8 ms·

How would heavily armed citizenry help solve the problem? Are you going to put a hole in the head of the officer who takes your cash out of your car? Won't that

How would heavily armed citizenry help solve the problem? Are you going to put a hole in the head of the officer who takes your cash out of your car? Won't that lead to anarchy or civil war, eventually? Maybe...consider changing the law, eh?

littletimmy 11y ago
How will it lead to total civil war? All it will lead to is the police stops taking people's property without a court order or they risk getting shot.
- timonovici 11y ago
  That's a rather naive way of looking at the outcome. For one, do you really think a someone with the training, experience, and exposure violence of a cop could be outmatched by you? Second, the statement above didn't say much about requiring a warrant to take people's property - how do you get to USA v2, where that law is in place? Do you shoot enough cops, so they would change the law? What kind of wild-west mentality dwells around there, anyway? How about writing a petition? How about sending (e)mails to your congressmen, or whatever people with that kind of authority you have in US?
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    >For one, do you really think a someone with the training, experience, and exposure violence of a cop could be outmatched by you? Sure, why not? Most cops don't train that much with their weapons, and there's a bunch of crazy rednecks out there who train constantly with various firearms. I'll put my money on the gun nuts against the cops. Check out some YouTube videos by guys at pistol ranges. Also, cops only train at standard ranges, where you stand still and shoot at a non-moving target, and don't generally do combat training. Face it, cops aren't soldiers; they're just thugs with guns, and most are about as skilled with guns as your average ghetto thug.
    - timonovici 11y ago
      I'm a pretty fit guy, but I'm sure the recoil of a gun could break my wrist (well, maybe a desert eagle, I was pretty good with a kalshnikov on my military trainig). I spend more time typing on a keyboard than on a shooting range (which is kind of expected, i'm a programmer). I doubt you can apply such logic as a large scale solution. Do we begin introducing shooting classes in high school, to protect all our citizens? As for your bet - the paradigm would shift from bullying all people to bullying frail people and avoid rednecks, as far as the violent cops go. This would hardly solve the problem.
      - Grishnakh 11y ago
        Break your wrist? WTF are you talking about? Have you ever even shot a pistol? It isn't like shooting a 12-gauge shotgun. Women with small hands shoot pistols all the time. Most cops only train with their pistols once or twice a year.
        timonovici 11y ago
        I've only shot a small caliber pistol. Leaving poetic derailments aside, my point is - A: the solution doesn't scale B: it will lead to further discrimination, only aggravating the problem
thescriptkiddie 11y ago
The police are breaking the law.
- finid 11y ago
  > The police are breaking the law. No, they're not breaking the law. They're just taking advantage of laws your elected officials wrote. So if you want to stop the cops from stealing from you, get your elected official to change the law, or threaten to _vote_ him/her out of office. That's how it's supposed to be, but citizens keep voting the same politicians into office that vote against their interests.
  - Nutmog 11y ago
    Absolutely. I live in an authoritarian country and people would love to be able to vote politicians out. Americans really can but they just complain then vote for the same two parties every time. Clinton caused some of these tough on crime and drugs laws. So if you voted for his party (Obama), then you voted for this.
    - such_a_casual 11y ago
      According to Howard Zinn in "A People's History of the United States", the political party and electoral system was created as a facade to placate the poor from revolting against the wealthy. It worries me how much of this may still be true today: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
      - finid 11y ago
        The real problem, is that shepherds (politicians) know how to play the game, while the sheep (citizens) are too stupid to realize that they're being played. All the politicians do is stir up emotional issues like "they're trying to take away your guns", or abortion, to distract the sheep. It works all the time.
such_a_casual 11y ago
>Won't that lead to anarchy or civil war, eventually? Yes, hopefully (though hopefully not at the scale you may be imagining). Cops have turned into thugs in this country and something needs to be done about it. Maybe legalizing drugs would fix everything. I don't know. But cops in this country aren't even accountable for the people that they kill. There are no logs on how many murders are carried out by police. Yes, they can take our property, including cash, for no reason (something like 90% of dollar bills test positive for traces of cocaine). And in this case all the officers had to do was say they smelled weed. I have been a victim of this "smell like weed" abuse myself, in which everyone in my vehicle was pulled out and searched. My vehicle was then searched without my permission. They found nothing and gave me a speeding ticket for going 5 miles over the speed limit. But seizing our property means nothing when they can take our lives without the public knowing about it.
sb057 11y ago
>Maybe...consider changing the law, eh? That's not very helpful if the people enforcing (and writing) the law are the ones who are breaking it. >Won't that lead to civil war, eventually? That's the idea! Or hopefully not even that, since many servicemen will revolt as well.
ryanlol 11y ago
One could theoretically perform a citizens arrest? Although, non-lethal force would be preferable here.
samstave 11y ago
How would a heavily armed citizenry help solve the problem? Are you going to put a hole in the head of the carjacker who takes cash out of your care? Wont that lead to less theft and carjacking eventually? Maybe considering enforcing the legal right to do so, eh?
d_t_w 11y ago
