No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#3)
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 16 years ago, in 2008, on the World Wide Web.
Posturing macho warrior
cops in Chicago, Miami, Palm Beach County, Montana, and Johnson City, Tennessee are all now starting to carry AR-15 or M4 assault rifles with them on ordinary street patrols, for all those tactical
situations that they expect to find themselves in.
Throughout the 1990s, Washington, D.C. had more of its residents killed by police officers than any other city in the United States. Now the D.C. metropolitan police department has ordered 500 AR-15 assault rifles, which they will begin issuing to inner-city patrol cops to start carrying on the streets this summer. I guess so they can more effectively shoot 14 year old black bike-thieving suspects in the back of the head.
Do you feel safer now?
(Via Manuel Lora 2008-05-10.)
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Scary shit. I can’t ever seem to understand why Democrats support this sort of stuff. They’re better than Republicans in virtually every other aspect…
nitpick: What the guy is holding is a G36K, not any type of AR.
Belinsky, Please… the Democrats want to disarm all US citizens so we are easily managed and/or killed. Wake up, The Dems are of the same evil being. It’s only an illusion that they are different so that the people are appeased by believeing they actually have a real choice.
@ Belinsky:
IT’S BECAUSE THEY SHARE A SINGLE AGENDA. THEY’VE GONE HYBRID.
IIDave,
Yeah; nitpick accepted. For what it’s worth, the pictured cop isn’t from the D.C. Metro Police, either; he’s from the U.S. Capitol Police, who have been carrying assault rifles on patrol for years now. Metro Police are a different agency, with jurisdiction outside the Capitol area, and have fairly standard blue uniforms, rather than those weird neon blue jackets. But since the Metro Police don’t have their AR-15s yet, this was about as close as I could get for a picture.
That’s a very simplistic picture you’ve painted, Dawn and Mikester. How can you look at someone like Dennis Kucinich, who has devoted his life to serving the public interest but is also in favor of strict gun control, going bankrupt at one point because of his service, and say that he is part of some giant conspiracy? I agree that for the most part, there is little difference between the Democrats and Republicans, but you really have very little evidence for the conspiracy theories. “the Democrats want to disarm all US citizens so we are easily managed and/or killed.” Seriously? What evidence do you have for this claim? Before I became a libertarian socialist, I interned for a Democratic politician, and I can tell you with confidence that they are not pure evil. Immeasurably corrupted by the system? Yes. But do they actually have malevolent intentions? No, no way. They care about their careers often more than they do about their constituents, but they do not actually harbor ill will toward their constituents.
Belinsky,
Well, O.K. Let’s look at Dennis Kucinich.
There’s a lot that I disagree with Kucinich about. But I agree with you that, if the direction of the Democratic Party reflected the influence and actions of someone like Kucinich much more than the influence and actions of doughface opportunists like, say, Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, then we would be much better off, politically speaking, than we are now.
But it doesn’t. Kucinich, even though he’s an elected (and repeatedly re-elected) Democratic office-holder, is isolated within his party, with no power and no real influence over any large or small question of message or policy. He cannot even attract a significant number of votes from his natural base, so-called Democrats, in the primaries during his various failed candidacies for President. Typical Democratic politicians don’t believe in anything like what he believes, and even if they did, they wouldn’t act on it, because the Democratic is against almost everything that Kucinich is for, and exercises a tremendous amount of power to buy out, intimidate or otherwise direct most Leftist Democrats into a policy in terms of their real-life actions. Kucinich has shown even less of an ability to make any mark on Democratic Party politics than Ron Paul, equally isolated and almost as powerless, has shown in Republican Party politics.
If you want to paint an accurate picture of the Democrats and their politics, you would be better served by paying the most attention to typical Democrats and to the and other Party power-brokers, than to exceptional, isolated, and ultimately inconsequential outliers like Kucinich.
Well, most elected Democrats (including so-called like Kucinich) favor gun control laws as strong, or (often) even stronger than those that exist today. But defending or strengthening gun control laws just means disarming U.S. citizens (or, more precisely, U.S. citizens not in the pay of the military or government enforcement agencies) so that they are easily managed by the government. (If the purpose of gun control is not to disarm people, then what in the world is it?)
You might object, But if that’s your line of argument, I think that it rests on a distinction without a difference. As long as ordinary citizens are disarmed by law and the government holds a coercive monopoly on providing services, anything done in the name of will amount to making government enforcement agencies more powerful and effective, which is to say, making ordinary citizens more easily managed by the government.
I’m sure that they don’t, but I’m much less interested in a politician’s personal thoughts, feelings, and intentions than I am in the effects of their public actions. After all, I’m not their priest or their shrink; but, whatever the state of their soul, I do have to live with the messes that they make.