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And Your Little Dog, Too (It’s time to control the government’s guns)
National Review ^ | 2-11-2013 | Deroy Murdock - Commentary

Posted on 02/11/2013 9:28:25 PM PST by smoothsailing

February 11, 2013

And Your Little Dog, Too

By Deroy Murdock

As Washington politicians aim to restrict the Second Amendment, they should look in the mirror. The time to control government’s guns is now. Overarmed federal officials increasingly employ military tactics as a first resort in routine law enforcement. From food-safety cases to mundane financial matters, battle-ready public employees are turning America into the United States of SWAT.

FBI agents and U.S. marshals understandably are well fortified, given their frequent run-ins with ruthless bad guys. However — as my old friend and fellow columnist Quin Hillyer notes — armed officers, if not Special Weapons and Tactics crews, populate these federal agencies: the National Park Service; the Postal Inspection Service; the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Labor, and Veterans Affairs; the Bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Even Small Business Administration and Railroad Retirement Board staffers pack heat!

These “ninja bureaucrats,” as Hillyer calls them, run rampant. They, and often their local-government counterparts, deploy weapons against harmless, frequently innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations.

• An FDA SWAT unit struck Lancaster, Pa.’s Rainbow Acres Farm in April 2010. From there, farmer Dan Allgyer illegally had shipped unpasteurized milk to his customers across state lines through something called a “cow-sharing agreement.” (Really.) Ignoring a woman’s right to choose raw milk, Washington launched an armed federal response against this Amish-run dairy. The company subsequently folded.

“He was not tricking people into buying it, he was not forcing people to purchase it, and there had been no complaints about his product,” stated then-Representative Ron Paul (R., Tex.). “These were completely voluntary transactions, but ones that our nanny-state federal government did not approve of, and so they shut down his business.”

U.S. marshals and other federal officers also have conducted similar actions against purveyors of unauthorized milk, cheese, and even elderberry juice.

• When financial questions arose regarding the Mountain Pure Water Company, Washington did not send a few staffers to inspect documents. Instead, last spring, some 50 armed Treasury agents breached Mountain Pure’s headquarters in Little Rock, Ark. They seized 82 boxes of records, herded employees into the cafeteria, snatched their cell phones, and refused to let them consult attorneys.

“We’re the federal government,” Mountain Pure’s comptroller, Jerry Miller, says one pistol-packing fed told him. “We can do what we want, when we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

• A U.S. Department of Education SWAT force burst into Kenneth Wright’s Stockton, Calif., home in June 2011. “I look out of my window, and I see 15 police officers,” Wright told KXTV. Wright said one officer forced him by the neck onto the front lawn. “He had his knee on my back, and I had no idea why they were there.” While officers searched his house, Wright said, “They put me in handcuffs in a hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” then ages 3, 7, and 11.

The feds sought Wright’s estranged wife, apparently for suspected financial-aid fraud. However, she had moved away a year earlier. Regardless, such a mobilization seems unnecessary to probe someone for possibly swindling scholarship money.

• In August 2011, armed federal Fish and Wildlife agents stormed into the Memphis and Nashville factories of Gibson Guitar, which helps Jackson Browne, B. B. King, and other legends sound amazing. What clear and present danger did Gibson pose? Rather than import finished guitar components, it purchased raw ebony and rosewood from India so that American workers — not Indians — could manufacture fingerboards and other electric-guitar parts. Proving that there no longer is a need to write fiction, Uncle Sam’s case against Gibson is called United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms.

• “SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, sent into bars and fraternities suspected of allowing underage drinking, and even [used] to enforce alcohol and occupational licensing regulations,” including armed incursions against several black barber shops in Orlando, Fla., according to the Huffington Post’s Radley Balko, who studiously chronicles this topic. He recalls a federal SWAT outfit that invaded an Atlanta DJ’s studio on suspicion of copyright infringement. When several Tibetan monks on a peace mission overstayed their visas, a federal SWAT unit cornered them. Texas SWAT officers targeted an Austin man accused of stealing koi from a fish pond. And a Virginia SWAT squad killed optometrist Sal Culosi while arresting him for sports gambling.

