Quote Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit View Post
These incidents will continue to occur until the cops get incentives not to engage in such activities. If they knew they'd get shot at while pulling this unconstitutional, unlawful crap, they'd be much more likely to just walk up and talk to people instead of doing this or no-knock raids. Sadly, innocent people would die. But innocent people are dying right now from extreme police tactics with no punishment for the cops from the law - just reviews that always clear them of wrongdoing.
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Heck, some police departments have taken concealed pistol licenses as an excuse to send SWAT teams bursting into people's homes in the middle of the night for non-violent crimes. That itself defies reality - you have someone (the person with the CPL) who submitted to background checks and fingerprinting voluntarily at a police station and so the cops think the best way to arrest him is not just to send some cops knocking on his door in the day but to bust in at night. There would be so much less violence if the cops in such situations would not treat everything as a shoot out at the OK Corral. But instead the cops are looking for ways to escalate the situation. They need to learn two can play that game.
You argue very effectively against yourself.

If the citizen escalates by becoming armed, the police will assume the worse and come overwhelmingly armed - just as you write in the second paragraph. In an extreme example, knowing that those slightly potty fellows in the Waco compound were armed did not encourage the police to knock politely and engage in civil discussion. They brought tanks.

The issue, as in many countries, is unaccountable police forces encouraged by politicians to over-ride human rights for the "greater good". By removing rights first from the despised "other" - unopposed by the majority who didn't care since it didn't affect them - they now feel empowered to impose actions which most assuredly do affect the "ordinary" citizen - and they have no power to change things. "I told you so" tends to be uttered wearily by those who long since warned of this ancient pattern.

The police are servants of the law and the people. The people must be sovereign and their rights upheld. It is government's role to hold public servants to account and to preserve the rights of Man at all costs. That's rights for all.