Being heavily armed (and also being white) alters how the police treat you, the Oregon stand-off demonstrates as much. There would likely also be a presumption, as a heavily armed white person, that you're extremely confident in your ability to recite the constitution, quite possibly spoiling for a fight to defend particular rights that you see enshrined in the constitution, that you will not submit to a warrantless search, and are even less likely to allow the police to steal your money. You don't need to put holes in the police officers, they would profile you from a mile off and assume you're a red-neck nutbag who is potentially going to put holes in them, move along citizen there's nothing to see here.
- gozur88 11y ago
  The Oregon stand-off just demonstrates that if you "occupy" buildings out in the middle of nowhere in the winter off-season the cops are going to ignore you and see if the cold convinces you to leave.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    Winter is the excuse, not the cause. The situation in Oregon is larger than just this single incident. I recommend reading the report[1] put together by the SPLC on the previous incidents. Page 9 of the report has photos of these militia scofflaws pointing rifles at federal and local law enforcement[2]. That show of force did get law enforcement to back off at the time. As for why the people involved still haven't been charged with - at a minimum - assault with a deadly weapon is another matter entirely that really needs to be remedied before those militia nutjobs escalate their tactics into a a reenactment of the Whiskey Rebellion.. When you strip away the usual political rhetoric an other distractions, the primary reason the Oregon stand-off didn't turn into a (possibly Waco-style) raid immediately is because the militia members are both white and conservative. We saw what happened to unarmed non-conservatives when the police started using CS gas on various Occupy Wall Street groups (e.g. the battles in Oakland). If the militia members were black or Muslim, the media would be calling them "terrorists" and the swat teams would have gone in shooting within the first day or two. [1] https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_files/downloads/publication/war_in_the_west_report.pdf https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_file... [2] http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2014/04/RTR3L0EB/lead_large.jpg http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2014/04/RTR3L...
bitwize 11y ago
A growing number of police chiefs are starting to like armed citizens. Because if there's an active shooter like Colorado, San Bernardino, or Sandy Hook, armed citizens mean the guy is more likely to get popped before the police get in the line of fire. Some officers are starting to embrace drug legalization too. This apparent upsurge in libertarian views among cops is almost enough to make me consider becoming a libertarian again. Cops adopt these stances because they think it makes their lives easier and safer. A stressed fearful cop is like a cornered animal: far more likely to lash out. So, more relaxed police = less police violence, better relations between the police and the citizenry.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  I really wonder if this isn't a case of people in different places being really different. For instance, people here in the US say particular generalizations about "the Europeans" all the time, but there's a world of difference between the cultures of Spain, England, Sweden, Latvia, Greece, and Moldova (and Russia, which is part of Europe geographically). So when you say some police chiefs like armed citizens, I really wonder where those chiefs are. I'm willing to bet good money the chiefs of NYPD, Chicago PD, LAPD, etc. are not among those chiefs. However, I can certainly see some police chief in some pop. 30k city being like that; I can also see the police in a random small city like that not having any real problems with police misbehavior; we're likely judging ALL police nationwide for actions of a lot of police who seem to mostly be in cities. Are the cops in rural North Dakota known by the people there to shoot unarmed people or beat people or steal from them? Note also that I'm not claiming that it's only a small number of police that are bad cops; I think it varies by jurisdiction, and I think they stick up for each other and that a few obviously bad ones in a department probably indicate the entire department is bad (much like the old saying, "one bad apple spoils the entire bunch"). But not all police departments are the same, and again it seems we usually hear about problems in cities.
  - bitwize 11y ago
    One of the armed-citizen supporters is the chief of the Detroit PD. Another is a former Cincinnati chief. I dunno, make up your own mind. And I was certainly not blaming all cops for police violence committed in the inner cities. The evidence we have to date suggests a pattern consistent with my statements that stressed out police officers who expect shit to go down at any minute are more likely to react with excessive violence. That's far more likely to be the situation in a major city. Police in rural and low-density areas are less likely to react this way.
ericcumbee 11y ago
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government" I would say based on the declaration of independence, if it comes to that the answer is yes.
baddox 11y ago
It's pretty clear how a heavily armed citizenry would disincentivize cops from this sort of thing. It's because the cops would be afraid that if they rob someone they will be met with a violent response, as they well should. As for leading to anarchy (let's save discussing whether that would be a good thing for another time) or civil war, I don't see why it would.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  No, its pretty clear that a heavily-armed citizenry would not disincentivize this, since the portion of the citizenry targetted by the powers at issue is alreadY heavily armed compared to the citizenry at large. > It's because the cops would be afraid that if they rob someone they will be met with a violent response, as they well should. The cops already are afraid that if they exercise seizure or arrest powers they will be met with a violent response, and conduct such operations based on the assumption of a violent response (often with tragic results.) This manifestly does not prevent them from executing these powers.
balls187 11y ago
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_National_Wildlife_Refuge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...

