December 18, 2010 --Â Sheriff Richard Mack came to Maine to speak to law enforcement officers about being a constitutional sheriff. He spoke for a couple of hours to law enforcement officers and then, after a couple of hours' break, he spoke to a large crowd of regular old citizens.
I caught up with him between those engagements where I had the chance to talk to him for a second time about his principles and his win at the United States Supreme Court.
In this interview, he discussed the unconstitutionality of traffic quotas, confiscation of vehicles without due process, ex-offenders and guns, ex post facto gun laws, the shooting at Virginia Tech and the abridgment of rights as a result of that, and much, much more.
From that interview:
"We're writing tickets that are a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which says 'No excessive fines or bail.' Well, tickets are both excessive in the amount of tickets we write, and the amount of the fine. And so we are violating the Eighth Amendment, and vicariously we are also working for the insurance companies who profit a great deal from all these tickets…Funny all the things you run into when you start studying the Constitution."
-=and=-
"The only time that we can disallow, lawfully and correctly -- if you read what the founding fathers said about the Second Amendment -- those citizens, Samuel Adams said, who have proven not to be peaceable citizens then can be denied that right. But that only means someone who has proven to be a violent person. And if I stole a TV from Walmart when I was 18 -- 45 years ago -- that doesn't make any sense that I can't own a gun today."
Listen to the interview here:
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