Who was Carl Drega?

[Lex]

Many of you already know who he is so you can skip this post.

On Tuesday, August 19, 1997, Carl Drega, a carpenter from Columbia, New Hampshire, decided he wasn't going to take it anymore, and in so doing, he became another corporate media poster boy in their crusade against the right to bear arms. But barely mentioned was the key issue surrounding Drega's outburst, which was, does the small private property owner have the right to do as he or she pleases, with their own property, without intrusive technocrats and authorities making their lives a living hell? Big commercial developers who make big campaign contributions often get some kind of hypocritical "certificate of environmental compliance" for their plans to pave, channelize, and blight the landscape, but the little guy faces years of hoop-jumping as his permit applications are lost, or returned for re-filing on updated forms, before they're finally denied. Let a private citizen try to turn a slice of his own private, rocky shoreline into a boat dock, a sliver of sandy beach, and suddenly the state authorities descend like locusts, demanding to see all the required permits, showering liens and injunctions like a freak April snow shower. Trying to stand up against this tyranny can be a frustrating, lonely, and dangerous business. Just ask Drega,67 (He's dead now, but that's beside the point.)

In 1981, 80 feet of the riverbank along Drega's property collapsed during a rainstorm. Drega decided to dump and pack enough dirt to repair the erosion damage, restoring his lot along the Connecticut River to its original size. A state conservation officer, Sergeant Eric Stohl, claimed to have spotted the project from the river while passing the Drega property on a fish-stocking operation. The state hauled Drega into court, attempting to block his tiny "project."


This was piled atop earlier actions by the town of Columbia, some dating back more than 20 years, and starting when the town hauled Drega into court and threatened him with liens, judgments and (ultimately) property seizure over a "zoning violation" which was comprised of his failure to finish a house covered with tarpaper within a time-frame which the town considered reasonable. Drega tried for years to fight the authorities on their own terms, in court. Needless to say, his filings became a laughing stock both in the courts and in the newspapers to which he sent copies, begging for help.
THE MEDIA PORTRAYS ANYONE WHO STANDS AGAINST TYRANNY AS A LUNATIC
By 1995, it was obvious that Carl Drega was running out of patience. Town selectman Vickie Bunnell, 42 (since appointed a part-time state judge) accompanied a town tax assessor to Drega's property in a dispute over an assessment. Drega fired shots into the air to drive them away. The courts have ruled that if the town decides to run a municipal water or sewer line along a street fronting one's property, the property owner can be assessed the amount by which the town figures the property's value has been enhanced -- usually in the thousands of dollars -- even if the property owner has a perfectly good well and septic system, and opts not to tie into the new municipal lines. Failure to pay can eventually lead to eviction and auction.)

Carl Drega could see what was coming. He couldn't have been ignorant of the government tactics used to ambush and murder harmless civilians at Waco and Ruby Ridge. He bought a $575 AR-15. He also began equipping his property with early-warning electronic noise and motion detectors against the inevitable government assault. But they didn't come for Carl Drega at home. On Tuesday August 19,1997, at about 2:30 on a warm summer afternoon, New Hampshire State Troopers Leslie Lord, 45 (a former police chief of nearby Pittsburg) and Scott Phillips, 32, arrested Drega in the parking lot of LaPerle's IGA supermarket in neighboring Colebrook, N.H. Why was Carl Drega arrested that day? New Hampshire Attorney General Phillip McLaughlin pulls out his best weasel words, reporting the troopers had stopped Drega's pickup because of a "perception of defects." Earlier wire accounts reported they were preparing to ticket him for having "rust holes in the bed of his pickup truck." But Carl Drega had had enough. He walked back to Trooper Lord's cruiser and shot the uniformed government agent seven times. Then he shot Trooper Philips, as the brave officer attempted to run away. Both died.