Balko also has reported on SWAT teams’ reprehensible habit of killing dogs:

• In 2008, gun-toting cops stormed the home of Berwyn Heights, Md.’s mayor, Cheye Calvo. They kicked down his door and handcuffed him (in his underwear) for two hours, along with his mother-in-law. Calvo’s wife walked in during the episode and discovered that police fatally had gunned down their two black Labrador retrievers, Chase and Payton.

“Our dogs were our children,” Calvo told the Associated Press. “They were the reason we bought this house, because it had a big yard for them to run in.” Next-door neighbor Edward Alexander added: “I was completely stunned, because those dogs didn’t hurt anybody. They barely bark.”

Police seized a FedEx package containing 32 pounds of marijuana, to which Calvo was unconnected. Drug traffickers had addressed it to his house, intending to collect it from his front porch before he did. No charges were filed against the Calvos.

• On July 13, 2010, a dozen St. Paul, Minn.–area policemen and a federal Drug Enforcement Agency officer assaulted Roberto Franco’s home. Clad in Army fatigues, they rousted all nine people there, including three children. “Each plaintiff was forced to the floor at gun and rifle point and handcuffed behind their backs,” states Franco’s $30 million federal lawsuit against these authorities. “Defendants shot and killed the family dog and forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead and bloody pet for more than an hour while defendants continued to search the plaintiffs’ home.”

According to the complaint, one young girl who “was handcuffed and prevented by officer from obtaining and taking her medication thus induced a diabetic episode as a result of low blood-sugar levels.”

Oops. Wrong house!

Negligent police meant to hit the house adjacent to the Francos. The search warrant named next-door neighbor Rafael Ybarra, but did not mention anyone named Franco. Perhaps these cops forgot to read that document before launching their onslaught against the Francos, their home, and their dog.

Eventually, the SWATsters realized their error. As the complaint continues: “Despite the fact that defendants learned that the suspect did not live at the address raided, defendants remained in the home of plaintiffs and continued searching the home.” The authorities eventually found a .22-caliber revolver in the basement. Although it belonged to Gilbert Castillo, another resident of the house, the gun was pinned on Franco, leading to his incarceration with Minnesota’s Department of Corrections.

• These raids destroy humans, too.

Fearing that criminals were invading his home on May 5, 2011, Iraq veteran Jose Guerena, 26, hid his wife and son, age 4, in a closet. He grabbed his rifle and went to investigate. An Arizona SWAT posse seeking marijuana kicked down Guerena’s front door, saw his rifle, and lethally pumped 71 bullets into him. Guerena did not fire a shot. Indeed, his rifle’s safety mechanism remained engaged. The dead father and husband had no criminal record, and his home was devoid of contraband.

Balko counts at least 46 innocent people killed in drug raids gone wrong.

Why are local constables devolving into flak-jacketed federales? As usual, thank Washington’s largesse. Like a steady drip of steroids, the War on Drugs has provided funding and encouragement for local cops to gird themselves like GIs leveling an Andean coca plantation.

Furthermore, as Balko wrote in November 2011, thanks to “a 1994 law authorizing the Pentagon to donate surplus military equipment to local police departments . . . literally millions of pieces of equipment designed for use on a foreign battlefield have been handed over for use on U.S. streets, against U.S. citizens.” Since September 11, 2001, the War on Terror has furnished additional funds and matériel. Some of it should be available to defeat militant Islam. None of it should be used against, say, blackjack players.

The Obama administration has played its part, too. “In 2009,” Balko explains, “stimulus spending became another way to fund militarization, with police departments requesting federal cash for armored vehicles, SWAT armor, machine guns, surveillance drones, helicopters, and all manner of other tactical gear and equipment.”

Alas, when local cops who write tickets dress up like Green Berets, their attitudes can change. As former Reagan Pentagon aide Lawrence Korb pithily states: “Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.”

“The routine use of SWAT teams to serve thousands and thousands of drug-search warrants has resulted in unnecessary tragedies and fueled fears of government run wild, military raids of homes in the middle of the night based more upon secret suspicions than evidence, and not infrequently causing casualties to the totally innocent,” Hoover Institution research fellow Joe McNamara tells me. The 17-year NYPD veteran and former police chief of Kansas City and San Jose adds: “The SWAT raids certainly haven’t won the drug war, but have caused ‘collateral damage’ and fears that impair the police’s ability to gain citizen trust and cooperation against serious and violent crime.”

