Early during my latest employment with the Chieftain, I was assigned the coverage of a local candidates forum. It proved to be a long night and I snuck out early.

However, during the lengthy grilling of county sheriff candidates some questions seemed strange.

Asking a sheriff candidate what he would do if armed federal emissaries arrived and demanded that all guns be forfeited to the government seemed a trifle far-fetched at the time. The answer for candidates in Wallowa County was easy. After all, each wanted to get elected and had to know the people who would be casting votes.

One candidate (he didnt get elected) went so far as to say, in my incredibly distorted paraphrase, that hed be first to fall on his sword to protect Second Amendment rights of those from Wallowa County.

Not long after that, in December 2013, Wallowa County passed a Second Amendment preservation ordinance and it dawned on me that questions asked those sheriff candidates might not have been as far off base as I originally had thought.

Somewhere between those two events I was less than 30 feet away when a disabled veteran, speaking to a U.S. Senator at a town hall meeting in Wallowa, threatened violence if anyone tried to prohibit him from driving his four-wheeler to his favorite hunting spot, whether the U.S. Forest Service liked it or not.

I was younger when I previously lived in Wallowa County, but I certainly dont remember areas of friction between locals and big government being as pronounced as they are today.

For example, take Wallowa-Whitman Forest Services federally mandated Travel Management Plan that quickly got quashed, mostly by residents from Wallowa County.

And in my opinion, rightfully so.

When the Forest Service selected their alternative plan, they had to have known that guesswork maps in their plan would not fly in Wallowa County where an army of volunteers/paid staff under the wing of the Wallowa County Natural Resources Advisory Committee had spent countless hours mapping and detailing road locations within Wallowa Countys portion of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Since half the county belongs to the federal government, its not surprising that locals would be sensitive about management practices and where residents can and cant go in that forest.

But there are other signs that big government is moving away from the people of Wallowa County.

As a journalist, its discouraging to encounter so many people in federally responsible positions unwilling to answer questions about what they, being paid by my taxpayer money, do while working. The system is in place where others, oftentimes less knowledgeable on the requested subject, are employed to speak for them.

Now heres a big-versus-small occurrence where Im treading on thin ice because government decided to resolve an extremely complex, public matter behind closed doors. One man shoots another man in the chest, law enforcement from three counties is called to the scene of a standoff that lasts five hours, and later the man who was shot is sent to prison without one word of explanation made available to the public.

I was in the courtroom when the judge OKd that state prosecutors request not to have his photo taken because it might blow his cover for future acts of justice the public doesnt need to be privy to.

Im a pacifist by nature and would have gone to jail had not the draft lottery spared me years back. Yet, having government decide guilt from innocence leaves a hollow pit in my stomach. The writers of the Constitution were right when they drafted the Second Amendment.

Jabberwock II columnist Rocky Wilson is a reporter for the Chieftain.