You guys have the Second Amendment. Guns, you has ’em. I am told it is the ultimate bulwark against tyranny. At least in principle I agree completely that an armed population is a good thing, which is sadly not the situation here in disarmed Britain.
Then why is this possible?
Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking. She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram. She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door. “I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic. “I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.”
So a politically motivated raid by armed police in Wisconsin is conducted against a political rival, and… well… and what?
As news of what happened belatedly spreads, are militia’s urgently forming in the ‘Land of the Free and Home of the Brave’ to meet this use for political armed force with opposing armed force? Is there a hash tag #NewMinuteMenMuster calling armed civilian enemies of tyranny in the USA to take up those 2nd Amendment blessed arms yet? Or at least are folks coming up with SOPs for an en-mass armed response for the next time this happens?
Clearly it would be wholly justified to start putting up NO POLICE ZONE signs backed up with lethal roadside IED’s to be used against the thugs who did this, so why in the land of the Second Amendment are such things not happening?
This is not a slide towards tyranny in the USA, this is tyranny. The tree of liberty is looking mighty parched right now.
Damn, I thought things were bad here, where all we have to defend ourselves with is pointy sticks, bottles full of soap flakes & petrol, and creative imprecations.
Gee, not sure why you think Americans have gone soft.
Unrelated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNAXNgGTTG8
This could have been a police raid ordered by a local leftist.
Or could it could be local leftist activists contacting the police and pretending that there are terrible crimes (child murders or whatever) going on at the ladies house.
This is an old trick of leftist activists – they have often done it, they think it is funny to get the “Fascist pig” police to attack the homes of “reactionaries” – there are plenty of college professors, and other scum, in Wisconsin who might have done this.
As for the lady opening fire on the police – or other people coming to help the lady and opening fire on the police.
That is exactly what the left want to happen.
Well I hope they get what they want then.
You jest (I think), but there has been some substantial backlash against the militarization of U.S. police, including (in some cases) people being no-billed for shooting back. A few moments search produces:
No-bill for killing a policeman: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/02/10/some-justice-in-texas-the-raid-on-henry-magee/
Indiana state law explicitly legalizing defense against police: http://www.in.gov/legislative/bills/2012/SE/SE0001.1.html
Yes to all of the above. Oathkeepers, IIIpers, Sipsey Street, WRSA, Mountainguerilla, Spark31’s Signal-3 magazine, etc. Hie thee to google, and take the red pill.
Some cops have gotten shot for this kind of thing. Usually doesn’t go well for the occupant of the home, but some of them have gotten off completely. (Hopefully they then move to a different jurisdiction.)
recentish cases with decent outcomes have been in indiana (ended up with the laws revised positively, i think) and texas. maybe check reason’s blog archives?
regardless, cops are slow to adjust.
Several wins have been earned already, BTW, most prominently the Bundy Ranch standoff.
Read it from the leftist of sources:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/180619/12-scariest-parts-new-report-bundy-ranch-standoff
http://cdn.bearingarms.com/uploads/2014/05/bundy-rifle.jpg
“Just last month, in the 31 days of March, police in the United States killed more people than the UK did in the entire 20th century. In fact, it was twice as many; police in the UK only killed 52 people during that 100 year period.”
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/american-cops-killed-people-month-march-uk-entire-20th-century/
I knew about the Bundy Ranch affair, but I must say that was perhaps the most perfect of all possible situations in which to confront the other side… still gratifying to see, don’t get me wrong, but as for the ostensible militia groups you mention, are they just willing to take the mountains (or boonies generally)… or are they actually preparing to take to the streets, because that is were it all starts to get interesting.
Actually, the RoE was defined by Clinton in Bosnia. The decision makers are the proper military targets, including compliant media and the bureaucrats who make the machine run.
Why take on hard targets like cops when you can spend your time on tax collectors, EPA inspectors, FDA goons, etc? All the cops get put on “protective detail” then, and you can do what you want in the streets.
Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. Eliminate a few bureaucrats and the compliant media that they rely on, and the machine grinds to a halt. Cops don’t go on the street when the bookkeepers won’t come in and cut the paychecks. Without the compliant media slanting the story as to how terrible that is, there’s no impetus to get it running again.
“all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Declaration of Independence.
Yeah but that is not logistics (or tactics), it is strategy.
Shooting at the media is probably the worst strategic idea ever btw, almost mindbogglingly counter productive. Indeed if the Bundy festivities showed anything, it is that simply making it clear that force is not an option unless they want a civil war, it is actually pretty damn effective to just show up and mean it (and you do have to mean it). The trick is translating that into something that is useful to political reformers who might be threaten with evil shit like what was done to Cindy Archer, rather than some well situated Rancher out in the middle of nowhere.
You think they would have done what they did if it was even plausible, let alone likely, that it might cause an armed confrontation, not with the hapless Cindy Archer and her dogs but with a few hundred later day Minutemen turning up half an hour later? I really doubt it.
This was an operation run by a Democrat married to a union boss who with the complicity of a Democrat appointed judge went after people illegally. These guys broke the story:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417155/wisconsins-shame-i-thought-it-was-home-invasion-david-french
Now it is up to the court system to hang the perps. We shall see.
I don’t think it is counter productive as you assume. The head choppers in the Middle East have gotten very positive results from it. In fact, when they progressed it to France, your own bbc stumbled over themselves to submit to the demands of a foreign irregular force.