Drega then commandeered Lord's cruiser and drove to the office of former selectman -- now lawyer and part-time Judge -- Vickie Bunnell. Bunnell reportedly carried a handgun in her purse out of fear of Drega. But if so, she evidently had no well-thought-out plan to use it. Bunnell ran out the back door. Drega calmly walked to the rear of the building and shot her in the back from a range of about 30 feet. Bunnell died. Dennis Joos, 50, editor of the local Colebrook News and Sentinel, worked in the office next door. Unarmed, he ran out and tackled Drega. Drega walked about 15 feet with Joos still clutching him around the legs, advising the editor to "Mind your own (expletive) business," according to reporter Claire Knapper of the local weekly. Joos did not let go. Drega shot Joos in the spine. He died.


Drega then drove across the state line to Bloomfield, Vt., where he fired at New Hampshire Fish and Game Warden Wayne Saunders, sending his car off the road. Saunders was struck on the badge and in the arm, but his injuries were not considered life-threatening. Police from various agencies soon spotted the abandoned police cruiser Drega had been driving ... still in Vermont. As they approached the vehicle, they began taking fire from a nearby hilltop where Drega had positioned himself, apparently still armed with the AR-15 and about 150 rounds of ammunition. Although he managed to wound two more New Hampshire state troopers and a U.S. Border Patrol agent before he himself was killed by police gunfire, none of those injuries were life-threatening, either.


Immediately, the demonization of Carl Drega began. A neighbor told the Globe about seeing a police cruiser pull up to the Drega house at 2:50 p.m., and leave at 3:10 p.m., minutes before smoke began to pour from the house. Ignoring the likelihood that a uniformed officer might have been sent to see if Drega had gone home, "Authorities believe the fire was set by Drega," the Globe reported on Aug. 20, thereafter reporting as a matter of established fact that Drega burned down his own home. Isn't it funny how they always do that?

Searching the barn and the remaining property later that week, "Authorities found 450 pounds of ammonium nitrate, the substance used in the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings, as well as cans of diesel fuel, Trenches on the property held PVC pipe carrying wires to remote noise and motion detectors. No remote booby-traps were discovered, though the barn and a hillside bunker contained ammunition, parts for AK-47s and the AR-15, "and a few boxes of silver dollars," as well as "homemade blasting caps, guns, night scopes, a bullet-proof helmet, and books on bombs and booby traps," as well as "the makings of 86 pipe bombs." "The makings," eh? I wonder how many wholesale hardware outlets in this country currently stock "the makings" of 860 pipe bombs? Or 8,600? The FBI searched the three-story barn, with its "concrete bunkers" containing not only ammunition, but also "canned food, soda, and a refrigerator." (I wonder if my basement would suddenly become a "concrete bunker" if I had a run-in with the law? How about yours?)
One of the items they alledgedly found was a book on "How to make a homemade grenade launcher" which they displayed as proof of his diabolical plans. If it was not a plant, which it may well have been, consider, since when is it illegal to own books, of any kind, here in the good ol'USA? Why is it, when someone decides to become a sovereign individual, they are targeted as a threat to society? They might as well have thrown the Bill of Rights into the fire they set to burn Drega's property to the ground. N.H. authorities decided that they should destroy the barn with a "controlled burn and explosion," which they promptly did.

Ammonium nitrate is, of course, a common fertilizer, sold in 50-pound bags to anyone who wants it -- no questions asked -- in garden stores in all 50 states. Farmers all over the nation store more than 60 gallons of diesel fuel at a time, and even know how to combine the diesel fuel with the ammonium nitrate to make a relatively weak explosive, useful in blowing up tree stumps. Purchase of blasting caps for this purpose is also perfectly legal. If this and a few hundred rounds of military surplus ammo constituted "the most dangerous private arsenal" the head of the New Hampshire state police bomb squad had ever seen, he must not get out much.

