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Do you know who owns your child?This might seem like a strange question to most… but the answer is even stranger and more terrifying to comprehend.When a question like this is posed, we the people often look to our legislature and our constitution for the answers, as esoteric and interpretable as those answers may be. But without the rose-colored glasses, we can actually read with our own eyes what the answer to this question is from the eyes and opinion of our government.Before you can truly attain the answer to this question though, and comprehend how it applies to you and your children, you must first temporarily suspend your emotion, your idealism, and your beliefs. For when we refer to law, these things do not apply. And when it is a corporation that writes these laws, morals, ethics, and values go out the window.Anger though, for the purpose of the information you are about to receive, is permitted and requested…≈First of all, let’s clarify that what we are about to see is the opinion of the court system. Courts do not offer “judgment”, only “opinion”. The justices (not judges) of the “Supreme Court” as well offer nothing but opinion, which then becomes what the BAR association considers to be “Public Policy” or public opinion. The BAR copyrights these opinions then misleadingly calls it the “law”.The side effect of being a consenting citizen of the United States (corporation) is that these copyrighted codes are applied to you with what the U.S.CODE itself calls Prima Facie law (law which derives its authority from presumed consent). Therefore, all branches of government technically operate under presumed law, meaning that the consent of the governed is automatically assumed in all legal matters and decisions based on court opinion.This, unfortunately, applies to all contracts made with or on behalf of the state…And one of those contracts is called a “Marriage License“.Yours and your spouses signature on that state-sanctioned and federally registered document signifies a consent-based contract between all three parties – you, your spouse, and the “State“.But don’t take my word for it… Let’s see what the court system offers in their opinion about this subject?First, lets visit an Illinois Appellate Court judgment from 1997:Appellate Court of Illinois, NO. 5-97-0108:“Marriage is a civil contract to which there are three parties-the husband, the wife and the state.“Van Koten v. Van Koten. 154 N.E. 146.Continued…“…When two people decide to get married, they are required to first procure a license from the State. If they have children of this marriage, they are required by the State to submit their children to certain things, such as school attendance and vaccinations. Furthermore, if at some time in the future the couple decides the marriage is not working, they must petition the State for a divorce. Marriage is a three-party contract between the man, the woman, and the State“Linneman v. Linneman, 1 Ill. App. 2d 48, 50, 116 N.E.2d 182, 183 (1953), citing Van Koten v. Van Koten, 323 Ill. 323, 326, 154 N.E. 146 (1926).“The State represents the public interest in the institution of marriage.“Linneman, 1 Ill. App. 2d at 50, 116 N.E.2d at 183 (1953).Continued…“This public interest is what allows the State to intervene in certain situations to protect the interests of members of the family.   The State is like a silent partner in the family who is not active in the everyday running of the family but becomes active and exercises its power and authority only when necessary to protect some important interest of family life.   Taking all of this into consideration, the question no longer is whether the State has an interest or place in disputes such as the one at bar, but it becomes a question of timing and necessity.“Also, this case law states…“The state has a wide range of power for limiting parental freedom and authority in things affecting the child’s welfare… In fact, the entire familial relationship involves the State.”Prince, 321 U.S. at 167, 64 S.Ct. at 442, 88 L.Ed. 645.(SOURCE: FindLaw's Appellate Court of Illinois case and opinions.)≈Well now… the courts sure do seem to offer the opinion that your child is owned by the state!But heck, what should we the people (not People) expect?When such authority and jurisdiction is just arbitrarily handed over to a bunch of attorneys running around in black moo-moos with little wooden hammers yelling that they rule supreme in their houses of judicial worship simply because the state allows them to presume such authority and jurisdiction… I suppose those people who consent to this charade get just what they deserve – slavery through a bondage contract.But then, when the President of the country is also a lawyer, along with his wife, and for that mater more than half of all U.S. Presidents, 56/100 Senators, over 35% of Congressmen, both “speakers” of the house, and most of the State Governors in office today are all BAR attorneys/lawyers, I suppose we shouldn’t be at all surprised that the opinion of the BAR Association is the law of the land…Of course, the above opinion is not just some isolated case. This opinion is quite general in its purview, and quite common in its legal application. In fact, it is the very basis of the criminal racket we call the dreaded “Child Protective Services (CPS)”, which claims its overarching authority from the Federal “Health And Human Services (HHS)” as it legally kidnaps your children.So where else can we find such blatant power abused so absolutely?How about in the case of MEADOWS v. MEADOWS, (Aug 2008), in the “Court of Civil Appeals of Alabama”?“The primary control and custody of infants is with the government.”Tillman V. Roberts. 108 So. 62“There is no wider area for the exercise of judicial discretion than that of providing for and protecting the best interests of children.“Ex parte Handley, 460 So.2d 167 (Ala.1984).“The court stands in the position of parens patria[e] of children.“Ayers v. Kelley, 284 Ala. 321, 224 So.2d 673 (1969)․“…we held that the best interest of the child took precedence over the parent’s right to travel.“Everett, 660 So.2d at 601-02.“In 1984, the Court of Appeals of Idaho ruled that the State had a ‘compelling governmental interest’ that justified restricting the residence of the custodial parent, holding that the best interests of a child had priority over the parent’s right to travel.“Ziegler v. Ziegler, 107 Idaho 527, 691 P.2d 773 (Idaho App.1985) (citing Carlson v. Carlson, 8 Kan.App.2d 564, 661 P.2d 833 (1983)).