Every time the media finds themselves in actual danger they flee the field. They will do the same if a few of the loudest statist shills discover that they aren’t a protected priesthood. The Islamists proved that.
To answer your question this administration (Obama) is the first to really use the IRS to go after the petite bourgeoisie (Nixon and Clinton both had their enemies lists, but those were generally more power folks inside the polisphere), and the Wisconsin abomination is the first time *I* know of outside of Chicago that there has been this sort of wide spread abuse.
Gun sales are up in this country, and there are more than a few people who call Obama “The greatest gun salesman ever”. I suspect by this time next year gun sales will be peaking again…Reminds me, I need to stock up on .223 and .308 this fall.
Right now there seems to be some questions about what’s happening in Wisconsin, and there might be some legal pushback. If there’s not, I suspect that the next time it happens things will go hot.
But in general Conservatives have some respect left where the police are concerned, and when they get told by a DA to serve a warrant they sort of have to assume that the DA and the Judge are at least not doing the wrong thing.
You only shoot police when *they* are doing the wrong thing. In this case it’s the judge and the DA that need to be drug out into the busiest street in town during evening rush hour and shot once in the back of the head and their bodies left on the side of the road for vulture. However criminal punishment will suffice.
Perry, the answer lies in geography. Wisconsin is not only one of the most socialist states in the U.S., it is also a state in which the Left has grabbed onto not only the state government and judiciary, but also the police. It is also the most disarmed state in the Union, tens of thousands of hunters (confined to rural areas and scattered) notwithstanding.
This is not a small thing. What happened in Wisconsin doesn’t happen in Texas, for example, and not because there are more militantly-armed citizens like myself who live here, but because the judges (not to mention the police themselves) would take an extremely dim view of such reindeer games.
That’s not to say the red states are blameless — abuses of power have happened there — but in these locales such abuses are not only more likely to face punishment, but less likely to be sanctioned by the chief law enforcement officers. I cannot even begin to imagine that politically-motivated SWAT raids would occur in Maricopa County, Arizona, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the chief law enforcement officer, or in my home county of Collin, where Sheriff Terry Box would never allow such raids to take place. (I’ve met the latter, and he’s if anything more of a Constitutional adherent than Arpaio, just more restrained about it.)
Sadly, this nonsense is more likely to occur in the Blue states: New York, California, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Illinois and so on. Good luck trying it in Idaho, Texas or Arizona.
Hear, hear!
Dear Kim, don’t forget that only Americans use the colour red to imply ‘conservative’. As an Australian, it sounded like a communist takeover!
It’s the statistical nature of things. As people are pushed further and further, not much appears to be happening first. Then, like the first bubbles in a pan of water, there are likely to be isolated incidents here and there then you’re at boiling point and it all starts spilling over the edge. Keep your eye on the isolated incidents.
I will point out that as a resident of the US, I am somewhat perplexed at my motherland, the UK. Politicians have been raping and murdering children, the police have been covering it up and yet… things seem very quiet. I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it but it seems very placid. A bit like the proverbial duck, perhaps?
I meant to write, “things seem very quiet, even given the lack of guns”.
“You only shoot police when *they* are doing the wrong thing.”
Did you even read the article? In this case it was the police “doing the wrong thing” (which isn’t to say that he DA and the judge aren’t also culpable). Yes, if given a warrant they have to execute it, but that doesn’t mean they have to use the methods described here.
In my opinion this event represents a combination of factors, all bad. The most obvious one is the (probably criminal) misuse of the police and the criminal justice system to settle a political score. But a contributing factor is the increased militarization of civilian police forces, which started under Bush II but has really accelerated under Obama (or, more properly, the execrable Eric Holder). A third element is the existence of immunity for police officers in all but the most egregious of circumstances. This doctrine is entirely judicially-created; there is no statutory (let alone constitutional) basis for it. The almost certain knowledge that there will be no personal repercussions leads inexorably to just this sort of abuse.
One can only hope that the court cases discussed in the article will put an end to abuses of this nature. Wisconsin also needs to repeal its disgraceful (and probably unconstitutional) “John Doe” law. And perhaps some of the victims will be able to pursue private legal remedies against the perpetrators of these abuses (although that seems unlikely). But on a larger scale, Phelps was correct to list (at 9:03 PM above) some of the better-known groups which are springing up to fight back against a government increasingly gone rogue. They were among those who showed up in Nevada in support of Cliven Bundy (I know someone who was there; it’s a fascinating story); Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars has been very publicly violating the new anti-gun laws in CT, NY and WA and daring the authorities to arrest him (so far they have declined). And the public in general is growing increasingly uncomfortable with these abuses; police killings are getting much more media attention these days, and it’s not only blacks who are protesting against them. We may be reaching a tipping point, and if that occurs we just might see some form of retaliation, possibly even including targeted assassinations. Wisconsin seems a good place to start.
Because, lets face it, if ordinary policemen were held directly responsible for their actions and couldn’t use the age old excuse of “I was only following orders”, then there would be a lot more policemen that would just say “No. I ain’t doing that and going to jail”. Who on earth is going to do that on a cops salary?
This is one of the many circumstances where immunity from prosecution is an accelerant for abuse.
I don’t think there is so much as a wet bus ticket between a police state and the US these days.
