State Governments top heavy with progressive thinkers have been looking for excuses to pass laws banning “militias.” Vermont, to my geographic and ideological left, used a gun range with a few unpermitted buildings to ban Militias statewide, and Vermont only exists because of a militia. Maine just followed suit.
Vacationland legislators used the rumor that a prominent neo-Nazi and white supremacist, Christopher Pohlhaus, was looking to open a training center as an excuse for the new law. I don’t know who Pohlhaus is or what he believes, but the government thought enough of whatever picture they’d painted of him to ban “paramilitary” “training” statewide. I’ve not read the bill, so I’m not going to pretend to know what they mean by that. Still, according to this reporting, “Without the new law, [Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey] said, he had no way to bring a criminal case against someone using military training to create civil disorder, as authorities say Pohlhaus sought to do.”
Did you catch that?
Polhaus may or may not be a despicable racist, but he has yet to use military training to do anything, let alone create civil disorder. All we have is the presumption that this is his or anyone else’s intention, which is all that is needed to bring a criminal case. If you and some friends like to go to the range to practice gun safety together, the State’s assumption about your intentions might be enough to get you and the range brought up on charges.
Again, I’ve not seen the bill, but it sounds like any gathering of lawfully armed individuals for any purpose has become a breeding ground for anti-second Amendment enforcement. And how does that work? The State gets a tip. They follow up. One of the attendees is discovered to have shared something on social media that the government thinks it can use along with this new law to shut down otherwise law-abiding behavior.
Maybe a few of them show up in the same tee shirts. Is that a uniform? Are they a militia? It doesn’t take much to make law-abiding citizens look like criminals.
You can pretend it won’t happen, but New Hampshire is about as friendly to rights and liberty as you can get in the Northeast. The AG of our Live Free or Die Republican governor has tried to use State and Federal Civil Rights laws to silence free speech because they don’t like the speech. The case, much like with Maine’s new anti-militia law, started with a local white supremacy group which, had the AG succeeded, would have put a chilling hand on all free speech and likely cost millions as lawsuits wound their way to the US Supreme Court where the State would have lost. This fishing expedition was dismissed, but the AG is back from another angle. His office has filed another suit, this time pretending Hate Speech is not protected – they are still fishing, and we’d be right to wonder why. Shouldn’t the AG be protecting speech?
Maine’s new mission is not much different in my head than that, except that its legislature passed a law someone will have to be charged with violating before it can be challenged on the anvil of the constitution by another branch of the government with a spotty record of reading the constitution in ways unpopular with people looking to infringe on rights.
I’m not advocating for military training whose specific purpose is to disrupt public peace, but crafting legislation that allows the police state to decide the intentions of others absent any crime for prosecution, while not new, is fascist and authoritarian.
Mainers deserve better than that.