**Note: The word “interest”, when it is used by the courts on behalf of “the state”, should be considered here to be defined in layman’s terms as the monetary interest in what the State considers one of its trade-able commodities. For to a for-profit government, people are considered legal “persons”, and their value is not in flesh and blood, but in labor and tax. Persons are the original form of legal tender. -Clint-Continued…“Parens patriae,” literally “parent of the country,” refers traditionally to role of state as sovereign and guardian of persons under legal disability.”Ex parte Bayliss, 550 So.2d 986, 988 n. 1 (Ala.1989) (quoting Black’s Law Dictionary 1003 (5th ed.1979)).“Pursuant to the parens patriae doctrine, ‘the primary control and custody of infants is with the government, to be delegated, as of course, to their natural guardians and protectors, so long as such guardians are suitable persons to exercise it.’ ”Ex parte Wright, 225 Ala. 220, 222, 142 So. 672, 674 (1932). See also Fletcher v. Preston, 226 Ala. 665, 148 So. 137 (1933); and Striplin v. Ware, 36 Ala. 87 (1860).“In other words, the state is the father and mother of the child and the natural parents are not entitled to custody, except upon the state’s beneficent recognition that natural parents presumably will be the best of its citizens to delegate its custodial powers… ‘The law devolves the custody of infant children upon their parents, not so much upon the ground of natural right in the latter, as because the interests of the children, and the good of the public, will, as a general rule, be thereby promoted.’ “Chandler v. Whatley, 238 Ala. 206, 208, 189 So. 751, 753 (1939) (quoting Striplin v. Ware, 36 Ala. at 89) (‘ ’).(SOURCE: FindLaw's Court of Civil Appeals of Alabama case and opinions.)≈Wait a minute, you say. This doesn’t sound very “constitutional” to me…Oh, you mean that mythical and more importantly interpretable (in court opinion) document that you believe gives you rights? Silly rabbits, tricks are for kids.In reality, everything that happens is in fact “constitutional” as long as the court (an attorney in a black moo-moo) says it is “constitutional” from within its (his/her) opinion.In the end, you have only one right. And that right is the right of non-consent. (Consent is the most important legal term that you can possibly ever comprehend.)But don’t take my word for it… here are a few more instances of “case law” which let you know that the constitution simply does not apply to you in the corporate world of commercial (copyrighted) code…“But, indeed, no private person has a right to complain, by suit in court, on the ground of a breach of the Constitution. The Constitution it is true, is a compact, but heis not a party to it.“Padelford, Fay & Co., vs. Mayor and Aldermen of the City of Savannah 14 Ga. 438, 520**Note: Remember, the word “person” refers to your veil of artificial person-hood; your STRAWMAN if you will. The court will never refer to you in the sense that you are a living, breathing, sentient being with god-given rights that cannot be taken away, but instead relies on your presumed consent as the physical representation of your fiction, your corporate self. “Person” is defined in U.S. CODE as an “individual, association, corporation, group…” etc. It is not defined as “people” unless those people are a group of “persons”, in which case, as in the constitution, the word “people” is capitalized (i.e. We, the People – referring to the men who signed the constitution, and whom were the only men for which that constitution held under “contract” with any authority. The constitution has no authority accept that for which the court passes judgment (opinion) upon. -Clint-“The people of the United States resident within any State are subject to two Governments: one State, and the other National; but there need be no conflict between the two. The powers which one possesses, the other does not. They are established for different purposes, and have separate jurisdictions. Together they make one whole, and furnish the people of the United States with a complete government, ample for the protection of all their rights at home and abroad. True, it may sometimes happen that a person is amenable to both jurisdictions for one and the same act… It is the natural consequence of a citizenship which owes allegiance to two sovereignties, and claims protection from both. The citizen cannot complain, because he has voluntarily submitted himself to such a form of government.“The Supreme Court, 92 US 551: “U.S. v Cruikshank”≈Well, there you have it!Even as the Supreme Court – which has mistakenly translated the word “supreme” to mean that these seven appointed “justices” who pass “opinion” upon the masses of consenting “citizens” are more supreme than even God himself – these men and women; who are not voted into these positions of power in any way by the people, but instead are appointed by the President of the United States (corporation)… these self-imposed deities clearly state here that they are the law of the land, and that that “the natural consequence of citizenship” is for the people to be under their supreme opinion!Well I for one do not voluntarily submit to the opinions of these megalomaniacs any longer.And for the record, as a free man with God as my witness…I DO NOT CONSENT!!!Source: https://realitybloger.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/do-you-own-your-children/

Honestly, as a Caucasian woman raised going to the Reservations in native country in New Mexico, I am sick and tired of white people answering this question. How bout we let a real First Nations person talk? Black Elk - WikiquoteGuess what folks - we stole their land, slaughtered their people and their buffalo, gave them diseases they had never even known about, destroyed them with alcohol when we weren’t outright killing them with firearms they had no initial access to, herded their children to schools far away from their families where the children had their language ripped out of them and were often raped and tortured. How would you deal with this if it happened to your people? The Canadian Government Systematically Tortured And Abused Aboriginal Children For 100 YearsBecause white people write the history books, we refuse to acknowledge that Hitler was studying how well we genocidally massacred entire populations and rewrote them out of history, and he used much of our horrific success as a model for how to get rid of the Jews, gypsies, and other outcast populations when he was writing Mein Kampf. Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?Thanks for yet again perpetuating the white colonizer superiority myth that we whose ancestors were part of the original Holocaust have participated in since the “Founding” (Read Occupation) of this country. I’d love to hear from any First Nations folks out there who can speak to the incomprehensible assault on their land, their peoples, their language, their traditions, their animals, and their spirituality by ruthless, master race colonizers.Read up on this before you rattle on about it white folk!Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of GenocideHistorians/History Native Americans, genocide by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her latest book is An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.Mass Grave at Wounded KneeThis paper, written under the title, “U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies,” was delivered at the Organization of American Historians 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO on April 18, 2015.US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.”i The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought and continue to fight for survival as peoples. The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.Settler-colonialism requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals, which then forms the foundation of the United States’ system. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.So, what constitutes genocide? My colleague on the panel, Gary Clayton Anderson, in his recent book, “Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian,” argues: “Genocide will never become a widely accepted characterization for what happened in North America, because large numbers of Indians survived and because policies of mass murder on a scale similar to events in central Europe, Cambodia, or Rwanda were never implemented.”ii There are fatal errors in this assessment.The term “genocide” was coined following the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations convention presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The genocide convention is an essential tool for historical analysis of the effects of colonialism in any era, and particularly in US history.In the convention, any one of five acts is considered genocide if “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:(a) killing members of the group;(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.iiiThe followings acts are punishable:(a) Genocide;(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;(d) Attempt to commit genocide;(e) Complicity in genocide.The term “genocide” is often incorrectly used, such as in Dr. Anderson’s assessment, to describe extreme examples of mass murder, the death of vast numbers of people, as, for instance in Cambodia. What took place in Cambodia was horrific, but it does not fall under the terms of the Genocide Convention, as the Convention specifically refers to a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, with individuals within that group targeted by a government or its agents because they are members of the group or by attacking the underpinnings of the group’s existence as a group being met with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. The Cambodian government committed crimes against humanity, but not genocide. Genocide is not an act simply worse than anything else, rather a specific kind of act. The term, “ethnic cleansing,” is a descriptive term created by humanitarian interventionists to describe what was said to be happening in the 1990s wars among the republics of Yugoslavia. It is a descriptive term, not a term of international humanitarian law.Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. The title of the Genocide convention is the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” so the law is about preventing genocide by identifying the elements of government policy, rather than only punishment after the fact. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.Within the logic of settler-colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; during the Civil War and in the post Civil War era of the so-called Indian Wars in the Southwest and the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period; additionally, there is the overlapping period of compulsory boarding schools, 1870s to 1960s. The Carlisle boarding school, founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man."Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children . . . during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”ivThe so-called “Indian Wars” technically ended around 1880, although the Wounded Knee massacre occurred a decade later. Clearly an act with genocidal intent, it is still officially considered a “battle” in the annals of US military genealogy. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time.Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”Whether 1880 or 1890, most of the collective land base that Native Nations secured through hard fought for treaties made with the United States was lost after that date.After the end of the Indian Wars, came allotment, another policy of genocide of Native nations as nations, as peoples, the dissolution of the group. Taking the Sioux Nation as an example, even before the Dawes Allotment Act of 1884 was implemented, and with the Black Hills already illegally confiscated by the federal government, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868 treaty, and so returned to Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard with settlers on allotments or leased land.vCreating these isolated reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that a March 3, 1871, appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.By the time of the New Deal–Collier era and nullification of Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one. However, “tribal governments” imposed in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.”vi Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge), observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign nation. We have our own government.”vii “Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with legislation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even the tribal governments.viii At the time of termination and relocation, per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355, while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500. Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search of jobs.ixThe situations of other Indigenous Nations were similar.Pawnee Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its [size at the end of the Indian wars].xAccording to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to British and US American invasion, warfare, refugee conditions, and genocidal policies in North America than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory writing, “Epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.”xiSuch an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. This is what anthropologist Michael Wilcox has dubbed “the terminal narrative.” Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principle reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective.Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from a one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster—framed as natural—in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged new questions.US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.”xiiOther scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa and Asia, and was also a factor in the Holocaust. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement.xiii Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility.xiv These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought severely reduced populations in the Pacific Islands, Australia, Western Central America, and West Africa.xv Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts nations—in late eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare.In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens or murdered by other means, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide. And no one recites the terminal narrative associated with Native Americans, or Armenians, or Bosnian.Not all of the acts iterated in the genocide convention are required to exist to constitute genocide; any one of them suffices. In cases of United States genocidal policies and actions, each of the five requirements can be seen.First, Killing members of the group: The genocide convention does not specify that large numbers of people must be killed in order to constitute genocide, rather that members of the group are killed because they are members of the group. Assessing a situation in terms of preventing genocide, this kind of killing is a marker for intervention.Second, Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: such as starvation, the control of food supply and withholding food as punishment or as reward for compliance, for instance, in signing confiscatory treaties. As military historian John Grenier points out in his First Way of War:For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.xviiGrenier argues that not only did this way of war continue throughout the 19th century in wars against the Indigenous nations, but continued in the 20th century and currently in counterinsurgent wars against peoples in Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific, Southeast Asia, Middle and Western Asia and Africa.Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Forced removal of all the Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory during the Jackson administration was a calculated policy intent on destroying those peoples ties to their original lands, as well as declaring Native people who did not remove to no longer be Muskogee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Choctaw, destroying the existence of up to half of each nation removed. Mandatory boarding schools, Allotment and Termination—all official government policies--also fall under this category of the crime of genocide. The forced removal and four year incarceration of the Navajo people resulted in the death of half their population.Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Famously, during the Termination Era, the US government administrated Indian Health Service made the top medical priority the sterilization of Indigenous women. In 1974, an independent study by one the few Native American physicians, Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four Native women had been sterilized without her consent. Pnkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.” At first denied by the Indian Health Service, two years later, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO found that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Various governmental entities, mostly municipalities, counties, and states, routinely removed Native children from their families and put them up for adoption. In the Native resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the demand to put a stop to the practice was codified in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. However, the burden of enforcing the legislation lay with Tribal Government, but the legislation provided no financial resources for Native governments to establish infrastructure to retrieve children from the adoption industry, in which Indian babies were high in demand. Despite these barriers to enforcement, the worst abuses had been curbed over the following three decades. But, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, used provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to say that a child, widely known as Baby Veronica, did not have to live with her biological Cherokee father. The high court’s decision paved the way for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the adoptive parents, to ask the South Carolina Courts to have the child returned to them. The court gutted the purpose and intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act, missing the concept behind the ICWA, the protection of cultural resource and treasure that are Native children; it’s not about protecting so-called traditional or nuclear families. It’s about recognizing the prevalence of extended families and culture.xviiiSo, why does the Genocide Convention matter? Native nations are still here and still vulnerable to genocidal policy. This isn’t just history that predates the 1948 Genocide Convention. But, the history is important and needs to be widely aired, included in public school texts and public service announcements. The Doctrine of Discovery is still law of the land. From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.xixThis doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision inJohnson v. McIntosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain’s North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court’s words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually for two weeks, devoted its entire 2012 session to the doctrine.xx But few US citizens are aware of the precarity of the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States._______________i Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, vol. 4 (December 2006), 387.ii Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.), 4.iii “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Paris, 9 December 1948,” Audiovisual Library of International Law, http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/cppcg/cppcg.html (accessed December 6, 2012). See also Josef L. Kunz, “The United Nations Convention on Genocide,” American Journal of International Law 43, no. 4 (October 1949) 738–46.iv April 17, 1873, quoted in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order(New York: Free Press, 1992), 379.v See Testimony of Pat McLaughlin, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux government, Fort Yates, North Dakota (May 8, 1976), at hearings of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, established by Congress in the Act of January 3, 1975.vi See: Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954.vii King quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 156.viii For a lucid discussion of neocolonialism in relation to American Indians and the reservation system, see Joseph Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 89–146.ix There is continuous migration from reservations to cities and border towns and back to the reservations, so that half the Indian population at any time is away from the reservation. Generally, however, relocation is not permanent and resembles migratory labor more than permanent relocation. This conclusion is based on my personal observations and on unpublished studies of the Indigenous populations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.x Walter R. Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2010), 77–78.xi Colin G. Calloway, review of Julian Granberry, The Americas That Might Have Been: Native American Social Systems through Time (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (Winter 2007), 196.xii Benjamin Keen, “The White Legend Revisited,” Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (1971): 353.xiii Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” 4–5.xiv Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press in cooperation with the Newberry Library, 1983), 2. See also Dobyns, Native American Historical Demography, and Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7 (1966), 295–416, and “Reply,” 440–44.xv Woodrow Wilson Borah, “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion upon the Non-European World,” in Actas y Morías XXXV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, México 1962,3 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Libros de México, 1964), 381.xvii John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5, 10.xviii http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/06/25/supreme-court-thwarts-icwa-intent-baby-veronica-case-150103xix Robert J. Miller, “The International Law of Colonialism: A Comparative Analysis,” in “Symposium of International Law in Indigenous Affairs: The Doctrine of Discovery, the United Nations, and the Organization of Americans States,” special issue, Lewis and Clark Law Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 847–922. See also Vine Deloria Jr., Of Utmost Good Faith (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), 6–39; Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008).xx Eleventh Session, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, http://social.un.org/index/IndigenousPeoples/UNPFIISessions/Eleventh.aspx (accessed October 3, 2013).

good luck reading this:People generally recognize law enforcement officers by their marked cruisers and uniforms, which include the display of symbols of authority—a badge and a gun. The public expects officers to be comfortable carrying a sidearm and to exercise precision and sound judgment when using it. officers are responsible for ensuring the safety and protection of citizens and, thus, expected to provide a calming presence. This is true when they are on duty, but does this extend to off-duty hours when there are no outward signs of authority?The U.S. Congress has determined that in a post-9/11 world, the public is better served when off-duty officers are in a position to effectively respond in the face of a threat. To this end, the Law Enforcement officers Safety Act of 2004 (LEOSA) allows officers to carry concealed weapons not only in their jurisdictions but in all 50 states, and the territories of the United States, provided certain conditions are met.1This article will explore LEOSA, address federal statutory limitations regarding firearms possession, and summarize a short legal history of the Second Amendment concerning the right to bear arms.2THE SECOND AMENDMENTThe Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791. It reads, “(a) well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”3History shows, however, that this simple amendment is anything but. Over the years, much debate has centered on whether the right referred to in the Second Amendment is an individual or a state right.4In 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court offered some insight as to the context of the Second Amendment in deciding United States v. Miller.5The case involved the interstate transportation of an unregistered shortbarreled shotgun in violation of the National Firearms Act of 1934.6The Court decided that the Second Amendment’s “obvious purpose was to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of militia forces.”7The Court further stated that only weapons with a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia” would come under the Second Amendment definition of arms.8Explaining that the militia meant “all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense,” the Court advised that these men would commonly provide their own customary arms when called to service.9The Court, thus, upheld the ban of weapons having no connection to the militia or to the common defense.Special Agent Bulzomi is a legal instructor at the FBI Academy.From 1939 until recently, the Supreme Court steered clear of much of the debate regarding the meaning of the Second Amendment. In 2008, the Court offered guidance as to the meaning of the Second Amendment in Heller v. District of Columbia.10The Supreme Court held that the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and operable firearms in the home was unconstitutional. However, the Court did note that the Second Amendment does not allow an unfettered right to possess all kinds of firearms or permit all persons to possess them.Heller, a special police officer in the District of Columbia, was denied a license to register a handgun for self-protection in his home even though he possessed one for his job. Citing the Second Amendment, Heller filed suit in federal district court challenging the city’s gun laws. This challenge was rejected and Heller appealed. The D.C. Circuit Court reversed the district court’s decision, holding that an individual has a right under the Second Amendment to possess firearms and that the city’s gun laws infringed upon that right. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision and discussed the extent of the right to bear arms.The Court declared that an “inherent right to self-defense” is central to the Second Amendment and that a total ban on an entire class of firearms essentially serving as Americans’ first choice for self-defense of “the home, where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute” is an impermissible infringement upon one’s right to keep and bear arms.11The Court clarified, however, that this right is not absolute. Further, the Court provided a nonexhaustive list of “presumptively lawful regulatory measures,” including restricting felons and mentally ill persons from possessing firearms, restricting the carrying of firearms into schools and government buildings, and imposing conditions or qualifications concerning the sale of commercial firearms.12The Court concluded by ordering the District of Columbia to allow Heller to register his handgun and to issue him a license to carry it in his home.As the District of Columbia is a federal enclave and not a state, the decision only impacts the federal government. However, this past term in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Supreme Court addressed the role of the Second Amendment with respect to state gun control.13In McDonald, the ban on handguns by the city of Chicago and one of its suburbs, the Village of Oak Park, Illinois, was challenged as violating the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiffs contended that the Court’s decision in Heller14should be applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause—interpreted by the Supreme Court as allowing the Court to incorporate provisions of the Bill of Rights and apply them to the states. According to the Court, the issue is “whether the particular Bill of Rights guarantee is fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty and system of justice”15or, in other words, “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”16The Court stated that its decision in Heller17was clear on this point.“...law enforcement officers retain their identity, training, experience, and dedication to the safety and welfare of the community regardless of whether they are on duty...”Self-defense is a basic right recognized by various legal systems throughout the ages. More important, individual self-defense is a fundamental right from an American perspective, deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition. As such, it is a “central component” to the Second Amendment right to bear arms to include the protection of one’s home, self, family, and property, a right protected from infringement by the federal government, as well as from the states. The Court reversed the court of appeals and remanded the case for further proceedings.Today, not only police officers but virtually all Americans may possess a handgun for home protection. As noted in Heller,18this may be limited as a result of reasonable restrictions, such as mental instability and felony convictions. In addition, local and state restrictions concerning the storage and number of handguns still may be lawful. However, any restrictions that appear so restrictive as to circumvent this individual right to bear arms likely will be deemed unconstitutional.FEDERAL STATUTESIn 1968, Congress enacted the Federal Gun Control Act,19prohibiting convicted felons from possessing a firearm. Since the passage of this act, Congress has enacted additional pieces of legislation to further restrict firearm possession. Two of these acts in particular—the Lautenberg Amendment20and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act—could affect law enforcement officers and their employers.21The Lautenberg AmendmentEnacted in 1996, the Lautenberg Amendment creates a prohibited-possessor status for persons convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.22There is a statutory stipulation that the convicted individual had legal counsel or knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently waived it. If the conviction is set aside, it does not automatically mean that the prohibited-possessor status also is set aside. If the judge’s order contains restrictions on firearms possession, the prohibited-possessor status continues.23The act permits an individual who is a prohibited possessor to petition to the U.S. attorney general for relief. If the relief is denied, the act allows for judicial review of the denial.24In United States v. Hayes,25the Supreme Court held that the statutory predicate requiring a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” does not have to include a crime establishing a specified domestic relationship.26In other words, the statutory predicate is satisfied as long as it involves a misdemeanor crime of violence and the victim is a person who has a qualifying domestic relationship. To require the predicate offense to be a crime that specifically included the domestic relationship as an element to the underlying crime would have limited the reach of the statute.In Hayes, police officers responded to a 911 call of domestic violence. They arrived at the home of Ronald Hayes, obtained his consent to search his home, and discovered a rifle, as well as two other firearms. Hayes was indicted on three charges of possession of firearms after having been previously convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence against his wife. He contested the indictment on the basis that battery was not a predicate offense under the Lautenberg Amendment. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia denied the motion to dismiss the indictment. Hayes then entered a conditional guilty plea and appealed the denial. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the district court, agreeing with Hayes that the underlying charge was not a qualifying predicate offense because it did not designate a domestic relationship as an element to the crime. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and reversed the Fourth Circuit decision.The Supreme Court held that the government need only show beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim of domestic violence was the defendant’s current or former spouse or in some way related to the defendant. The Court stated, “but that relationship, while it must be established, need not be denominated as an element of the predicate offense.”27Aside from the obvious suitability issues raised by the underlying conduct engaged in by the applicant or officer, which should be considered by the agency, Hayes may impact hiring and retaining officers by law enforcement agencies. For example, if a misdemeanor conviction pertaining to a crime of violence surfaces during the investigation, the department must determine whether the crime involved someone who had a domestic relationship with the applicant or officer.The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention ActThe Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act also creates a prohibited-possessor status upon a finding based on reasonable cause to believe, after a hearing with notice and an opportunity to participate, that an individual is a “credible threat” to the safety of an intimate partner or child.28An exception to the act exists whereby the prohibited possessor status does not extend to the “United States or any department or agency thereof or any state or department, agency, or political subdivision thereof or for military training or competitions.”29The extent of this exception and whether it applies to individuals has yet to be fully determined. As with the prohibited-possessor status created by the Lautenberg Amendment, the provision in the Brady statute also could impact the ability of an officer to carry a firearm.