This is an issue that has often bothered me. I really only lurk on the polite side of the right-ish internet, so there may well be militant groups calling for war that I am just not exposed to. But it really gets to me the way a lot of militant TALKERS will proclaim this kind of thing is fascism and cannot be tolerated, yet as soon as some leftist is called rude names on the street, they chastise the person responsible for their behavior.
I mean seriously, if you’re going to call for action, don’t get all pissy and “polite” when braver people deliver. Bodies from lamp posts is where this needs to go, and the ones who will do it need rhetorical support, at the least, if it’s to become a campaign rather than a one-off.
It appears that the main differences between Wisconsin and Venezuela are (i) climate (ii) language (iii) availability of toilet paper.
Talk of direct action is nonsense, what is needed is a legal environment where such behaviour on the part of State officials is called out immediately and results in either prosecution or impeachment. To create that, political change seems to be needed, and an understand of the danger that the State present, “Where will you hide, Roper, when the laws are all flat?” as Paul Schofield’s Sir Thomas More put it.
I do not assume, I know, because you are completely wrong about the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Indeed CH and the earlier Mo Toon affair in Denmark did wonders to generate opposition to the Islamist agenda. You need to stop reading Steyn, he has gone a bit weird in the head sadly, giving the impression the European Caliphate is due to be established sometime next week (or was it last week).
Moreover the moment a US militia starts shooting journalists, I suspect some of the people they thought supported them would abruptly pick up a phone to tell the FBI who did it and where there they live. If you cannot see the difference between attacking journalists who say things you do not like, and attacking people issuing orders to armed men seizing private property or raiding political opponents, well… lets just say I would have second thoughts about manning the barricades with you.
Meaning?
You think Jyllands-Posten fled the field? Seriously you really need to stop reading Steyn. Indeed quite a lot of the US right-side media write things about the UK and Europe that make me think they are viewing us from orbit whilst looking through Coka Cola bottles. Full ones.
A lot of journalists ARE effective agents of the state at this point, propagandizing on its behalf. While shooting journalists for mere disagreement is ridiculous, shooting the ones who whole-heatedly support government tyranny would be more than reasonable.
Very poor trolling sir. Don’t try again.
Well Mr. Black as you support going after people because of what they write in newspapers, you are different to the people you purport to oppose how exactly? Ed is right, you are trolling.
Kim, are you sure it couldn’t happen in Texas?
See, this is the problem I was talking about. You want a nice peaceful revolution with only the people YOU dislike being targeted for killing. The moment someone suggests some other names in need of a bullet, you’re the first one to pull the plug on the idea.
The left is not the police, they are following orders. They will follow orders from anyone else just the same. The left, the heart of the left, is the civilian structure in the media, education and government. If you only plan to eliminate their hired foot soldiers yet leave the movers and shakers alone then you’re not calling for action at all. It’s just more posturing for the crowds.
Jefferson reference detected! You win the internet today.
In other words, if you kill 5 cops who were on this raid, the entire political class will turn on you to destroy you. Cops are just doing their jobs. One thousand more cops will be sent out to hunt every conservative in the land.
If on the other hand you kill the prosecutor, the judge who signed off on it, the police chief and a few of the others who gave the order, their replacements will be VERY reluctant indeed to give such an order again. Those are the targets that need to be eliminated. The people with “clean” hands and evil intent.
Correct, because being profoundly stupid is bad strategy.
Indeed given the choice between shooting journalists I disagree with… or shooting a person shooting at said journalists, it is really a very easy choice to make. I would shoot the shooter without hesitation. Indeed I would see the ‘Patriot’ shooter as no different to the Islamo-fascists who attacked Charlie Hebdo (and CH were & are a haven of florescent left wing idiocy, but THAT IS NOT THE POINT).
Do read the thread, this was actually about the notion of killing JOURNALISTS.
Explain to me why killing journalists who are vocally in favor of government tyranny IN THE CONTEXT OF REVOLUTION against that is a bad thing.
An enemy recruiter is just as much of a target as the soldiers he recruits. You’re being ridiculous to draw a distinction between them.
Because there is no “revolution” in the offing, just a rebellion. And even that will not happen if the people responsible for this kind of thing get jailed, as they should be. I think the ways things played out at the Bundy Ranch were close to perfect: but it seems cooler heads than yours were the ones that prevailed.
The USA has not collapsed, regardless of goggle-eyed Turner-esque fantasies to the contrary, and there are still significant elements of legal institutions that are supported by the very civil society you delusionally assume will be manning the barricades with you when you start shooting journalists for their opinions.
Indeed you know of the actions of the police and people who sent them because journalists are still able to write about such things without the state coming after them for sedition. You think National Review will be supporting you if they conclude they might get bombed if they are seen as going a bit ‘off message’ on some issue by ‘Patriots’?
Ahh, so you’re redefining the circumstances to avoid the question. So then we are in agreement on the redefined circumstances. In the case of fending off a single police raid, I agree it would be stupid to then go and kill journalists. I don’t think anyone was suggesting that.
In the context I spoke of, that being a general uprising against leftist tyranny, shooting the journalist supporters of that tyranny is entirely appropriate, as well as a good deal of other civilians supporters of it that also have “clean” hands while enabling and encouraging the dirty work.
Phew, good to know you realise your views have no relation whatsoever to reality as we actually find it then.
“Then why is this possible?”
That’s a mistaken question. An armed population does not guarantee good behavior by government etc., it just changes the odds over the long run.
That remains to be seen if it changes anything at all.