As gun stores currently enjoy land-sale business, some Americans are arming themselves to insure against circumstances as yet unseen. They justifiably worry that a government that aims gun barrels at Amish dairy farmers is capable of the unimaginable.

— Deroy Murdock is a Fox News contributor, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: bamglist; banglist; cnsf; donutwatch; drugs; drugwar; guncontrol; korb; leo; militarization; secondamendment; swat; warondrugs; wod; wodlist; wosd
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BFL


41 posted on 02/12/2013 6:00:00 AM PST by Max in Utah
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To: smoothsailing

This is why conservatives need to get off their butts and elect constitutional sheriff in their counties.

After Katrina, a county sheriff posted armed deputies at critical locations and refused to allow federal thugs inside his county.

Sheriffs have met armed federal thugs in their counties and chased them out. One sheriff told federal fascists that if they entered his county with armed SWAT he would mobilize his SWAT team and engage them. The federal pigs ran away.

With a constitutional sheriff you can:

1. Protect your neighborhood.

2. Buy surplus military equipment.

3. Investigate, arrest and imprison leftists in your comunity.

4. Muster a 2,000 man auxiliary deputy force for “emergencies.”

Now I know it’s difficult to stop remodeling the kitchen, turn off the barbecue grill and stop worshipping the false god mammon, but if you don’t get involved, you’ll lose everything you’ve worked for, including your children.


42 posted on 02/12/2013 6:07:59 AM PST by sergeantdave (The FBI has declared war on the Marine Corps)
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To: CitizenUSA

Well said.


43 posted on 02/12/2013 8:14:19 AM PST by Altariel ("Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!")
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To: smoothsailing
From the article:

“The routine use of SWAT teams to serve thousands and thousands of drug-search warrants has resulted in unnecessary tragedies and fueled fears of government run wild, military raids of homes in the middle of the night based more upon secret suspicions than evidence, and not infrequently causing casualties to the totally innocent,” Hoover Institution research fellow Joe McNamara tells me. The 17-year NYPD veteran and former police chief of Kansas City and San Jose adds: “The SWAT raids certainly haven’t won the drug war, but have caused ‘collateral damage’ and fears that impair the police’s ability to gain citizen trust and cooperation against serious and violent crime.”

44 posted on 02/12/2013 8:31:31 AM PST by JustSayNoToNannies ("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
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To: All

I wonder how one of these local jack boots would feel if a group of federal jack boots invaded their home and forced him and his family to sit handcuffed on the floor for 6 hours. Plus shot the dog in front of the kids.

I know a guy who is very conservative who voted for Kerry because of Bush’s Patriot Act. He said he knew Kerry would be a lousy president but the Patriot Act was too far over the top.


45 posted on 02/12/2013 9:33:27 AM PST by Terry Mross (How long before America is no more?)
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To: Husker24

This would explain the increase in LEOs and the decrease in peace officers.

They are deliberately working to weed peace officers out in the academy level, now.


46 posted on 02/12/2013 9:48:59 AM PST by Altariel ("Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!")
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To: smoothsailing

BTTT!


47 posted on 02/12/2013 10:15:32 AM PST by neverdem ( Xin loi min oi)
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To: sergeantdave
After Katrina, a county sheriff posted armed deputies at critical locations and refused to allow federal thugs inside his county.

Hmm, was this in Louisiana?

48 posted on 02/12/2013 10:19:41 AM PST by MarMema
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To: JustSayNoToNannies
Here in Washington state, we made pot legal. Go away feds. Stay away.

The war on drugs has been a complete failure.

49 posted on 02/12/2013 10:21:24 AM PST by MarMema
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To: Vince Ferrer

“...the act of creating a police state will create its opposite as well,...”

So true. So sad. Government created SO much by its ignorant “planning.”

The SUV? Created by govt.

Lobbyists? Created by govt.

The list goes on...


50 posted on 02/12/2013 10:30:20 AM PST by Peet (TurboTax: "So simple even a Secretary of the Treasury can use it!")
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To: smoothsailing

The standing army our founders feared.


