Let this be a lesson to us all: If you're having trouble sleeping, keep your mouth shut and load up on Melatonin:
In the old Soviet and East German police states of the Cold War, police kept secret files on scores of common people. Information was fed to the police by thousands of clandestine sources – and a seemingly banal or routine interaction with nearly anyone could lead to a surprise “knock on the door” by authorities. During the late Soviet era, communist leadership moved away from the executions and purges of the Stalin years and began to increasingly rely upon medical professionals to diagnose “enemies of the state” as insane – thus, a routine trip to your doctor could lead to a visit from police.
Although the Cold War ended over two decades ago, a lawsuit filed December 17th in U.S. District Court in Rochester, NY alleges that such heavy-handed police-state tactics are presently being employed in Andrew Cuomo’s New York. The suit, filed by attorney Paloma Capanna on behalf of plaintiff Donald Montgomery, alleges that the New York State Police ordered the permanent confiscation of Mr. Montgomery’s registered handguns after he sought treatment for insomnia. The confiscation was ordered under Cuomo’s “SAFE Act” gun-control law.
The allegations in the case are downright scary. The complaint contends that Montgomery, a Navy veteran and retired police officer who rose to the rank of detective sergeant during his thirty-year career, voluntarily sought treatment for insomnia at a hospital on Long Island in May of 2014 after relocating to a new home several hundred miles from his previous residence.
According to the suit, the hospital diagnosed the plaintiff as “mildly depressed,” and his clinical evaluation stated, “Patient has no thoughts of hurting himself. Patient has no thoughts of hurting others. Patient is not having suicidal thoughts. Patient is not having homicidal thoughts…” and “there is no evidence of any psychotic processes, mania, or OCD symptoms. Insight, judgment, and impulse control are good.” The suit further alleges that a psychiatrist told the plaintiff, “I don’t know why you were referred here. You don’t belong here.”
Nonetheless, the suit contends that five days after being discharged from the hospital, the local sheriff’s department showed up at Montgomery’s door and seized his four registered handguns, including his former duty sidearm, after the sheriff had been subjected to “repeated pressure” by the New York State Police, who claimed that Montgomery had been declared mentally defective and had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution.
Sounds like Mr. Montgomery was a "target of opportunity" for the New York State Police, doesn't it? He has many of the traits the gun-grabbing Left heartily detests: He's a veteran, he's a cop, he's a legal gun-owner. And he made the mistake of believing he could trust "the system" and put himself in an unwittingly vulnerable position in which the State of New York could and did go for his not-so-figurative jugular.
As this sorry episode illustrates, not only can police statism happen here, it already is, and with increasing frequency and openness, as the Left's star sinks disarrayedly towards the political horizon. We just don't recognize it as such because of the surreality of it, and because we lack the historical context for what we're seeing. But the parallels with the KGB and Stasi are far from hyperbolic, and are in fact a harbinger of things to come. Which is why We, The People, have less and less to lose by speaking out and standing up now, while there is the possibility of doing so successfully and staying out of the Alaska Gulag at the same time.
Think of it this way: That knock on the door in the middle of the night is coming one way or another - wouldn't you feel better if you'd done all you could to prevent the mass exodus to the cattle cars? Even if that got you first spot in the State "insane asylum"? At that point, hard labor versus being slowly turned into a mental vegetable will be a six of one proposition anyway.
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