Somewhat related, I recently watched the excellent documentary The Staircase about the trial of Michael Peterson in the early ’00s. To cut a long story short, the “expert” prosecution witness who was supposedly skilled in blood spatter analysis blatantly lied about his experience, knowledge, training, and methodology. This was key to the jury reaching a guilty verdict for Peterson. He was nevertheless more fortunate than others who the same “expert” witness almost single handedly put away for life: a chap called Greg Clark got 17 years in jail because of this man’s lying about supposed blood spatter on a car. This bloke would routinely withhold the results of negative blood tests from the prosecution and defence, and only give them the positive results in blatant contravention of the law. Eventually – after 20 years! – his wrongdoing was discovered and Peterson and Clarke released, but alas he has not seen the inside of a jail cell himself. Then (h/t Duff and Nonsense) I see this in the Mail, a story about how lying and exaggerating evidence is widespread in the FBI labs and routinely used by those wishing to support the prosecution and further their own careers. Why, if a few innocent people go to jail for life or are executed, that’s a small price to pay for moving a few inches up the career ladder.
These fuckers should be dragged out on the street, doused with petrol, and set on fire. I can only hope there is a special place in hell for people like this, who knowingly fabricate evidence or lie in order to get people they don’t even know incarcerated for life or executed. A lower form of scum I cannot imagine.
Missing:
The actions decried, however deviant from “reasonable” methods by their authorization, were under the sanction of legislation – theoretic due process.
Regardless of the motivations of the prosecutor and the jurist, the actions were within the prescriptions of the statute.
So, how do such statutes come into existence? That is the real underlying social issue. Why do we have such statutes (called “laws,” but really just Rules of Policy to delineate a desired social order)?
Why is such “discretion” vested in a single officer of the “Law?” What are the objectives, how were they determined?
While Wisconsin tends to be a “collectivist” society (Nordic roots, co-ops, etc.) it is not unique in the U.S..
This is the fragmentation carried on by those who would have some direct the conduct of all.
It could well bring back (bring back) assassination as a political and social tool.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me 🙂
Like Waco? Most American yawned after Waco. These things have been happening for decades. The late Samuel Francis referred to “anarcho-tyranny” in the 90s and gave many similar examples of US police raiding homes in hopes of finding drugs then getting to confiscate and sell the property for profit. Often they found nothing but did manage to kill the residents. None of it stopped Americans from claiming they were the freeist best armed people on earth in contrast to those unarmed lily livered statist European sheep. We heard the same thing during the so-called Muslim Paris riots of 1995 (they were mostly black Africans not North African Muslims). “They wouldn’t dare do that in America where we are all armed”. Ferguson and incredibly high levels of intra-racial violence throughout the US would suggest otherwise.
Being armed provides limited protection against tyranny. Being in control, or even having just some influence, over media and schools is far more important.
oops. That should be “inter” racial violence.
BTW a lot of European countries do permit fairly wide spread gun ownership. Not everywhere is like Britain or Sweden. It hasn’t done much good there either.
I do think that there is a case to be made for the death penalty for perjury and/or perverting the course of justice. Perhaps if a noose were to be dangled in front of every witness as they take the oath, and with it left dangling in front of their eyes as they give evidence, with them being weighed for it in the witness box before being sworn in, and there being a very real prospect of swinging, then wrongful conviction rates might be somewhat reduced.
Perhaps with expert witnesses, the jury could decide on the spot if an expert witness was lying and pronounce sentence, the judge being excluded from the process?
In the Peterson case, the expert witness testified under oath that he had carried out 200 such analyses. The actual figure was 3 (three) and the most recent of those a decade previously. A noose is about right.
Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo indeed stayed on the field — and they are bit players. The BBC fled the field, along with ABC, CBS, NBC — even Fox. This is a clip of Sky News actively shoving their head between their legs and begging the head choppers for mercy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSxum5_G_tA
Wholesale murder of journalists? That would force them to fight. But you don’t need that. You take out two prominent, undeniably biased “journalists” who routinely and enthusiastically carry statist propaganda, like (for example) George Stephanopoulos and Rachel Maddow (NOTE: This is an example, not an instruction list) and the rest will promptly rediscover the safety of simply reporting the facts and not editorializing and spinning things for the state. In fact, when the state utterly fails to do anything to protect them, they won’t even BE allies of the state anymore.
In any event, the whole purpose of talking about this is so that we never have to do any of this. Rebellion and civil war is like a wildfire — there are a million things that can start it, but once it is burning, no one is in control of it and no one knows where it is going to go. You nudge it here and there, build firebreaks where you can, but once lit it is going to do what it does, and that is destroy.
Oh, and naturally the Establishment looks after their own:
Lying under oath and sending innocent men to jail for 17 years? Why, he should be demoted not fired!
More importantly, the cops are our natural allies — that is why the left loves to throw them at us. It is a win-win. The cops kill us? They win. We kill the cops? They win. We kill the decision makers and the cops shrug their shoulders because most murders go unsolved once they are 72 hours old?
That is how the left loses. They are cowards at heart. They send better men than they out to do their fighting. As soon as THEY have to pay the butcher’s bill, they fold.
The problem isn’t cops, politicians and bureaucrats. The problem is that the situation we have is one that is largely supported by the population. The problem isn’t a few petty tyrants in DC or at the local cop shop. The problem is the 300 million wanna be tyrants who facilitate them. I am not by any means advocating democracy, but what I am saying is that pragmatically speaking a people gets the government they want and deserve, even if that drags down a few good people in the process.