51 posted on 02/12/2013 12:02:56 PM PST by Atlas Sneezed (Universal Background Check -> Registration -> Confiscation -> Oppression -> Externination)
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To: NVDave

Thanks for the info!


52 posted on 02/12/2013 7:34:11 PM PST by Jack Hydrazine (It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!)
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To: CitizenUSA

Tragically, an increasing number of Americans still support the Patriot Act and its multiple infringements on our liberty.


53 posted on 02/12/2013 11:26:26 PM PST by Altariel ("Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!")
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To: PGR88

Firemen have become paramedics 90-95% of the time. They rarely fight fires. That’s a job that can be 100% privatized and placed into the competitive market.

Why not police officers as well? Let them go back to being peace officers at the government level. If they’re going to be simple minded law enforcers then take away their sovereign immunity. Let them think about the consequences.

That’s the simplist way to get them back under control. If you can be sued to poverty and perhaps jailed for your actions you’ll be a little more level-headed.

Go find a cop that doesn’t use the gun or badge as absolute immunity from prosecution and I like cops.


54 posted on 02/13/2013 4:55:57 AM PST by 1010RD (First, Do No Harm)
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To: Vince Ferrer

Great idea. If the intervening years since 9/11 have shown us anything it’s that our enemies are for the most part impotent. 9/11 wasn’t the end of America.

End the TSA, demilitarize our police and federal agencies and go back to pre-9/11 laws and procedures. If the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is over then the war in America and against American liberties is too.


55 posted on 02/13/2013 4:57:38 AM PST by 1010RD (First, Do No Harm)
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To: sergeantdave; MestaMachine; thouworm; Rushmore Rocks; Oorang; dragonblustar; jersey117; Velveeta; ..
.

This is why conservatives need to get off their butts and elect constitutional sheriff in their counties.

After Katrina, a county sheriff posted armed deputies at critical locations and refused to allow federal thugs inside his county.

Sheriffs have met armed federal thugs in their counties and chased them out. One sheriff told federal fascists that if they entered his county with armed SWAT he would mobilize his SWAT team and engage them. The federal pigs ran away.

With a constitutional sheriff you can:

1. Protect your neighborhood.

2. Buy surplus military equipment.

3. Investigate, arrest and imprison leftists in your comunity.

4. Muster a 2,000 man auxiliary deputy force for “emergencies.”

Now I know it’s difficult to stop remodeling the kitchen, turn off the barbecue grill and stop worshipping the false god mammon, but if you don’t get involved, you’ll lose everything you’ve worked for, including your children.

Check out article and comments.

# 9 is interesting.

56 posted on 02/13/2013 7:20:22 AM PST by LucyT (In the 20th century 280 million people were killed by their own governments.)
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To: smoothsailing
Remember the movie Shooter? In the book, the real reason he went to war against the Feds was that they killed his dog, while that was barely mentioned in the movie.

These people, they get away with such brutality and think they can run roughshod over everybody. Someday they're going to try this crap with somebody who has the proper training and skills and kill his dog and then they will find that there are other people in the world who can and will retaliate and they are to be feared for good reason.

Like Marcus Luttrell, the famed Navy SEAL. His dog was brutally killed for kicks by a couple of psycho hillbillies. He pursued them and was in contact with law enforcement the whole way who begged him not to kill them so they could make an arrest. But what do you think that SEAL would do if a cop killed his dog then bragged that there was nothing he (Luttrell) could do?

57 posted on 02/13/2013 11:06:51 AM PST by ExSoldier (Stand up and be counted... OR LINE UP AND BE NUMBERED...)
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To: LucyT

Thanks LucyT, great article and thread!


58 posted on 02/13/2013 11:13:21 AM PST by Las Vegas Ron (Medicine is the keystone in the arch of socialism)
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To: MileHi

Hey, some of us are gettin’ better!


59 posted on 02/13/2013 11:19:00 AM PST by Little Ray (Waiting for the return of the Gods of the Copybook Headings.)
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To: Little Ray

Shweeeet!


60 posted on 02/13/2013 11:28:55 AM PST by MileHi ( "It's coming down to patriots vs the politicians." - ovrtaxt)
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