One of the most chillingly memorable lines in 1984, George Orwell’s famous novel about an imagined future dystopia, is uttered by O’Brien, a soulless apparatchik of the totalitarian state. “If you want a vision of the future,” O’Brien dispassionately told his tortured victim, Winston Smith, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Tragically, billions of our fellow human beings are living, or have lived (and died), under despotic regimes with the boot of the police state on their faces. The right to be free and to defend oneself is fundamental and natural. That includes the right to bear arms in the defense of oneself, one’s family, and one’s community. It also includes the right to act together with others in a legal polity to delegate limited powers to designated full-time individuals “to serve and protect.” We give them badges and guns and a certain measure of authority to carry out this task for the common good. However, as the human experience has shown (from ancient history to our present day), this authority is often abused, especially when it is expanded and centralized into a national force unaccountable to local control.

Our constitutional Republic, with its checks and balances among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, and its equally important division of powers divided among the national, state, and local governments — and the people — is veering perilously close to becoming a de facto police state. As explained in our article Biden's Crime Wave, our federal government has no constitutional authority for any general police powers. Nevertheless, according to the latest data available from the federal Department of Justice (DOJ), the federal police force has expanded to 136,815 officers in 90 federal agencies. 

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