Perhaps you subscribe to the view “give me liberty or give me death.” If so, that can readily be arranged by shooting up a few cops doing the many bad things cops do. However, if you recognize that death is the ultimate tyranny a different approach seems appropriate. Specifically, building as many personal walls against tyranny as you can, and trying to convince others to think differently.
On the former you might consider a new location where the government, though equally oppressive, is less well organized, and you might also try to apply the principles in Harry Browne’s book “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World”, even if they are all a little dated now. Another book that offers some useful insight on living more free in an unfree world is Tim Ferriss’s book “The Four Hour Work Week” which is really more about living free than about working less hours.
If you really feel the need to die on a hill for liberty, at least make sure you choose a worthwhile hill.
And ultimately, if you want to solve the problem, and save the country’s future, the best place to start is advocating for the ending of the state from running the school system since that is the matrix of the aforementioned tyranny loving population
BTW, Perry, I’m not sure what perfect rebellion you are expecting, but no rebellion has ever happened that didn’t involve people who “shouldn’t” be killed getting killed. That is it’s nature. In fact, a key feature at the start is to provoke the state into overreacting to minor attacks (see England vs Ireland) in order to increase popular sentiment for the rebellion.
Widespread violence is the perfect situation for score-settling, and there are a lot of unrelated scores that will be settled if this happens, especially in the inner cities (and in fact, even between nations once America is focused on its own shores for once).
It’s another one of the many, many, many reasons to avoid this. The calculus isn’t just, “is fighting the state worse than letting the state continue?” The real question is, “is all the bloodletting that will happen once things go hot worth toppling the current state… and taking our chances with what will replace it?”
I’m more interesting in making all the tyrants die for nothing. Right now, they would still be able to salvage a victory — but the battlespace prep continues.
Indeed, and a great many rebellions fail catastrophically because the people driving it do amazingly stupid things, going all the way back to the First Jewish–Roman War (the Great Revolt), namely killing the wrong people and assuming it will make folks flock to your banner, rather than either factionalising or even pointing the ostensible enemy in your direction. When you piss off the people who support you, they know where you live.
And killing journalists in the name of freedom, liberty and constitutionally limited government would indeed “increase popular sentiment”… for hunting down and killing the lunatics killing journalists.
And funny you should mention Ireland. Like most Americans I suspect you might not understand the dynamics driving recent Irish history since 1900 very well (your use of the phrase “England vs Ireland” is one of those dead give away markers 😉 ). Ask yourself why Ulster is still part of the UK. But that said, lets not get too off-topic as Ireland and particularly Ulster is a whole separate dog’s dinner, and given past eye-rolling experiences, I am usually unwilling to debate the topic with people from all too far from these
SepticSceptred Isles.Actually let me be blunter. If you came out, in Bundy Ranch style armed support, in opposition to some grotesque abuse of power then it might be clear what you oppose, but it is also clear what you support sure ain’t ‘liberty’ in view of your remarks.
If you think killing journalists is a good idea, you are either working for the other side looking to discredit the people you ostensibly support, or you are actually no different from them. Either way you are the enemy. That is how I see it.
Actually, the problem is that I do know, and have the advantage of being able to look at it objectively from a distance rather than being embroiled in it. It was about as close to a “controlled” rebellion as you can get. That was the best case scenario.
On the other hand, I get the impression that you don’t get how bad things are in America right now. America will not have an IRA style rebellion. We’ll have Kosovo. America won’t come to a slow boil — it will erupt like a volcano. I don’t know when the last time you visited and got out of the large coastal cities was, but the heartland of America is pissed off to a degree I’ve never seen, with divisions rising as striking as in the mid-nineteenth century.
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2015/04/05/liberals-may-regret-their-new-rules-n1980933/page/full
Costco is selling disaster food — marketed as disaster food, not camping supplies. Walmart can’t keep ammunition on the shelves, and hasn’t been able to for five years running, even though production is running at full capacity and has been the entire time. It is a very dangerous time in America.
They aren’t journalists. They are agents for the deep state who get their paychecks from entertainment companies. If you think slapping a title on them makes them immune to retribution for their crimes, you are a fool and deserve to be ruled by these unelected tyrants. That is how I see it.
Yesterday I was asked “why haven’t the WI Republicans moved to repeal this John Doe law, or whatever it’s called – thoughts?”
This is a cut and paste of my reply:
Kim,
Wisconsin has the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Note the specific enumeration of security and defense as reasons to carry. Note also “any other lawful purpose”. There are restrictions around schools, police stations and places where the property owners or managers have posted the buildings as gun free. With the exception of the off premises extension of the zone around schools, these are reasonable restrictions. State gun law preempts municipal laws that are stricter. This is why you have the same gun carry rights in Milwaukee and Madison as you do in Appleton or farms in the middle of nowhere.
This has been interpreted to mean open carry. We are now (rather belatedly) also a concealed carry state.
Lest you doubt the actual presence of non-hunting guns in Wisconsin, shooting is a popular pass-time. It is not at all unusual in the semi-rural area where I live to hear the sound of shooting from near or far away. When somebody decides to kill tin cans with a magnum on a Saturday morning and I get annoyed, I just think of it as the sound of liberty.