“LEOSA applies to qualified active duty and retired officers.”LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS SAFETY ACT OF 2004On July 22, 2004, President George W. Bush signed into law H.R. 218, the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act (LEOSA),30which created a general nationwide recognition that the public is better served by allowing law enforcement officers to carry their firearms outside of their jurisdictions whether they are on or off duty. The theory behind LEOSA already was recognized among a number of states.31That is, law enforcement officers retain their identity, training, experience, and dedication to the safety and welfare of the community regardless of whether they are on duty in their employer’s jurisdiction, going home to another community, or merely traveling for leisure purposes. However, the act creates a limited privilege to carry concealed weapons for law enforcement officers, not a right to bear arms.Qualification Under LEOSALEOSA applies to qualified active duty and retired officers.32Qualification under LEOSA requires employment by or retirement from a local, state, or federal law enforcement agency as someone charged with the ability to investigate, prosecute, and arrest people for violations of law.33If an agency has firearms profi ciency standards, the offi cer must meet them to qualify to carry under this act.34The statute also prohibits carrying firearms when under the influence of alcohol or any intoxicating or hallucinatory substance.35If a current or retired officer is prohibited by federal law from possessing a firearm, they are not qualified to carry one under this legislation.36It also is important to note that if an officer is under a disciplinary action that may result in suspension or termination by their agency, they are not qualified to carry under this act.37Qualified retired officers must have retired in good standing for reasons other than mental instability and served at least an aggregate of 15 years.38However, if the retirement was due to a service-related disability, the officer need only have completed the probationary period to qualify under this act.39Retired officers also must have a nonforfeitable right to benefits under their agency’s retirement plan.40At personal expense, the retired officer must meet the state standard for firearms qualification required for active law enforcement officers.41Qualified active duty and retired officers must have photographic identification issued by the agency they work for or retired from.42Retired officers’ identification must have some indication that they have been tested or have otherwise been determined by the issuing agency to meet the standards active officers must meet to carry concealed weapons.43Retired officers do have the option of possessing the photographic identification with a certification from the state, rather than their former agency, that they have met the state’s requirements for active duty officers to carry concealed weapons within 12 months of the issuing date of the identification.44LEOSA does not give qualified officers any special enforcement or arrest authority or immunity. It merely allows them to carry concealed weapons. If these weapons are used, there is no special protection from arrest. Qualified officers may find themselves acting only under the authority of a citizen’s arrest or self-defense claim or under authority established by the state.“LEOSA allows qualified officers to protect themselves, their families, and the community by being armed while off duty.”Qualified officers may use LEOSA only as an affirmative defense if prosecuted. An affirmative defense requires that the finder of fact, the judge, must make a determination of whether the person raising the defense is eligible to do so. To be eligible, the judge must have determined that the person raising the defense is, in fact, a qualified officer under LEOSA and was carrying the required identification at the time of the alleged violation. This means that the act will not keep officers from being arrested. However, LEOSA will stand as a defense at a hearing as to the legality of the arrest if the arrestee is, in fact, a qualified officer with the requisite identification.Limitations of LEOSAType of FirearmLEOSA allows qualifying officers to carry concealed firearms, but, at the same time, limits what qualifies as a firearm. The act’s definition of firearms does not include machine guns, silencers, or explosive or destructive devices.45State Limitations on Carrying in Certain LocationsLimitations also exist as to where a concealed firearm may be carried. LEOSA exempts qualified officers from state laws limiting or prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons.46However, LEOSA does not supersede state laws permitting private property owners from limiting or prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons on their property.47This would include public bars, private clubs, and places, such as amusement parks. Nor does the act circumvent any state laws prohibiting carrying concealed weapons on state or local government property.48Possible examples would be courthouses, schools, or parks.Federal Limitations on Carrying in Certain LocationsFederal laws or regulations are not superseded by LEOSA. Qualified officers may not carry concealed weapons onto aircraft under the act. They also cannot carry firearms into federal buildings or onto federal property. However, in February 2010, a federal statute took effect authorizing individuals to carry concealed weapons into national parks if they have complied with the carry concealed rules of the state or states in which the park is located.49Of course, this federal statute will not change the fact that it is unlawful to carry a firearm into federal buildings, even in a national park.50This would include facilities, such as visitor’s centers, museums, and restrooms.Internal PoliciesIt is unclear whether LEOSA overrides an agency’s ability to limit an officer’s authority to carry a personally owned handgun off duty as part of off-duty restriction policies. Some agencies have continued to enforce such policies. Arguably, because