Posts Tagged → police
US Supreme Court decides straight forward case with weird outcomes
Fernandez v. California was decided yesterday by the US Supreme Court. Everything about it is just…weird.
In a holding that is enraging advocates of private property rights, limited government, and citizen privacy, the Court’s conservatives were joined by two liberals to allow the police to enter a private home without a warrant, even if one resident says they cannot enter, because another resident said they could enter.
In other words, if the police get a resident of a home to grant permission to enter that home for the purpose of searching for something illegal, which the police now do not have to specify in writing, the police may enter. What they are looking for could be unknown, or undocumented. Maybe they are on a fishing expedition, just looking for anything they could use against the person who said they did not want the police to enter. It seems like planting evidence would be a lot easier, now. In any event, your home is no longer your castle, if a pissed off teenager inside decides to take out their misplaced teenage aggression against their loving parents.
Seems like a recipe for disaster.
Justice Ginsburg wrote a dissent, noting the obvious erosion in Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches and seizures that result from holdings like this. Ginsburg is the court’s most liberal member, an extremist who has spoken out against the US Constitution she is sworn to uphold, and an authoritarian statist who otherwise just loves, loves, loves state power over citizens.
And here’s the really weird stuff: The facts involve “illegal guns,” which in California is anything down to and including a Daisy BB gun, and documented domestic violence.
The person blocking the police from entering the home to search it was the Mr. Wife-Beating Fernandez, a scumbag who held his cringing wife prisoner under brutal circumstances. After he was momentarily out of the picture and not a direct threat, she allowed the police to search the house, where they found the illegal guns (let’s be clear – California is on the path to making all gun ownership illegal, except by the police, which is otherwise known as a police state, a separate topic).
Thus did Mr. Macho Wife Beater get into even more and more serious trouble with the legal system, and thus did he subsequently attempt to suppress the evidence the police found, which really put him away behind bars for a while.
Ginsburg and other liberals typically trumpet the rights of domestic abuse victims, but here they are clearly ranking them beneath the rights of the gun-owning wife beater. Weird.
Conservatives like Alito typically champion the rights of gun owners and are split 50/50 on privacy rights. But here they are so obviously opening up the flood gates of potential abuse by police. No warrant? No documentation for probable cause? Husbands and wives typically cannot testify against each other, but here they are now allowed to defy one another in the family ‘castle’ so the state apparatus may enter at will.
Seems like a pretty huge detonation of American citizens’ privacy rights. Weird.
Westgate Mall, Kenya….a “gun free zone”
Islamic activists attacked the Westgate Mall this week, challenging the oddly dressed and poorly equipped Kenyan police and military to take time off from beating civilians and assert armed force against armed forces.
By all accounts the attack and counter attack were a horrible mess. The Muslims racked up a dandy accounting, murdering about 65 women, children, and old men in cold blood, often challenging their victims to recite parts of the Koran to prove that they were Muslims, and thereby deserving of life.
One thing is for sure, those “gun free zones” and all the disarmed gentle people in them seem to attract a lot of crazies with guns. Westgate is the most recent, but malls, movie theatres, and schools are all similar in their distaste for legally armed civilians. Their taste for illegally armed lunatics is proving to be quite high.
Hopefully at some point, this “If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist” attitude driving the gun-free zone policy will evolve into some expression of self-preservation, which means having the ability to meet force with force.
Certain people have hero complexes. Among them are police officers who want to disarm civilians and maintain militarily armed “rapid response” teams. Problem is, when seconds count, these rapid response guys are at best minutes away. Consider also that countries where only the police have effective guns are called police states.
Want to see my rapid response team? It’s right here. I’m looking at it. It’s my trigger finger, and I would stake my life on it, and yours, long before I’d expect the cops to show up after the shooting started.
You’ve got your own rapid response team, too. Start exercising it, it might come in handy. And if it does, you can enjoy being a hero while the hero-wannabes are just starting to show up.
“Obama Cop” Tom Hyers Has Some Explaining to Do
Nick-named the “Obama Cop” because of his recent role in promoting gun control with US VP Joe Biden, York County, Springettsbury Township police chief Tom Hyers now has some big-time explaining to do.
I met Chief Hyers when we debated gun control at the WITF studio last month. Hyers was quick to promote gun control, quick to dismiss armed citizens and teachers, and quick to draw imaginary images of heroic rapid response police who bust down doors and shoot bad guys.
Strangely, Chief Hyers called my observation that, when seconds count the police are only minutes away, a “smoke screen.” It’s no smoke screen; it is a fact that the laws of physics cannot overcome. After our debate, we spent some time off camera chatting, getting to know one another, and exchanging views on gun control and culture.
Now, Chief Hyers has police officers on his force accused of using wildly excessive force. One of the officers is accused in at least two different incidents. The incidents are all on camera, and they explicitly show men in uniform out of control, sadistically hurting the defenseless citizens they are sworn to protect.
My own takeaway from this is that policemen like Hyers are super into their jobs, and we both support them and cast a wary eye. On the one hand, we admire men and women who put their lives on the line to bring order to our society, who confront dangerous humans and risk their health to do a job. On the other hand, Hyers believes too much in the power of police. He practically worships it, to the point of dismissing the effectiveness of armed citizens, a silly thing to do. When I mentioned during our debate that concealed carry holders are extremely safe and have been observed to have a lower accident rate than uniformed police, Hyers bristled and demanded to know where such ‘outrageous claims’ came from.
No wonder Chief Hyers loves gun control so much. He also knowingly employs cops who beat the heck out of innocent citizens and face no internal corrective action. Police deserve our respect, and their power deserves watchfulness. Chief Hyers is very much the face of gun control. He is a man to watch, all right…watch out, America!
Once Every Blue Moon I Agree With the ACLU
Blurring the lines between policing and soldiering is an increasing problem best witnessed by YouTube videos showing police officers needlessly Tasering and beating innocent civilians. Now the ACLU is beginning to dig into the transmittal of huge amounts of military hardware from the Department of Homeland Security, of all places, to local police departments around the nation.
Read more here: http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/a-c-l-u-has-concerns-over-military-weapons-used-by-local-police/
MY Question is this: Why and how is the US Dept. of Homeland Security dealing in military weapons and gear? America has always maintained a strong wall between the military and the police. That is clearly being dissolved. Is the DHS becoming the Big Government Big Brother we worry about? Liberty, folks, America is all about individual liberty, and these sorts of policies corrode, erode, and undermine individual liberty one small step at a time. Push back. Elect citizens to office who disagree with these sorts of policies and who will work hard to eliminate them and make them illegal.