Also, you don’t understand Wisconsin politics. We are not a blue state. We are not a red state. We have both extremes from a Tammy Baldwin on the left to Senator McCarthy on the right. We are a state where swing votes matter greatly. This thuggery (the John Doe cases) is the defeated blue lashing out. They continue to lose critical battles and just last week the state’s voters changed the state supreme court process for selecting the chief justice. It had always been delegated to the longest serving justice. This means that a hard left justice has been running a court with a conservative majority. Abrahamson managed to seriously meddle with the judicial process in the state by virtue of the positions power. As of last week, we voted to let the justices elect their own chief justice every two years. Abrahamsom is sueing. But of course!
Oh. One last thing. We are also a state where a (big “L”) Libertarian candidate actually got in the double digit percentages in the governor race during Bush II years. Libertarians in Wisconsin will probably not make that mistake again as the resulting split vote saddled us with Governor Doyle (who among many other things, plundered the state transportation budget, cancelling projects already in process to pay off his state employee supporters). Now the libertarian contingent is instead influencing Republican party choices with results like Walker and US Senator Ron Johnson.
@ RRS: “Regardless of the motivations of the prosecutor and the jurist, the actions were within the prescriptions of the statute.”
As far as I know that is true with respect to the issuance of the warrant (hence the need to change the law). However, the actions of the police in executing that warrant were not. And this comes back to my argument about the militarization of police. A true “peace officer” executing such a search warrant would knock on the door (there was no need for a battering rams; these people aren’t going to flush laptops down the toilet like illegal drugs) and be reasonably polite to the occupants (these aren’t violent criminals). But we have spent the last decade or more turning local police into paramilitary organizations who view the citizenry as the enemy. Our (inaptly-named) Justice Department has been showering them with military gear, from automatic weapons to grenade launchers to armored personnel carriers (literally). And of course every two-bit municipality now has its own SWAT team, which is not only wholly unnecessary but overtly dangerous (they have the tool so they want to use it, such as to serve non-support warrants and break up residential penny-ante poker games). Obama has been turning local police forces into the internal army he so much desires. And the inevitable result is abuses such as that documented here. It needs to stop, and the police restored to their proper role in the community.
It may have already done so. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell.
Someone didn’t. However he is (rightly) remembered as a terrorist which is why anyone with an ounce of wisdom will give pause before resorting to precipitative action.
The state’s forces are always outnumbered, outgunned and surrounded: we can afford to be a little relaxed about their transgressions so long as we retain the power to correct them forcibly if need be. In the meantime, legal corrections are in hand.
Having the capability of violence makes sensible people less violent, not more.
Having carried a concealed handgun for many years, I can attest to that.
Laird:
Come now, I began with:
That sanction included the actions of the prosecutor and the jurist (referred to).
But, (except in violation of (real) law and due process) none of this would have occurred absent the statutory imperative.
Thus, the real issue remains, why such a statute? What does its existence indicate?
Laird, et al.,
To a follower of the activities in WI during the advent of Scott Walker, a change in the legislature, and the subsequent actions (which included police cooperation)to impede legislative changes; it seems reasonable to assume that the mode of police conduct here was NOT the result of militarization, but a continuation of attempts at intimidation (“See what can happen when you get too active!”)in order to “get the word out” that being involved can get you lots of trouble.
It is probably not the last gasp, but one of the retreating grunts of those losing power.
Part of the problem is that Americans are very enthusiastic about shooting each other.
Why expect American policemen to pussyfoot around with the public when they know the public is trigger happy and shoot each other all the time?
The police in the UK go in mob-handed and with force if they think they are dealing with armed people. Given the number of guns in America I expect US police just assume that the people they are going to arrest could be armed.
Perry, we’ve had this kind of conversation before. Generally speaking, we Americans prefer our rebellions to be gradual and orderly — even the scumbags on the Left prefer it so, which is why their Long March through the media, academia and judiciary has been so successful. (For all their rhetoric, the American Left doesn’t have the stomach for actual revolution.)
We on the Right, however, prefer our rebellions to be more peaceable. Yes, we have the Four Boxes of Liberty (soap, ballot, jury and cartridge), but even faced with the recent nonsense in Wisconsin, we’re more likely to try for change through the ballot box — as we speak, there’s talk of a Constitutional Convention to alter a few of the more egregious machinations of the Left — and the popularity of candidates like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, along with groundswell movements like the Tea Party, are ample evidence of the growing resistance to what the modern Republic has become. (I should point out that a recent survey shows that over 70% of Americans support the use of firearms to prevent, deter and protect from violence, which is a complete inversion of the attitude of the late 1970s. Change does come, sometimes not as quickly as we’d like it to, but come it does.)
The problem with “revolutionary” change, as pointed out above, is that the killing seldom ends “appropriately”. Also as pointed out above, being armed actually makes the law-abiding less likely to use violence, not more. That doesn’t mean violence is impossible — hence the continuing efforts of the Left for gun control — but it reiterates the desire for the Loyal Opposition (that would be us conservatives) to keep trying for a peaceful change in our laws.
On that topic: unlike the Left, we conservatives are always leery of restrictive legislation because we’re cognisant that such laws are double-edged and could be used against us. Likewise when it comes to change, the more thoughtful among us don’t want the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction because that too is likely to be unpleasant.
I am certainly not on the side of those who advocate the “selective” assassination of journalists, lawyers and politicians; in fact, as also stated above, if I see someone trying to kill anyone, I’m more likely to target the assassin with my 1911. I’m especially disdainful of people calling for such actions from the safety of their comfortable apartments in central London, when it is people like myself whom they exhort to engage in these acts of terrorism.
