Your writing is terrible. You frequently misuse words and misplace punctuation. It’s as if you think a thesaurus can cover up the fact that you are an idiot. I take comfort in seeing that most of the intelligent comments in response to yours are well-written. For your sake, I hope that “edit device” becomes available soon, lest your obviously weak grasp on grammar, syntax and vocabulary weaken your future arguments.

Where’s the amdt for “street drugs” like there was for alcohol? If it’s such a wonderful cause then the amdt would pass in a heartbeat.

If the drug dealer in question never dealt drugs or if his wife cared more about her kids health and safety than the Benjamins, she’d not be in the predicament she was in either. In a world where drugs are illegal and those laws are enforced, anyone breaking them risks this outcome for themselves, their family members, and any law enforcement on the other side. You can’t just put all the blame on the laws and their enforcers.

Finally, google “felony stop officer shot” or “officer shot traffic stop” or “suspect shot arrested parking lot” and notice how many hundreds of thousands of stories come up. It’s not like this fanciful alternative of is a real one, and this sets aside the risk to convictions and evidence if it were honestly pursued.

-You have zero hard statistical evidence on the overall (mal) performance of SWAT teams in arrest mode;

-you don’t have the balls to admit that the wife’s gun (ownership), which your libertarian view nested, was ultimately used to kill the FBI agent.

And for the record, I do support DC/Heller. How ya’ like them apples.

But I’m not such a frickin’ ideologue that I would try to dodge the elephant in the living room.

If you want to try and make a (now clearly specious) case against SWAT teams and riot gear, and for dope legalization, you’d have more credibility if you’d readily address the DC/Heller consequences in this immediate matter.

Instead, we get the my-conservative-penis-is-more-conservative-than-yours polemic.

Yawn.

By avoiding or subtly deflecting the topic (and now-obvious downside) of the right to own guns, you make that downside and the weakness of your case all the more conspicuous, along with your anti-government, knee-jerk fundamentalism.

Would it be so much to ask that law enforcement make a documented showing that a particular individual is dangerous before sending in the SWAT team?

That, in essence, is what libertarians are asking for.

And resh, check out Radley Balko’s work for Cato on the subject. This is literally all there is because police departments don’t keep records on these sorts of things.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476

http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

Because no real conservative or libertarian has any problem with people having a gun for self-defense if they are not serving time in prison or demonstrably insane.

But nary a peep about the very thing that killed the agent-relaxed gun rights qua the DC Heller ruling that you libertarians thump your chest over.

Heller was irrelevant here. No one should be disarmed until they are arrested, prosecuted and convicted of a crime.

You got some splain’n to do, Lucy.

As do you, since you act like gun control would have played a key part in preventing this, a very liberal position. After your holier than thou claptrap above about living next to the ghetto, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Perhaps the most fundamental disagreement that we have here is that I don’t believe in saving people from themselves. Such is condescending, not kind.

Did anyone present any actual evidence, i.e., stats or studies-not these stories from grandmom’s local paper-that SWAT teams increase (v. decrease) violence?

If there’s such a rash of recklessness and superflous ruin from SWAT teams, it should be easy to prove, right? So let’s see the data.

I’m happy to stipulate that errors can be made, or that better arrest plans can be considered, if that’s the sum total of the melodramtic point.

As to Heller, Mike, the point is simply that not one of the libertarian posts supra made mention of the wife’s gun in the house and to it being dispositive of the FBI agent’s death. Why is that?

We heard eagerly about the SWAT teams, the raid upon the castle, due process and the silliness of the drug laws.

But nary a peep about the very thing that killed the agent-relaxed gun rights qua the DC Heller ruling that you libertarians thump your chest over.

You got some splain’n to do, Lucy.

I won’t disagree with you that SWAT units are more professional in many cases than regular cops, but there are two kinds of SWAT units today: full time and part time. Most are the latter, as they belong to smaller jurisdictions where there is literally no justification for a regular SWAT unit on the local police force. The town my mother lives in has 55,000 people at the peak of its population when college is in session, and they have a SWAT unit. We’re talking about a jurisdiction where there are maybe a half dozen homicides a year. I see no reason why Virginia should tolerate them having such a heavily armed police unit, when they have no case for it all, unlike say, Richmond, Fairfax County, Arlington County or Hampton Roads.

There needs to be very stringent legislation in place governing the regulation of which jurisdictions can have SWAT units. Those that don’t have a bona fide reason based on large scale violence and/or gang presence shouldn’t be allowed to arm their cops like a light infantry unit.

You will also find too that a lot of the places that “need” them have crime problems in no small part because they don’t allow people to exercise their second amendment rights. It should be offensive to any conservative or libertarian that a local government would simultaneously deny gun owner rights to its citizens, while arming its police like they’re preparing for full-blown urban warfare. A jurisdiction that does this has not made the case for why it needs the weapons at all, since it won’t even take the crime stopping measure of allowing its citizens to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

It seems elementary, but highly controversial among libertarians, that so long as a law exists, it should be enforced.

It seems elementary, but highly controversial among authoritarians and statists, that all government decisions are moral, and therefore, all laws should be enforced.

I take it, Mr. Roach, you would have supported the arrest and punishment of runaway slaves in the 19th century? You would have approved of punishing anyone teaching a slave to read?

Money.

Illegal drugs have the value they do to those who have them and those who want them ONLY because it is a black market. Take away the market, the value plummets with no change in the availability of the products. This will never happen because of one reason.

Money.

Without a drug war to fight there is no reason for the funding. Established law enforcement and incarceration industry will NEVER allow the reason for their immense budgets and increasingly invasive enforcement procedures to be taken away from them.

As for the users and addicts, they will never be any incentive towards treatment. There is NO MONEY to be made in helping people. To the State an addict is a liability, a convict is an asset.

The Drug War is a BUSINESS. The players of this game will never let anyone disturb their status quo. Criminals want their profits, Law Enforcement wants their funding. There’s no incentive to stop.

And so it will go on, and more people will die. More families will be shattered. There will be more violence in our streets, more people incarcerated and no end in sight.