When to shoot a policeman
<p>A policeman was<br />
<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2002/11/26/state1239EST0059.DTL">premeditatedly shot dead</a> today.</p>
<p>Now, I don&#8217;t regard shooting a policeman as the worst possible<br />
crime &mdash; indeed, I can easily imagine circumstances under which I<br />
would do it myself. If he were committing illegal violence &mdash; or<br />
even officially legal violence during the enforcement of an unjust<br />
law.  Supposing a policeman were criminally threatening someone&#8217;s<br />
life, say.  Or suppose that he had been ordered under an act of<br />
government to round up all the Jews in the neighborhood, or confiscate<br />
all the pornography or computers or guns.  Under those circumstances,<br />
it would be not merely my right but my <em>duty</em> to shoot the<br />
policeman.</p>
<p>But <em>this</em> policeman was harming nobody.  He was shot down in<br />
cold blood as he was refueling his cruiser. His murderer subsequently<br />
announced the act on a public website.</p>
<p>The murderer said he was &#8220;protesting police-state tactics&#8221;.  If<br />
that were his goal, however, then the correct and appropriate<br />
expression of it would have been to kill a BATF thug in the process of<br />
invading his home, or an airport security screener, or some other<br />
person who was actively and at the time of the protest implementing<br />
police-state tactics.</p>
<p>Killings of policemen in those circumstances are a defensible<br />
social good, <i>pour encourager les autres</i>. It is right and proper<br />
that the police and military should fear for their lives when they<br />
trespass on the liberty of honest citizens; that is part of the<br />
balance of power that maintains a free society, and the very reason<br />
our Constitution has a Second Amendment.</p>
<p>But this policeman was refueling his car.  Nothing in the<br />
shooter&#8217;s justification carried any suggestion that the shooter&#8217;s<br />
civil rights had ever been violated by the victim, or that the<br />
murderer had standing to act for any other individual person whose<br />
rights had been violated by the victim.  This killing was not<br />
self-defense.</p>
<p>There are circumstances under which general warfare against the<br />
police would be justified.  In his indymedia post <a href="http://www.sf.indymedia.org/print.php?id=1545325">The<br />
Declaration of a Renewed American Independence</a> the shooter utters<br />
a scathing, and (it must be said) largely justified indictment of<br />
police abuses.  If the political system had broken down sufficiently<br />
that there were no reasonable hope of rectifying those abuses, then I<br />
would be among the first to cry havoc.</p>
<p>Under those circumstances, it would be my duty as a free human<br />
being under the U.S. Constitution not merely to shoot individual<br />
policemen, but to make revolutionary war on the police.  As Abraham Lincoln<br />
said, <em>&#8220;This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people<br />
who inhabit it.  Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing<br />
government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending<br />
it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow<br />
it.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>But the United States of America has not yet reached the point at<br />
which the political mechanisms for the defense of freedom have broken<br />
down.  This judgment is not a matter of theory but one of practice.<br />
There are not yet police at our door with legal orders to round up the<br />
Jews, or confiscate pornography or computers or guns.</p>
<p>Civil society has not yet been fatally vitiated by tyranny. Under<br />
these circumstances, the only possible reaction is to condemn.  This<br />
was a crime.  This was murder.  And I would cheerfully shoot not the<br />
policeman but the <em>murderer</em> dead. (There would be no question<br />
of guilt or due process, since the murderer publicly boasted of his<br />
crime.)</p>
<p>But that <em>this</em> shooter was wrong does not mean that<br />
everyone who shoots a policeman in the future will also be wrong.  A<br />
single Andrew McCrae, at this time, is a criminal and should be<br />
condemned as a criminal.  But his case against the police and the<br />
system behind them is not without merit.  Therefore let him be a<br />
warning as well.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=85135479">Blogspot comments</a></p>