LEOSA explicitly overrides state law provisions (except those addressing state facilities and property), and the head of an executive agency is given power by way of state law, it would appear that LEOSA would override off duty restriction policies. However, agencies with such a policy and officers working within these agencies should seek guidance and clarification in regard to the legality of such policies.CONCLUSIONIn recent opinions, the U.S. Supreme Court has clarified what previously was unclear for hundreds of years, that the Second Amendment does confer a right to bear arms for purposes of self-defense in the home, subject to reasonable restrictions. LEOSA, as noted above, does not confer a right to bear arms. The act merely confers a limited immunity from state and local laws dealing with concealed firearms and does not supersede any federal laws or regulations. Some jurisdictions outlaw the open display and carrying of firearms; however, LEOSA does not allow officers to carry firearms other than concealed. The authorization to carry concealed is not accompanied by any grant of extraterritorial arrest powers. Qualified officers must be aware of the laws of the state in which they are carrying concealed weapons, satisfy qualification standards, and carry proper identification.The world changed on September 11, 2001. Through LEOSA, Congress reacted to this new age of terrorism, accepting the fact that America never has faced a greater need to have additional watchful eyes on the streets of its cities, towns, and rural areas. These eyes possess the training, skills, and resources necessary to stop rapidly evolving situations before they become disasters. They also provide an instantaneous, no-cost benefit to the country by simply allowing trustworthy officers to carry concealed weapons while off-duty. LEOSA allows qualified officers to protect themselves, their families, and the community by being armed while off duty.Law enforcement officers know that criminals are never off duty. LEOSA also is premised on the notion that officers are vulnerable off duty. Criminals sometimes target them, as well as their families, for harm; these individuals also know that off-duty officers may be unarmed. LEOSA allows qualified officers to protect themselves, their families, and the community by being armed while off duty.Law enforcement officers of other than federal jurisdiction who are interested in this article should consult their legal advisors. Some police procedures ruled permissible under federal constitutional law are of questionable legality under state law or are not permitted at all.Endnotes1Title 18 U.S.C. § 926 B and C.2U.S. Constitution, amend. II.3Id.4In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, dismissed an indictment for two individuals charged with denying freemen their Second Amendment right to keep and “bear arms for a lawful purpose.” The Court advised that citizens must look to the state’s police power for protection against other parties infringing upon their right to bear arms as the amendment wording “shall not be infringed…means no more than it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government.” The Court concluded that under the laws of the United States there were no applicable federal charges in the indictment. The Court continued along this trail of precedent that the Second Amendment limits only the federal government when it upheld a state prohibition against participation in an unauthorized militia in the 1886 case Presser v. Illinois,116 U.S. 252 (1886). Presser was an unlicensed militiaman who, along with 400 others, marched through the streets of Chicago with swords and rifles in violation of Illinois state law, exercising what Presser and the others claimed was their right to bear arms. The Court decided that the states, unlike the federal government, were free to regulate the right to keep and bear arms. The Court also emphasized that the Second Amendment protects only a legitimate reserve militia meant to serve the states and the federal government. The Court cautioned, however, that the states cannot disarm the people so as to deny the United States this military resource regardless of the Second Amendment.5307 U.S. 174 (1939).6Id. at 175-76, (National Firearms Act, Pub. L. No. 90-618, 48 Stat. 1236 (1934) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 28 U.S.C.) was the first federal regulation of private firearms).7Id. at 178.8Id.9Id. at 179-80.10128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008).11Id. at 2817-18.12Id. at 2816-17.13130 S. Ct. 3020 (2010).14128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008).15Id. at 3034.16Id.17128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008).18Id.19Pub. L. No. 90-618 (1968), codified in chapter 44 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code.20Title 18 U.S.C. § 922.21The short title of the 1993 amendment, which included amendment to § 922 and 924.22The Lautenberg Amendment contains § 922(d)(9) and (g)(9), passed in 1996, which was part of the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1997. This act was challenged in United States v. Hayes, 129 S. Ct. 1079 (2009), without success.23See Title 18 § 921 (33)(B)(ii).24See Title 18 U.S.C. § 925 (c).25129 S. Ct 1079 (2009).26Id. at 1090.27Id. at 1088.28See Title 18 U.S.C. § 922 (g)(g).29See Title 18 U.S.C. § 925 (a)(1).30Title 18 U.S.C. § 926 (B) and (C).31All 50 states exempt their own on-duty police officers from statutes governing the right to carry concealed weapons. A majority of states allow within their borders other states’ peace officers to carry concealed weapons if on official business. Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Vermont allow on and off-duty out-of-state officers to carry concealed weapons. California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Wyoming allow carry-concealed permits or rights for retired officers.32Title 18 U.S.C. § 926B (qualified law enforcement officers) and § 926C (qualified retired law enforcement officers).33Id.; and Id. at Sec. 926B(1) and 926C(1).34Id. at § 926B (C)(4).35Id. at § 926B (C)(5) and 926C (C)(6).36Id. at § 926B (C)(6) and 926C (C)(7).37Id. at § 926B (C)(3).38Id. at § 926C (c)(3)(A).39Id. at § 926C (c)(3)(B).40Id. at § 926C (c)(4).41Id. at § 926C (c)(5).42Id. at § 926B(d) and § 926C(d)(1).43Id. at § 926C(d)(1).44Id. at § 926C(d)(2)(A) and (B).45Id. at § 926B(e)(1)-(3) and § 926C(e) (1)-(3).46Id. at § 926B(a) and § 926C(a).47Id. at § 926B(b)(1) and § 926C(b)(1).48Id. at § 926B(b)(2) and § 926C(b)(2).49See Title 36 U.S.C. § 2.4.50See Title 18 U.S.C. § 930, Possession of Firearms and Dangerous Weapons in Federal Facilities.(source: Legal Digest: Off-Duty Officers and Firearms | FBI: Law Enforcement Bulletin )