I sat and tried to make sense out of this news piece. With Hurricane Irma bearing down upon the Caribbean....the governor of the Virgin Islands (US territory) has signed an emergency order that dictates the National Guard of the island (approximately 1,000 folks)....can seize private guns, private ammo, private explosives, and property....to respond to the hurricane.
The order allows the Adjutant General of the isle to dictate the rules to this and everything would be approved by the island's chief prosecutor.
Legal? I was amused at the idea.
First, you'd need a court order by a judge to go into each single house and you'd have to demonstrate how this guy or that family needed to hand over their weapons. Just in time constraints alone.....you'd have at least two or three judges around the clock....twenty-four hours a day....signing these search-and-seizure letters.
Second, the National Guardsmen obeying this? Having worked around such individuals in my life....I can vouch that no enlisted guy would obey some order to walk up to a house and attempt to enter the house, and seize the owner's weapons. There might be some Colonel at the head of the island's Guard unit, who says sure....but no one is going to obey that officer with this type of order.
Third, the Constitutional challenge? It basically suggests that you only have Constitutional rights in fair weather, and none in bad weather. Jefferson would laughing so hard that he'd probably have fallen on the floor from this 'joke'.
Fourth, once you seized all these weapons....where exactly do you intend to store them? There are 102,000 residents on the island and one might take a guess that at least 10,000 weapons exist there. What armory exists that can hold such an amount of weapons, and how many Guardsmen will you have standing there to guard the armory instead of being out in the hurricane zone?
Fifth, let's say that the Guardsmen do obey this, and the first place they stop is the house of the governor, and his chief of security. How exactly will either react....having their own weapons taken?
Sixth, the private property angle? Seizing some guy's store-front, or his car? I can't see any Guardsman obeying that order. It just opens them up for prosecution later about an illegal order.
Where this leads onto? At the conclusion of all this hurricane clean-up....likely to take six to twelve weeks minimum....this idiot governor will stand up and say proudly that his seizure program was a remarkable success, and that no one was shot. Then some Fox News guy will ask how many weapons were seized by the Guardsmen, and the governor will say he has no idea (the number likely will be zero).
Oddly, this will be talked about for weeks....how some governor made up some bogus executive order, and how no one listened to the guy.
