How I Became a Domestic Terrorist

As I begin to write this piece it is 4:30am on a Tuesday morning, and as usual I can’t sleep. Every day around this time, over the last 15 years, I wake up for the same reason. I wake up to my thoughts racing at break neck speed, my eyes watering, reacting to the stabbing pain of a large sliver embedded within my mind, one that affects every aspect of my life and has for years. It is the same sliver that continuously occupies my thoughts, directs my attention, and causes massive amounts of pain, anxiety and restlessness. The righteous anger of injustice is persistent and relentless, it affords me no peace; I haven’t been in a good mood in years. It has been a long time since my family and I had to endure the nightmarish hell that made all this happen…but I am not alone. Everyday people across the country have to come to terms with highly traumatic events that have occurred in their lives, and it is not easy. It is a daily struggle, often one that lasts a lifetime - some memories just don’t fade.

Like us the victims and family members of seemingly senseless events are frequently scarred by the injustice and malevolence directed towards them. Examples of this are plentiful in both the US and Canada, for instance those involved in various mass shootings, among many other headline events…and I’ll bet that they all can’t sleep either, reliving the total senselessness of it all on a daily basis, it is completely exhausting. I know that pain well, and so do many other innocent families that were also the victims of tragic headline events such as these; those that were made to accept responsibility for them. Mine is but one such family, one of many.

In my attempts to cope with the pain and anguish that accompanied a completely senseless and very long series of devastating events, it was suggested to me that writing out some of my thoughts might be therapeutic, and could maybe provide at least a small outlet for the massive amounts of righteous anger that grew (grows) within me after years of government persecution. Over time this project grew into something else; it grew into a story that had to be told, and (thankfully) it grew into a passion for writing. I have, and continue to, put myself and my family at great risk by telling our story, as I am putting us both at risk right now for writing this – I have already spent time in prison for putting the preverbal pen to paper about this topic, despite having the so called ‘freedom of expression’, and I am always fearful of additional reprisals. In spite of the (many) threats against our family I would not remain silent then...and I will not remain silent today; so long as I still have, at a minimum, a semblance of the freedom to speak my mind, I will exercise that right – jail or no jail, consequence or no. A great many men fought, bled, and died to ensure I had this inalienable right; it would be an insult to them to not defend it. Today it is real easy to believe in freedom, it takes no effort at all, but it’s something else to defend it, there’s a price to pay for that. I paid that price, and continue to do so - as have many others before me.

At the end of August in 2020, after 18 years of service, I was medically released from the Canadian Armed Forces. When I joined I took an oath to defend Canada from enemies both foreign and domestic, I am proud of my service to Canada and have only good things to say about my time in uniform where I met a lot (and I mean a lot!) of really, really good people. I had a long and diverse military career, one that afforded me many opportunities, but it didn’t start out that way. Towards the end of 2002, a few short weeks from the beginning of basic training, I had received all of my gear and was awaiting the course. I was working outside the city and so I stored my kit in my parent’s basement until they were needed. I arrived there one day, and after saying a quick hello to my parents, I departed around the corner to see my brother. We had a brief argument and I left; for some reason the police were called. My brother explained to them upon arrival that he didn’t call them and that there was never any need for police involvement, just a minor argument. They were promptly set to depart pretty much as soon as they had came, however there was a small hitch, a minor technical issue…I had a firearms license.

In Canada firearms ownership is not viewed as a right, but as a privilege…like driving, and just like driving you need a license. They call it a PAL – Possession & Acquisition License.

While all this was happening I was out for a stroll at a local park and so no-one could talk to me about anything. When I would return to my parents home a few hours later all of our lives would never be the same. They were asleep when I got there, in the morning they would tell me what had happened. My mother was in tears when she described the previous night’s events. The young officer who had been at my brothers home came to my parents home next, in order to talk to me, to confirm my brother’s account that nothing had happened. The officer informed my parents that since I had ‘access to firearms’ due to my PAL they had no choice but to search their house for weapons. They didn’t find any guns, because I didn’t own any, I only had the license for employment (driving armored car)…but they did find my military gear. My parent’s street was immediately blocked off by multiple police cars, each containing a handful of officers who had made their way into every room of my parent’s home, before spending a good ninety minutes intensely drilling them about my professional qualifications. I was eventually charged with various weapons offences for my nephews Nerf toy (not joking!)

