Cops Are Killed By Stupid Legislators Who Pass Stupid Laws
Ask Cliven Bundy of rural Nevada, who saw an army of armed...
Avatar of Fred Weinberg Fred Weinberg — January 2, 2015
A police officer, working on a task force, gets into a take-down scuffle with a guy who is much bigger than he and refuses to be arrested. The officer brings him to the ground using a hold taught at the police academy, and the guy is arrested. The guy says he can’t breathe and is transported to the hospital. He dies in the ambulance of a massive heart attack an hour after the take-down.
Some weeks later, two police officers are gunned down with no warning in their squad car by a gunman who yells something about the incident above and then kills himself.
Who is at fault?
My take is that Congress and all 50 state legislatures are at fault, and ultimately those of us who elected them are at fault.
Congress has created a Federal Code so big that nobody could actually read the whole code in their current lifetime. It makes virtually every citizen of the United States a felon virtually every day. And the states are not far behind.
It falls to Federal and local police forces to enforce all those laws–and their masters in the executive branch to prioritize that enforcement.
Did I mention that the guy who died of the heart attack was arrested by a task force of five cops because he was selling loose cigarettes on Staten Island in New York City–and that task force had been directed to do so because the city was “losing” tax revenue?
Now I should also mention that this guy was no angel. He had a rap sheet as long as your arm.
But he was selling loose cigarettes on Staten Island. That was his “crime” that merited a five cop task force taking him down in the first place.
It happens a citizen used his cell phone to make a video of the take-down; it went viral and became a racial issue.
It’s not a racial issue.
It’s an issue of police enforcing a “law” that is virtually unenforceable and a citizen dying in the process.
The cops were doing what they were told to do by their executive branch masters who, in turn, were enforcing a “law” that was made by the legislature—probably at the request of the executive—and someone died as a result.
The fault lies with the orders to enforce a bogus “law” and the people who ultimately issued those orders who, at the end of the day, are the morons who passed the law–and we the people who elected them in the first place.
We have full time legislatures that are scored by the number of laws they pass. And they don’t actually pass many of those laws themselves. Many times, they delegate the making of those laws to jackasses buried in the bureaucracy. Sometimes those jackasses aren’t even employees of the state. (In Nevada for example, the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association can make additions to the Nevada Administrative Code that have the effect of law.)
And, when there is a flashpoint, it becomes us versus them.
You don’t have to be black to experience that.
◾From 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled-from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people.
◾Today, the US is 5% of the World population and has 25% of world prisoners.
◾Combining the number of people in prison and jail with those under parole or probation supervision, 1 in every 31 adults, or 3.2 percent of the population, is under some form of correctional control.
That’s not my research. That’s from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
But, as I said before, you do not have to be black to experience that.
Ask Cliven Bundy of rural Nevada, who saw an army of armed Feds show up to carry out a Bureau of Land Management fiat that his cattle be removed. (Thwarted by armed Americans, the Feds caved.)
Ask the Gibson Guitar Company, which was raided by an armed posse of Feds (Fish and Wildlife Service—you can’t make this stuff up) over the wood they imported to make guitars.
Why do our legislatures start with the assumption that we’re all a bunch of animals that need to be imprisoned at a rate higher than any other nation? We send more people per capita to the big house than any other nation on the face of the earth. Russia is second. China (which we used to call Red China) is 18th on the list, right in front of Canada. (North Korea is not on the list because the whole country is a prison.)
Here’s an idea.
Why not, in the next session of every legislature, we concentrate on REMOVING laws?
Why can’t we concentrate on bringing our incarceration rate down to, say, those of, say, Israel, which is fourth on the list and has a rate less than half of ours.
And you can start by removing the government as a collection agency.
Go on down to most county lockups, and you will see that a good chunk of the population there relates to a lack of money. They didn’t pay fines, fees, bail, etc.
Yet we pay for their upkeep.
You wonder why it is suddenly OK to take potshots at cops?
It’s not. But we’re busy in legislationland passing more laws and stacking the deck against cops. Then we wonder why things blow up.
Think about that next time somebody runs for Congress or the State Legislature on a “law and order” platform.
Read more at
http://www.westernjournalism.com/cops-killed-stupid-legislators-pass-stupid-laws/#8MwlPUwSyaYCzymZ.99