Anyway, the buildings are all burned to the ground now -- just like at Waco -- and the newspaper reporters -- trained to just report the facts and never express opinions -- had ruled within days that Carl Drega was "diabolical and paranoid." The remaining question is, did government agents Vickie Bunnell, Leslie Lord, and Scott Phillips deserve to die? Did Carl Drega pick the right time and place to say "That's as many of my rights as you're going to take; it stops right here?" Or is that the right question? The problem with the question is that the oppressor state and its ant-like agents are both devious and clever: except when faced with overt resistance and a chance to make an example of some social outcasts on TV, they rarely send black-clad agents to pour out of cattle trailers in our front yards, guns ablaze. No, they generally see to it that our mental castration is so gradual that there can never be a majority consensus that this is finally the right time to respond in force.They'll tell you,"Those are the rules," after all. "Everybody has to do it; I just do what they tell me; if you don't like it you can write your congressman."
When ... when is it finally the right moment to respond, "I'll tell you what; why don't you and your congressman go screw yourselves? Carl Drega decided the day to finally say that, was the day they came to arrest him on the private property of a supermarket parking lot, supposedly for having rust holes in the bed of his pickup. Does anyone believe that's really why they stopped Carl Drega? I am not -- repeat, not -- advising anyone to go forth and start shooting cops and bureaucrats. To start with, one's own life expectancy at that point grows quite short, limiting one's options to continue fighting for freedom on other fronts. Most of us -- unlike Carl Drega -- also have families to think of.


And finally, such a course invites obvious risks of mistaken identity, collateral damage to relatively innocent bystanders (witness newspaperman Coos), and an end to due process ... a concept for which I still harbor some respect, even if our government oppressors do not. What I do know is, in little more than 30 years, we have gone from a nation where the "quiet enjoyment" of one's private property was a sacred right, to a day when the so-called property "owner" faces a hovering hoard of taxmen and regulators threatening to lien, foreclose, and "go to auction" at the first sign of private defiance of their collective will ... a relationship between government and private property rights which my dictionary defines as "fascism."


Carl Drega tried to fight them, for years, on their own terms and in their own courts. We know how far that got him. What I do know is that this is why the tyrants are moving so quickly to take away our guns. Because they know in their hearts that if they continue the way they've been going, boxing Americans into smaller and smaller corners, leaving us no freedom to decide how to raise and school and discipline our kids, no freedom to purchase (or do without) the medical care we want on the open market, no freedom to withdraw $2,500 from our own bank accounts (let alone move it out of the country) without federal permission, no freedom even to arrange the dirt and trees on our own property to please ourselves.

If they keep going down this road, there are going to be a lot more Carl Dregas, hundreds of them, thousands of them, fed up and not taking it any more, a lot more pools of blood drawing flies in the municipal parking lots, a lot more self-righteous government weasels who were "only doing their jobs" twitching their death-dances in the warm afternoon sun ... and soon. When is it the right time to say, "Enough, no more. On this spot I stand, and fight, and die"? When they're stacking our luggage and loading us on the box cars? A fat lot of good it will do us, then. "You must be kidding!" come the outraged cries. "This guy shot a fleeing woman in the back." Oh, pardon me. Did Judge Bunnell propose to fight a straightforward duel with Mr. Drega, one on one, mano a mano, to determine who should have a right to decide whether he could build a tarpaper shack on his own property?


Of course not. The top bureaucrats generally manage to be sipping martinis at cocktail parties when the process they put in motion "reaches its final conclusion," with padlocks and police tape and furniture on the sidewalk ... or the incinerated resister buried in the ashes. Go watch "Escape from Sobibor." When the Jewish concentration camp inmates finally start to kill their German oppressors, tell me how long you spend worrying that they "didn't give the poor, jackbooted fellows a fair, sporting chance." Each and every one of us must decide for him- or herself when the day has come to stand fast, raise our weapons to our shoulders, and (quoting President Jefferson, this time) water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots, and of tyrants. Give up the right to make that decision, and we become nothing better than the beasts in the field, waiting to be milked until we can give no more, and then shuffling off without objection, heads bowed, to the soap factory. Carl Drega was a resident of New Hampshire. On the day Carl Drega decided was a good day to die -- on the day they towed it away -- the license plates on his rusty pickup still bore the New Hampshire state motto: "Live Free or Die." Carl Drega was different from most of us, all right. He believed it still meant something.