littletimmy 11y ago

How will it lead to total civil war? All it will lead to is the police stops taking people's property without a court order or they risk getting shot.

timonovici 11y ago
That's a rather naive way of looking at the outcome. For one, do you really think a someone with the training, experience, and exposure violence of a cop could be outmatched by you? Second, the statement above didn't say much about requiring a warrant to take people's property - how do you get to USA v2, where that law is in place? Do you shoot enough cops, so they would change the law? What kind of wild-west mentality dwells around there, anyway? How about writing a petition? How about sending (e)mails to your congressmen, or whatever people with that kind of authority you have in US?
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  >For one, do you really think a someone with the training, experience, and exposure violence of a cop could be outmatched by you? Sure, why not? Most cops don't train that much with their weapons, and there's a bunch of crazy rednecks out there who train constantly with various firearms. I'll put my money on the gun nuts against the cops. Check out some YouTube videos by guys at pistol ranges. Also, cops only train at standard ranges, where you stand still and shoot at a non-moving target, and don't generally do combat training. Face it, cops aren't soldiers; they're just thugs with guns, and most are about as skilled with guns as your average ghetto thug.
  - timonovici 11y ago
    I'm a pretty fit guy, but I'm sure the recoil of a gun could break my wrist (well, maybe a desert eagle, I was pretty good with a kalshnikov on my military trainig). I spend more time typing on a keyboard than on a shooting range (which is kind of expected, i'm a programmer). I doubt you can apply such logic as a large scale solution. Do we begin introducing shooting classes in high school, to protect all our citizens? As for your bet - the paradigm would shift from bullying all people to bullying frail people and avoid rednecks, as far as the violent cops go. This would hardly solve the problem.
    - Grishnakh 11y ago
      Break your wrist? WTF are you talking about? Have you ever even shot a pistol? It isn't like shooting a 12-gauge shotgun. Women with small hands shoot pistols all the time. Most cops only train with their pistols once or twice a year.
      - timonovici 11y ago
        I've only shot a small caliber pistol. Leaving poetic derailments aside, my point is - A: the solution doesn't scale B: it will lead to further discrimination, only aggravating the problem

thescriptkiddie 11y ago

The police are breaking the law.