A brief history lesson: in the early 1770s, there was a Boston-based organization called the “Sons of Liberty” whose members tarred and feathered Crown officials (judges, tax collectors and the like) and basically intimidated these officials into not carrying out the Crown laws. (The Boston Tea Party was another of their actions.) I should point out, however, that the American Revolution was not started by the Sons of Liberty, but by a bunch of courageous legislators and lawyers who wrote the Declaration of Independence (a seriously-seditious document) and later, the Bill of Rights. It was an armed militia force which ignited the Revolution in Concord and Lexington, but only when the Government tried to disarm them.
This is why no Leftist government dare attempt to disarm Americans physically: there aren’t enough body bags. It is the threat of the armed populace which keeps these pricks in check. The fact that the Left gets away with the occasional injustice like the Wisconsin raids pales into insignificance when compared to the Bundy Ranch standoff in Arizona. (Note that not a single shot was fired in that situation, and more importantly, the Federal government hasn’t been that eager to repeat the exercise.)
It’s the threat of an armed populace which keeps this bastards honest. We don’t have to start shooting them; we just have to retake the government and judiciary, and start reversing the Long March. Yeah, it’s tough, and yeah, it has no guarantee of success. But for people who respect the rule of law, that’s the way to do it, much as we may occasionally be tempted to more radical activities.
I apologize for the length of this post, but it’s a very serious topic and warrants lengthy discussion.
Seldom have I read such bullshit. Some Americans are very enthusiastic about shooting each other: urban gangs, drug dealers (some overlap) and similar criminals. But excluding such animals, the police are far more likely to die in a car accident than shot by a citizen (feel free to look at the stats).
American police have an aggressive attitude because 99% of their job is dealing with scum, and their attitude is coloured thereby. (I’m not excusing the attitude — in fact, I deplore it — but I do understand it.)
And please don’t make comparisons between U.S. and British police, because we are two different societies with two different mindsets and two different systems of law. When a retired senior citizen like Rodney Knowles can be arrested and end up with a criminal record for carrying a Swiss Army knife in his briefcase, I would suggest that the attitude of British police and the British legal system might be more problematic than ours.
“pointy sticks, bottles full of soap flakes & petrol,”
Approximately how high does St. Steven’s Tower rise above the pavement below?
Approximately how high is the roadway of Tower Bridge above the water at…say….mean high tide?
Of course, one COULD simply restrict their meals to kidney pie…
I’ve heard some Russians, short on arms, simply threw the heads-of-the-snake out the window.
Kevin, Austin isn’t in Texas except geographically. It exists on some neo-socialist plane, akin to Manhattan and San Francisco. (Note too that the prosecutorial excesses referred to in your link are, as in Wisconsin, perpetrated by Democrats and not by conservatives.)
I’ve pointed out before that native Austinites absolutely loathe all the transplanted Californians who have moved to the tech corridor around Austin. The reason is not that the Californians are too liberal; it’s that the Californians are not liberal enough for the typical Austinite.
@Midwesterner: when a state is a reliable supplier of Electoral College votes to the Democratic presidential candidate as Wisconsin has been for the past eighty years (Reagan excepted), I think one can make a case that Wisconsin is a Blue state. As for your comment about the right to bear arms in the state constitution, I should point out that similar constitutional “safeguards” exist in both the Illinois and Californian state constitutions too, and look what it got them. The fact that Wisconsin only got decent concealed-carry laws passed a couple of years ago could also be called a reliable indicator.
Kim du Toit, while calling out some utter rubbish, wrote “Seldom have I read such bullshit.” I have nothing to add to that, save to drill a little deeper into the nature of the enthusiasts that he mentions.
Matra wrote “oops. That should be “inter” racial violence.”
The evidence suggests that Matra might have been correct the first time, i.e. “intra”. In general, when somebody gets shot in this country, it’s a young black man being shot by another young black man. In a few areas you can replace “black” with “Hispanic” and in even fewer you can replace “Hispanic” with “white”, but the curve is pretty steep.
It’s an established and not-yet-falsified (which are not the same things) maxim in criminology that people are generally killed by people that they know. The drive towards multiculturalism (which looks a lot like ghettoisation, from where I sit) ensures that the people that one one knows are more likely to be of the same race or ethnicity as one.
I suppose that making most murders intra-racial is one way of cutting down on inter-racial killings, but I can’t help thinking that it somehow misses the point…
“Why aren’t these jerks in jail?”
1. Prosecutors enjoy wide immunity
2. Eric Holder is running the Federal DOJ
3. Local judges are on board with the program
4. Public Service Unions
Why would the Americans rebel again? The first War of Independence was all about demanding representative government. They’ve now got that, and even if some amendments have been twisted by the Supreme Court, it’s still a home-grown affair. We might like to think that it was about individual liberty, but it was not about getting rid of goverments. And governments have always been inclined to grow.
Phelps has the better of this argument Perry. Journalists are not some special protected class that should be preserved, they are propagandists in a culture war, and if it should happen, also in a shooting war. Those who propagandize for the enemy should be eliminated because they ARE the enemy. In the context of rebellion that is.