Here began the beginnings of an eight year criminal investigation that would see me arrested and jailed on multiple occasions, that would see the violation of multiple constitutional rights, that would see (for years) more police presence in all of our friends and families homes than a criminal gang leader had on his worst days, that would see the involvement of multiple government agencies, that would see attempts to revoke my citizenship and discharge me from the military, that would see me imprisoned for writing articles (like this one) and contacting external agencies about the case, that would see close to thirty something court appearances before finally culminating in 2009 by defending myself in front of a jury of my peers against a five (5) year prison term...and I never even got up out of a chair; nobody (including police) even claimed I had.

Years of hell and torment, everything I ever worked for, destroyed because one man, whom I have never met, claims that it is reasonable to believe that I pose “a significant threat to public safety” because I was in the military with a firearms license and as such this made him concerned that I might ‘do something’. Now, I am not going to spend time discussing the details of what happened to me and my family, I have written a book entitled Reasonable Grounds for the Irrational: or How I Briefly Became a Domestic Terrorist, which explains the lengthy legal case against me in greater detail. It is available on Amazon, a link to it can be found on the web at www.reasonablegrounds.com.

However in the aftermath of senseless events, in attempting to emotionally and intellectually grasp the meaning (if any) behind them, there often lie a lot more questions than answers. The prominent one is usually ‘how could this have happened?” I can gain a thorough understanding of the emotional state that accompanies this claim. However, it never once affected my reason. When a dear childhood friend of mine committed suicide there were many questions as to why, as it seemed inconceivable. A whole assortment of possible reasons for his actions fluttered to the top of my head over a several week period, of whom and what could be blamed. But despite all my attempts at self-convincing I knew he and he alone was responsible, and that there is no way I could have known his reasons for doing what he did. If he had a firearm he probably would have used it, but he did not and so he hung himself – should I now blame the rope? Does it matter how he did what he did it? If he had cut his wrists would it make sense to attempt to regulate the sale of kitchen knives? The result is the same – he is still dead by his own hand and there is no law or regulation that could have ever prevented it from happening. Violence (and suicide) has been a part of human existence since times of the cave; and its cause is not found in law…or its absence.

There is little doubt as to the pain and despair that violent events can leave behind, but in spite of that emotion “blame” must be placed accordingly; with the individual. It was not firearms (or access to them) or any privacy issue in the communication of someone’s alleged mental state that made any headliners do what they did, it was not the availability of un-fact checked material on Facebook that convinced them to act, it was their own moral premises. It was because of their irrational and contradictory principles, convictions and values that gave them the tools they needed to justify and rationalize their actions, to make them “righteous”. It was their mind that planned and justified the attack, it was their own hands that physically picked up the (illegal) guns, it was their own legs that brought them to the location, it was with their own eyes by which they chose targets and it was their own will that pulled the trigger. There is no inanimate object that can take responsibility for these actions and there is no amount of law or regulation that can ever prevent similar acts from occurring in the future, and yet…

Yet more and more we are seeing an ever increasing level of armed police “responses” directed at innocent families. In our rural communities we are hearing consistently more and more stories of terror from good, honest family men who have had their lands swarmed with armies of heavily armed police agents, their lives and family affected forever for simply being on their own land with a rifle, often while hunting or performing rodent control; in our cities, armed SWAT teams are common place occurrences to the mere mention of a gun, especially if you attend a school. The same schools that children are being suspended from for violating ‘zero tolerance’ policies on weapons because a child who draws a picture of a gun, or pretends that a stick or their finger is one, somehow poses an existential danger to all the other kids. Today the paranoia which grows exponentially with each passing headline acts as a continuing justification to violate our fundamental rights and liberties (civil, legal, moral, political).