finid 11y ago
> The police are breaking the law. No, they're not breaking the law. They're just taking advantage of laws your elected officials wrote. So if you want to stop the cops from stealing from you, get your elected official to change the law, or threaten to _vote_ him/her out of office. That's how it's supposed to be, but citizens keep voting the same politicians into office that vote against their interests.
- Nutmog 11y ago
  Absolutely. I live in an authoritarian country and people would love to be able to vote politicians out. Americans really can but they just complain then vote for the same two parties every time. Clinton caused some of these tough on crime and drugs laws. So if you voted for his party (Obama), then you voted for this.
  - such_a_casual 11y ago
    According to Howard Zinn in "A People's History of the United States", the political party and electoral system was created as a facade to placate the poor from revolting against the wealthy. It worries me how much of this may still be true today: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
    - finid 11y ago
      The real problem, is that shepherds (politicians) know how to play the game, while the sheep (citizens) are too stupid to realize that they're being played. All the politicians do is stir up emotional issues like "they're trying to take away your guns", or abortion, to distract the sheep. It works all the time.

such_a_casual 11y ago

>Won't that lead to anarchy or civil war, eventually? Yes, hopefully (though hopefully not at the scale you may be imagining). Cops have turned into thugs in this country and something needs to be done about it. Maybe legalizing drugs would fix everything. I don't know. But cops in this country aren't even accountable for the people that they kill. There are no logs on how many murders are carried out by police. Yes, they can take our property, including cash, for no reason (something like 90% of dollar bills test positive for traces of cocaine). And in this case all the officers had to do was say they smelled weed. I have been a victim of this "smell like weed" abuse myself, in which everyone in my vehicle was pulled out and searched. My vehicle was then searched without my permission. They found nothing and gave me a speeding ticket for going 5 miles over the speed limit. But seizing our property means nothing when they can take our lives without the public knowing about it.

sb057 11y ago

>Maybe...consider changing the law, eh? That's not very helpful if the people enforcing (and writing) the law are the ones who are breaking it. >Won't that lead to civil war, eventually? That's the idea! Or hopefully not even that, since many servicemen will revolt as well.

ryanlol 11y ago

One could theoretically perform a citizens arrest? Although, non-lethal force would be preferable here.

samstave 11y ago

How would a heavily armed citizenry help solve the problem? Are you going to put a hole in the head of the carjacker who takes cash out of your care? Wont that lead to less theft and carjacking eventually? Maybe considering enforcing the legal right to do so, eh?

d_t_w 11y ago

Being heavily armed (and also being white) alters how the police treat you, the Oregon stand-off demonstrates as much. There would likely also be a presumption, as a heavily armed white person, that you're extremely confident in your ability to recite the constitution, quite possibly spoiling for a fight to defend particular rights that you see enshrined in the constitution, that you will not submit to a warrantless search, and are even less likely to allow the police to steal your money. You don't need to put holes in the police officers, they would profile you from a mile off and assume you're a red-neck nutbag who is potentially going to put holes in them, move along citizen there's nothing to see here.

