If someone thinks that's a healthy part of a democracy, I'd be real curious about your reasoning.
Knowing what happened, I think it's clearly better for all of us that the park was held by hippies with spray cans.
>Police who refuse to identify themselves and carry no markings used against an administration's political opponents
This is such a mentally lazy platitude. All arming the population has done is incentivize them to use their arms against their fellow countrymen.
When bandits become indistinguishable from cops, cops become indistinguishable from bandits.
of course it does. bombs or tanks dont help you hold a city - it is singly people with firearms to kill the other people with firearms.
its a different story if youre talking total war, but theres basically no scenario where american military would decimate american cities.
> This is such a mentally lazy platitude
interesting opinion considering all you have to do is look at the last two decades of failed intervention in the middle east.
EDIT: additionally, many places in the middle east were occupied against their will by the terrorist forces we were there to fight. thats not the same as a citizen militia resisting occupation
So he obviously thinks the guns were the differentiator and not the privilege enjoyed by being a bunch of old white men with the support of the authorities.
A number of cops were shot at during these recent protest. Our mayor was discussing this very fact this morning. Turn out, all that body armor is highly effective at stopping small arms fire. (There was no elaboration on who did the shooting though, so I guess it could have been friendly fire)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It doesn't need to. Just as it doesn't need to have a provision for yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. But such actions will have consequences.
Congress has the authority "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;". Assembling for the purpose of violence is by definition an insurrection. So if the First Amendment said nothing of peaceably assembling, we can assume it is meant so, otherwise the Constitution would say nothing of insurrections.
The point to needing to identify police is that without that rule and the accountability that comes with it the "police" become just another gang on the streets. None of that is relevant to investigatory law enforcement.
Obviously both kinds of anonymity can be abused, but only one has an easy and obvious solution.
Seriously: no one sane thinks that riot cops should be operating in street clothes and refusing to identify themselves. This whole subthread is a ridiculous digression.
The only problem is that international law doesn't govern how a country conducts activities on their own people. But it reflects a widespread consensus nonetheless.
Note: I'm not accusing the police of terrorism -- that would be pretty massively inflammatory and not my intent -- but simply giving examples to support a widespread discomfort with using non-uniformed forces.
Image: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIS4C7ym5YM
If there is to be an alternative to the distant and aloof police state, it will have to be in the form of attentive and caring locals possessing sufficient enforcement power. Their look may vary based on local demographics, but I think that's okay as long as they are accountable to their neighbors.
Your interpretation is not compelling (as well as not relevant, due to the presence of the term).
When there is a question, entertained by a court and an emduring legal precedent, ipso facto there was a legal question. An assumption about what needs to be enumerated to exist, is the doctrine of strict constructionism.
When the NRA and their allies advocate for an armed citizenry, they emphatically don’t mean “our political enemies”
This is not problematic on the face of it -- police are expected to use non-lethal tactics whenever possible, and the laws of war are hugely biased towards killing rather injuring because overwhelming your opponent with casualties is considered inhumane in war.
Do you really think there aren't an infinite number of heavily armed spooks ready to materialize from the ground under Washington, D.C. on a moment's notice? Do you really the think the agencies they work for all officially exist? Do you think they haven't been there since at least Reagan?
There were fires near the White House. The leviathan is starting to feel a little bit threatened. Now if these guys are actually mixing it up with protestors I will be deeply worried. But while they are just a small presence on the sidelines, standing at at attention in their G-Man sunglasses and coiled earpieces, I will be reassured that the deep state functions exactly as I expect it to.
Any law abiding citizen should have whatever arms they want. I don’t care what their politics is.
Hollywood has no need to make shit up.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nra-california-open-carry-...
Claiming that something that happened in 1967 is the current position of an organization on record opposing that sort of thing for at least the last 40 years that I'm aware of is also pretty silly.
Claiming that a political organization that is mostly concerned with how pretty Wayne's suits are and how nice his mistress' apartment in Fairfax is reflects modern gun owners' opinions is again -- pretty silly.
The NRA is a Fudd gunner's organization, they're an anachronism of the past, they're being abandoned in droves by anybody born since the 1960s, and quite frankly I don't give a shit what they think about anything -- and I especially don't care what they may have thought in 1967.
