent history....the past
very few decades and see that the badge has ALWAYS given
them the power to do as ordered and to do as they like.

Until they are shown in no uncertain terms by the use of
force that they DO NOT GET TO EXERCISE THEIR POWER UNOPPOSED
then it will be business as usual meaning doors kicked in, dogs shot and family’s terrorized as usual.

Does he really expect Roberts and company to rule the CT laws unconstitutional? Don’t get stuck on stupid.

What happens when Roberts and company uphold CT law? Do you fold your tent and obey the law? If so, save your money and comply now.

Or, if you really believe what you wrote, will you defy a law ruled constitutional. Be prepared for the outcome, whatever it may be.

Not exactly the letter from Col. Travis, now, is it?

A legal brief is shorter and more to the point. It takes longer to write a shorter note, but unless it's boiled down to three, maybe four, brief paragraphs fuggetabouddit!

Is this about one man's "case," a stack of research on politicians, pop cultural ramblings and private language, or is this about the lately hyped Connecticut assault on the Bill of Rights?

I can already hear all the reasons for composing a Remonstrance written in an nearly incoherent manner, but there's a reason why the "the car of history" on the clock in the old House Chamber is on wheels.

The Passing Parade waits on no one. Wrap it up!

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