Vin Suprynowicz & J.N.

[Fluff and Stuff]

Many of you already know who he is so you can skip this post. To those who don't this might be an interesting story, although hopefuly none of us will have to face the same fate as Carl Drega:

I'm not gonna do or saying anything else in this thread but I don't think talking about this on a NH Forum is a good idea.

[Lex]

Many of you already know who he is so you can skip this post. To those who don't this might be an interesting story, although hopefuly none of us will have to face the same fate as Carl Drega:

I'm not gonna do or saying anything else in this thread but I don't think talking about this on a NH Forum is a good idea.

I wasn't planning on talking about it, just posting the story. Or did you include posting the story in talking about him?

You can't deny what happened. It probably wasn't the best way for Drega to handle the situation but that's what happened. I'm not implying that what he did was wrong or right, he paid the price for what he did and that's all there is to it.

[Dreepa]

I never heard of the guy before.
Quite a story.

[president]

Many of you already know who he is so you can skip this post. To those who don't this might be an interesting story, although hopefuly none of us will have to face the same fate as Carl Drega:

I'm not gonna do or saying anything else in this thread but I don't think talking about this on a NH Forum is a good idea.

I wasn't planning on talking about it, just posting the story. Or did you include posting the story in talking about him?

You can't deny what happened. It probably wasn't the best way for Drega to handle the situation but that's what happened. I'm not implying that what he did was wrong or right, he paid the price for what he did and that's all there is to it.

Didn't you say he was one of your heros before?

[president]

Two words:

Carl Drega

Wow! This guy is my hero! Here is a great article about him. And there is even a book about him.

[Lex]

Didn't you say he was one of your heros before?

For sticking up for himself, yeah. That doesn't contradict what I said earlier.

[Russell Kanning]

I think this is a perfect place to post this story. If we find any other articles, we could add them.
I think the Kelo 6+1 have a better method of standing up for their property rights.
Drega would have been better off not wasting time and money in court. He should have just refused.

That is a wild story.

[Mark]

The Bottom Line:  Freedom From The Man!

Actually, the bottom line is that Drega was a piece of fucking filth -- a murderer who got what he deserved in the end.

[AlanM]

The Bottom Line:? Freedom From The Man!

Actually, the bottom line is that Drega was a piece of fucking filth -- a murderer who got what he deserved in the end.

Carl Drega was a man who was pushed beyond his endurance, and lost his senses.

[AlanM]

I'm sorry, but killing innocent people does not a liberty justify...

Oh, I agree. He went bonkers. Some folks go bonkers under pressure. No justification for his killing innocents, just a sadness that the Gov pushes folks beyond their limits.

[Lex]

I'm sorry, but killing innocent people does not a liberty justify...

I'm sure to him they weren't so innocent.

But I agree that his actions did not help advance liberty one bit and probably did the opposite.

[AlanM]

I agree, Alan.? The "Man" pushed him too far in so many areas.? That's why we need to work harder, smarter and faster than our present form of democracy (ooohhhh, I hate that word) in order to educate others about the revolution that is at hand.

Shorty to the rescue! 

[Kat Kanning]

Pushed beyond his limits....like that CO guy who built himself a tank 

[Mark]

This "pushed beyond the limits" talk is horseshit. I haven't surrendered my morality to any government, and I don't know why we'd expect any less of Drega. If you want a foolproof way to ensure that people in your new (or soon to be new) state think you're crazy, go ahead and take up this guy's cause. He's no martyr. He's a murderer, plain and simple.

Now go ahead and smite me for failing to defend an immoral killer, or for not using enough "tact" in discussing his actions.