Protecting us from umbrellas and cameramen

A hysterical California gun phobe called the police reporting a man with a rifle strolling on the University of San Marcos campus.

The trained, enthusiastic, protectors of the peace responded with a SWAT team and campus lockdown.

They should have sent A Peace Officer to investigate. You DO remember when we hired peace officers instead of ENFORCERS, don’t you?

No reports of shots fired. Only ONE of the thousand cell phones on campus indicated threatening behavior.

Just one caller who saw a man carrying what might be a rifle… or a stick … or a broom … or … an umbrella on a day when it just might rain.

So one loony can call out an entire swat team with no corroborating evidence, no investigation, no scouting party. That is much like the community fire departments sending out every truck and team in the county to find it is just a back yard barbeque happily, innocently grilling burgers.

At least when the firemen arrived, they wouldn’t hose down the neighborhood.

Muzzle sweeping the dormitories.

Full-auto M-16 aimed at the cameraman, and at they guy who dropped his assault umbrella, hands up, with three goons surrounding him … Yeah, he needs to be looking down the barrel of an M-16 too.

Rather obviously, that is what it takes to make these sissies feel whole. Every once in a while they get to gear up and feel like a man. Trust me, little boys, that is not the same feeling.

Corrections officer training stresses rifles or shotguns at “ready” safely pointed at a 45 degree angle to the ground UNLESS you are going to fire. Military and Peace Officer training did as well.

When did this become okay?  Aiming at unarmed bystanders is outrageous.

Probably about the same time government shooters began using what they strategically named “No Hesitation Targets” like the one on the left for practice. Click on the link to see that article and more of those we are the enemy targets they began using a couple years ago.

Of course we sympathize – they do risk their lives every day to protect us, don’t they?

Uh, not exactly. In fact cops don’t even rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country... The reality is, at 16th, police fall just below below taxi drivers …

And of the police deaths, 56% are from traffic accidents not related to high-speed chases. If they walked their beats, they probably wouldn’t make the top 40. Better still, if they carried no more firepower than a revolver and did no SWAT training, it would be safer than running a day care.

The ACLU reported recently that SWAT teams in the United States conduct around 45,000 raids each year, only 7 percent of which have anything whatsoever to do with the hostage situations with which those teams were assembled to contend. Paramilitary operations, the ACLU concluded, are “happening in about 124 homes every day — or more likely every night” — and four in five of those are performed in order that authorities might “search homes, usually for drugs.” Such raids routinely involve “armored personnel carriers,” “military equipment like battering rams,” and “flashbang grenades.” Were the military being used in such a manner, we would be rightly outraged.

The Baltimore Sun did an analysis of SWAT deployment in Maryland and found the militarized team was sent out nearly five times each day. Only 6% of SWAT-involved incidents were for extreme emergency situations (bank robberies, barricades, hostage holding) – most were for search warrants or apprehending suspects involved in trivial matters like misdemeanors.

This shift toward a heavy reliance on SWAT teams does not fulfill the mission of “protecting and serving.” If anything, the violent tactics put everyone – including bystanders – in more danger. Let’s not understate the psychology of the situation either – when you dress police in war gear, they’re going to feel like soldiers out for a kill, not officers of peace.

In the last decade alone the number of people murdered by police has reached 5,000. The number of soldiers killed since the inception of the Iraq war, 4489.

So as it turns out, everybody BUT the police should be armed…

Oh yeah, and that California caller who can’t tell an umbrella from a rifle.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).