Review by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
I’M FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND I’M HERE TO KILL YOU: The True Human Cost of Official Negligence, by David T. Hardy. ©2017. Published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc., New York, NY, Distributed by Perseus Distribution, Phone: 800-343-4499.
Hard cover, 239 pages, MSRP Price $24.99. Also available online.
Don’t let the title fool you; this is a book about laws and injustice. The author is a Tucson, AZ, lawyer who worked as an Interior Department solicitor for ten years, and who has written a number of books, including a New York Times best seller, and produced videos.
His premise is that according to multiple Supreme Court decisions, an American citizen cannot sue the government no matter how negligent the government or its agents are, no matter how many lives are taken, or how property is destroyed. This is based on the English law precedent that “the king can do no wrong.” In order for a plaintiff to get any kind of settlement, Congress has to pass a special bill.
Now you might think that this cannot really happen, so Hardy reviews in a very readable style a number of notorious government schemes that cost many lives. AS gunowners, TGM readers will have a pretty good knowledge of the Ruby Ridge “shoot on sight” disaster involving the Weaver family, the Waco, TX, “Showtime” destruction of the Mount Carmel religious compound; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ disastrous “Fast and Furious” program. Less well known perhaps will be the destruction of Texas City, TX, because the government mishandled ammonium nitrate, the Tuskegee, AL, syphilis study that resembled more a Nazi program than science, the government’s callous atomic testing in the western US that poisoned land as well as people, and the militarization of urban police agencies, and incompetent negligence within the Veterans Affairs Department.
There’s a chapter devoted to each of these cases, complete with footnotes, as Handy builds his brief against injustice at the federal level. For many, the destruction of Texas City, TX, in the late 1940s that leveled a city and took some 600 lives, as the government mishandled its attempt to rid itself of wartime explosives, and lied about it.
But this is not just a book detailing past injustices just for the horror of it all. It is a wake-up call to the changes that must be made in US jurisprudence if justice is finally to be served.
The final segment of the book is concluding chapter that bares the author’s recipe for putting a lease on the government bureaucracies that have exploded, poisoned, burned, shot and otherwise been allowed to get away with murdering and mistreating innocent Americans. It contains the author’s lawyerly recommendations for changing the law in order to end injustices,
This book will likely make you angry, but it may also lead you to support changes in federal law so that justice can finally be served. I recommend it highly.