Persecutory actions such as this seem so highly irrational, on such a large scale, that it seems almost inconceivable as to how it could happen. How can one argue or debate with one closed to reason; how can one fight such, apparently, large scale irrationality? The answer is: with reason. Most are well aware of the fear and paranoia which act as a justification to violate civil liberties, however the window which sheds light on the cause of such irrational behavior is right out in the open for all to see. It lies in their own words, in how they justify their thoughts and actions. Ben Franklin said once; “those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security”. The ability and willingness to sacrifice one’s own freedoms and the practical results of attempting to do so are an effect and in order to fully understand this effect one must examine its cause.

A full and detailed examination of this cause would take volumes, but as a hint regarding the fundamental premise that has to be checked and challenged, in order to prevent such irrationalities, consider this; notice how it is the same highly subjective, collective premise that is used by politicians and law enforcement agencies to justify all these actions. That politicians had no choice but to rush through ill-advised legislation; that schools have no choice but to over-react; that police have no choice but to act in order to protect public welfare and that protecting the public (often from a vague and undefined threat) is necessarily necessary to ensure some kind of generalized public…good, welfare, safety, benefit, interest, security, protection, etc.

The cultural, and the political, notion of “the public good” has served as the moral justification of almost all social systems throughout human history - and all tyrannies as well. The degree of a society’s enslavement, or the degree of its freedom, directly corresponds to the extent to which this notion has been employed or ignored. As evidence of this, consider Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, communist China – all of them were wholly committed to serving the public good, which they defined. It is actually though an indefinable concept: there is no such entity as “the public” - any group is only a number of individual members. Nothing can be good or bad for any group, things can only be good or bad for each individual group member; concepts such as “good/evil", "right/wrong", "true/false", “value/nothing” applies only to living people – to each individual living person to be more precise – not to a disembodied collection of relationships, not to an aggregate. Any group or union, by itself, does not exist, its individual members, as such, do exist. - it is they that comprise the whole.

The “public good” is a meaningless concept, unless it is taken quite literally, in which case it means: the total sum of the good of all individuals. But if this is the case, the concept is still worthless as a moral or practical standard as it doesn’t answer just what is good for each individual or how to determine what that is. It is not, however, in its literal meaning that this concept is usually employed. It is accepted precisely for its elastic, indefinable, malleable, and fluid characteristics which serve not as a rational guide, but as an escape from it. Since goodness is not applicable to a disembodied group, it becomes a moral (and legal) blank check for those who attempt to embody it – for those who claim to be the public’s spokesman. The common good of a society then becomes regarded as both separate and superior to the individual good of its members and so it becomes a carte blanche excuse, an umbrella justification, for all political activities, even unconstitutional ones.

It is only on the basis of individual liberty that any good – private or public – can ever be defined or achieved. Only when each individual is free from coercion by political (pressure) groups will everyone be free to work for (not obtain as a right) the greatest good he/she can achieve for themselves, by their own choice, and by their own effort, and the total sum of such individual efforts is the only kind of generalized social good that is even possible. The basic, common interest of all citizens is freedom; which is not freedom from fear, want, pain, loss, effort, struggle, bias, inequality, intolerance, or discrimination…but freedom from force! Individual liberty and personal freedom are the first requirement of any “public good”. And so I implore you, whoever is reading this document; reason is the soil of the forest in which truth, justice and liberty are the trees and if you poison the soil, the forest will die.

The militant, frenzied, cancelling cries of (often leftist) emotionalism, virtue signaling, rhetoric, propaganda, fear and paranoia can only be countered by the calm soothing voice of reason. Despite their many (many!) highly agitated claims to the contrary, in many different areas - facts are facts; meaning they correspond to reality, they correspond to the natural world, they are not fluid, changeable or interchangeable at whim, they are not created by anyone, nor are they binary or ambiguous…they simply are! Facts are facts and the fact is that so long as responsible citizens accept, in whole or in part, this vague collectivized premise of a ‘public welfare’ as a basis and justification for all political action, they ensure their own demise – and their demise will come by their own default and justified as being “for their own good”. All you hear today (even prior to Covid-19) from politicians and other leaders is a constant stream of “we had to, we had no choice; we have to protect public safety…public safety, public safety, public safety”. This is the ultimate justification for every law, regulation or policy devised today within our modern system of rule. This is how and why I briefly became a domestic terrorist - to protect you from the danger which is me.