gozur88 11y ago
The Oregon stand-off just demonstrates that if you "occupy" buildings out in the middle of nowhere in the winter off-season the cops are going to ignore you and see if the cold convinces you to leave.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  Winter is the excuse, not the cause. The situation in Oregon is larger than just this single incident. I recommend reading the report[1] put together by the SPLC on the previous incidents. Page 9 of the report has photos of these militia scofflaws pointing rifles at federal and local law enforcement[2]. That show of force did get law enforcement to back off at the time. As for why the people involved still haven't been charged with - at a minimum - assault with a deadly weapon is another matter entirely that really needs to be remedied before those militia nutjobs escalate their tactics into a a reenactment of the Whiskey Rebellion.. When you strip away the usual political rhetoric an other distractions, the primary reason the Oregon stand-off didn't turn into a (possibly Waco-style) raid immediately is because the militia members are both white and conservative. We saw what happened to unarmed non-conservatives when the police started using CS gas on various Occupy Wall Street groups (e.g. the battles in Oakland). If the militia members were black or Muslim, the media would be calling them "terrorists" and the swat teams would have gone in shooting within the first day or two. [1] https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_files/downloads/publication/war_in_the_west_report.pdf https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_file... [2] http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2014/04/RTR3L0EB/lead_large.jpg http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2014/04/RTR3L...

bitwize 11y ago

A growing number of police chiefs are starting to like armed citizens. Because if there's an active shooter like Colorado, San Bernardino, or Sandy Hook, armed citizens mean the guy is more likely to get popped before the police get in the line of fire. Some officers are starting to embrace drug legalization too. This apparent upsurge in libertarian views among cops is almost enough to make me consider becoming a libertarian again. Cops adopt these stances because they think it makes their lives easier and safer. A stressed fearful cop is like a cornered animal: far more likely to lash out. So, more relaxed police = less police violence, better relations between the police and the citizenry.

Grishnakh 11y ago
I really wonder if this isn't a case of people in different places being really different. For instance, people here in the US say particular generalizations about "the Europeans" all the time, but there's a world of difference between the cultures of Spain, England, Sweden, Latvia, Greece, and Moldova (and Russia, which is part of Europe geographically). So when you say some police chiefs like armed citizens, I really wonder where those chiefs are. I'm willing to bet good money the chiefs of NYPD, Chicago PD, LAPD, etc. are not among those chiefs. However, I can certainly see some police chief in some pop. 30k city being like that; I can also see the police in a random small city like that not having any real problems with police misbehavior; we're likely judging ALL police nationwide for actions of a lot of police who seem to mostly be in cities. Are the cops in rural North Dakota known by the people there to shoot unarmed people or beat people or steal from them? Note also that I'm not claiming that it's only a small number of police that are bad cops; I think it varies by jurisdiction, and I think they stick up for each other and that a few obviously bad ones in a department probably indicate the entire department is bad (much like the old saying, "one bad apple spoils the entire bunch"). But not all police departments are the same, and again it seems we usually hear about problems in cities.
- bitwize 11y ago
  One of the armed-citizen supporters is the chief of the Detroit PD. Another is a former Cincinnati chief. I dunno, make up your own mind. And I was certainly not blaming all cops for police violence committed in the inner cities. The evidence we have to date suggests a pattern consistent with my statements that stressed out police officers who expect shit to go down at any minute are more likely to react with excessive violence. That's far more likely to be the situation in a major city. Police in rural and low-density areas are less likely to react this way.

ericcumbee 11y ago

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government" I would say based on the declaration of independence, if it comes to that the answer is yes.

baddox 11y ago

It's pretty clear how a heavily armed citizenry would disincentivize cops from this sort of thing. It's because the cops would be afraid that if they rob someone they will be met with a violent response, as they well should. As for leading to anarchy (let's save discussing whether that would be a good thing for another time) or civil war, I don't see why it would.

dragonwriter 11y ago
No, its pretty clear that a heavily-armed citizenry would not disincentivize this, since the portion of the citizenry targetted by the powers at issue is alreadY heavily armed compared to the citizenry at large. > It's because the cops would be afraid that if they rob someone they will be met with a violent response, as they well should. The cops already are afraid that if they exercise seizure or arrest powers they will be met with a violent response, and conduct such operations based on the assumption of a violent response (often with tragic results.) This manifestly does not prevent them from executing these powers.

balls187 11y ago

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_National_Wildlife_Refuge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...