Wrong as usual Mr. Black. The whole key to a ‘rebellion’ is carrying a critical mass of people in the rebelling society along with you. Alienate enough of your own supporters and you lose. Journalists are indeed a special protected class and if you cannot figure out why, you have more in common with the people you are ostensibly opposing. A rebellion is not a war between nations, it is an armed PR campaign within a society unless it escalated to the point it really is a full blown tanks-and-artillery civil war like the Spanish one. At that point the media hardly matters.
Clearly, this raid was a politically motivated attempt to get a political rival silenced, or, if possible, killed. The first thing the victim had to do, therefore, was make sure she was not killed, and thankfully she succeeded in that. A home invasion by cops should not lead to your death, so long as you do not resist, unlike a home invasion by more mainstream criminals.
Having survived, the victim can then begin the real process of self-defence, not using a gun, but the law, and the media, and public opinion, to expose this evil and to try and get redress and justice, insofar as that word has any meaning in a banana republic like Wisconsin.
I agree John. Cindy Archer needs to use the law and public opinion to get justice, not get into a shoot out.
That said, this only happened because the vermin who ordered it knew there was no chance of it leading to a ‘Bundy Ranch’ stand off. They knew force was not going to cause a sudden assembly of deeply un-intimidated armed minutemen. They knew force & intimidation was very much a viable option against Cindy Archer.
That was what lead me to ask the questions I asked. Even if the state is quite happy to get into shoot outs on their terms (Waco, Ruby Ridge, pretty much any SWAT action etc.) because have every possible advantage, the state’s minions NEVER EVER want to get into shoots out that are not on their terms, for perfectly rational reasons: there is a very real risk of getting killed.
That is why they backed off at Bundy Ranch and why they have not come back. It is not a situation they can control with any confidence & thus naked force is simply not an attractive option.
I think the lessons to be learned looking at the two situations are fairly clear. Threatening the likes of Cindy Archer is seen as low risk because it is. Maybe that needs to change, and I am not suggesting the hapless Cindy Archer’s of the world should start shooting at cops any more than the Bundy family could have done it alone either.
You vastly overestimate the esteem that reporters are held in by Americans. They are not respected, and the certainly aren’t considered honest.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166298/honesty-ethics-rating-clergy-slides-new-low.aspx
20% of Americans find them honest and ethical. That puts them even with lawyers. The only people they are more honest than in this poll is politicians and car salesmen. People trust auto mechanics and bankers more.
TV Journalists are scum. Americans know that they are scum. If the scummiest of the scum start taking lumps along with everyone else few Americans are going to chance their opinions based on that. You’re right — if we just start shooting journalists out of the blue, we will lose support. However, if everyone is embroiled in a hot war, and the journalists who are obvious state shills start taking it in the face, no one is going to bat an eye — except the other journalists.
Not so, Perry. If that were the case they would not have gone to the spectacular lengths they went to trying to make it look like a drug trafficking bust. They went so far as forbidding their targets from even telling their own lawyers about the “search”. It was their intent to not only avoid the public eye, but to also evade habeas corpus – the judicial process. They almost succeeded. Yes, it was pure thuggery. But it was pretty obviously thuggery carried out in fear of the public. The public cannot defy what it cannot detect.
So, Kim. Faced with and endless stream of candidates that either want to control how we use our assets or control how we use our bodies, Wisconsin swing voters reliably voted for the ones that pledged to leave our bodies alone. And then along came a candidate (the second one if you count Goldwater who lost to a misguided sympathy vote) who offered both personal (by the standards of the times) and economic liberty; a candidate who favored free enterprise over big business. And, quelle shock, Wisconsin swing voters voted for him.
You will note that the only two Republicans that have achieved US senator or governorship in Wisconsin since Governor Thompson went native in Washington as Secretary of HHS under Bush II, have been libertarians (Walker and Johnson). And yet the stone skulled idiots controlling the Wisconsin Republican party continue to attempt to drive out the libertarian element from the Republican party. If you want to know why Tammy Baldwin was elected, don’t look to the Wisconsin voters, look to the Republican party hacks. They spent the donations that were intended to elect a Republican to the US Senate and spent it in the Republican senate primary election to block out libertarian/small business candidates. The more you think about that, the more evil stupid it is.
We now have a window of opportunity where the Democrats have achieved levels of moral crusading that paleo Republicans only ever dreamed about. If we could just get the Republican party oligarchs out of the way, Wisconsin would be able to consistently elect the likes on Walker and Johnson. And it should be noted that before Governor Thompson went native in Washington, he was a libertarian governor and when he left, his brother actually ran on the Libertarian ticket scoring double digit points.
If the Republican bosses try again to evict libertarians from the party, then we will get more Baldwins. If the Republican oligarchy S’sTFU during the primaries and only gets involved in the real election, then we will get more Walkers and Johnsons.
BTW, Kim, you said:
So I looked it up just to see if you know what you are talking about. The Illinois constitution contains the following phrase:
To do your homework for you, I’ll reference “the police power” that all gun rights in Illinois are vulnerable to.
Police power.
In other words, virtually no gun rights at all in Illinois.
I have searched the California constitution, specifically Article 1, The Declaration of Rights and found no reference to arms or any right to bear them. You will need to point me to the specific clause you are referencing if you want me to comment on it.
“If we could just get the Republican party oligarchs out of the way . . . .” That’s the mantra of every Tea Party group nationwide. It’s as true here in (ostensibly) conservative South Carolina as it is in Mordor on the Potomac. I’ll expect to see it right after I see aeropigs flying in V formation.