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