Guns and Freedom
This is an old post which I was working on but somehow became stuck before publishing:
“October ,2013 In recent weeks I have been using my Facebook profile to express my feelings about The American Gun laws and what we have here in Australia. Kater’s election mandate and the lobby groups that are developing here made me sit down and reflect or just what liberal gun laws mean to the average person in the street.
Before I start I think we should just do a simple comparison of gun related deaths in three countries. The United States has 10.3 deaths/100,000 people, Australia has 1.06 and Singapore 0.16. As you can see we are not at the top but we could still improve matters greatly. It is interesting to see that Mexico which is regarded by me as a very dangerous country due to its drug related gangs has just about the same death rate as the US.
Now the question arises as to what reduces the gun related death rates. Is it the restrictions on being able to own a gun or is it the penalties for committing a felony using a gun?
In Australia our gun laws are framed differently to the United States. Here we certainly we can the right to own an armament. To own a gun here you must have a reason such as a farmer who needs it to control feral animals. Persons may own a gun if they are members of a club but generally the rule prohibits most people from owning a gun. Even if you have the right to own a gun it has to be licenced and kept in a Gun Safe when not in use. The type of gun is also very restricted and for most is restricted to a non-automatic rifle.
These very rules mean that Gun holders in Australia are operating in a much different manner to those in the U.S. In the U.S guns may be kept anywhere in the house and often people keep them near themselves. The type of gun can be a pistol as well. The nature of these gun laws mean that the guns themselves are much more accessible than would be the case in Australia.
In recent decades the Australian Government has tried to reduce civilian gun ownership, notably through a weapons buyback scheme after the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996. It has worked, with figures estimating there are only about 15 guns per 100 Australians. In comparison, the United States has an estimated 90 guns for every 100 civilians – the highest rate of gun ownership in the world. And for comparison purposes Singapore has 0.5 guns per 100 civilians.”
But now read on and see how law enforcement in the United States has gone one step more. And the same is happening in Australia and other places.
Armed and dangerous
No-knock raids, assault weapons and armoured cars: America’s police use paramilitary tactics too often
EARLY one morning a team of heavily armed police officers burst into the home of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retired engineer in Los Angeles county. What happened next is unclear. The officer who shot Mr Mallory six times with a submachine gun says he was acting in self-defence—Mr Mallory also had a gun, though he was in bed and never fired it. Armed raids can be confusing: according to an investigation, the policeman initially believed that he had ordered Mr Mallory to “Drop the gun” before opening fire. However, an audio recording revealed that he said these words immediately after shooting him. Mr Mallory died. His family are suing the police.
Such tragedies are too common in America. One reason is that the police have become more militarised. Raids by Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units used to be rare: according to Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University there were only about 3,000 a year in the early 1980s. Now they are routine: perhaps 50,000 a year (see article).
These teams, whose members wear body armour and are equipped with military-style weapons, were originally intended to tackle only the most dangerous criminals, such as murderers or hostage-takers. Now they are most commonly used to serve search warrants in drug-related cases. The police raided Mr Mallory’s home, for example, because they thought they would find a methamphetamine factory there. Instead they found two marijuana plants, belonging to a stepson who had a California medical-marijuana licence.
Some of the uses to which SWAT teams are put defy belief. In Maryland paramilitary police have been sent to break up illegal poker games; in Iowa, to arrest people suspected of petty fraud; in Arizona, to crack down on cockfighting.
America’s courts tend to smile on SWAT tactics. They have ruled that police may enter a home without knocking if announcing their presence might give a criminal a chance to destroy evidence, for example by flushing drugs down the toilet. Such “no-knock” raids carry the advantages of surprise—and the disadvantages.
Having armed men burst into one’s home is terrifying. Startled citizens may assume they are being burgled—the “flash-bang” grenades that SWAT teams toss in to (temporarily) blind and deafen their targets tend to add to the confusion. Some people shoot back, with tragic consequences. Radley Balko, a campaigning journalist, has identified more than 50 innocent civilians who have been killed in SWAT raids.
Two factors have pushed the American police to militarise. First, thanks to the “war on terror”, there is plenty of money available for big weapons. Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security handed out a whopping $35 billion in grants to state and local police. In addition, the Pentagon supplies surplus military hardware to police forces at virtually no cost. That is why the quiet little town of Keene, New Hampshire has an armoured personnel carrier called a BearCat, which the local police chief said might be used to protect its pumpkin festival.
Second, the war on drugs creates perverse incentives. When the police find assets that they suspect are the proceeds of crime, they can seize them. Under civil asset-forfeiture rules, they do not have to prove that a crime was committed—they can grab first and let the owners sue to get their stuff back. The police can meanwhile use the money to beef up their own budgets, buying faster patrol cars or computers. All this gives them a powerful incentive to focus on drug crimes, which generate lots of cash, rather than, say, rape, which does not. This is outrageous. Citizens should not forfeit their property unless convicted of a crime; and the proceeds should fund the state as a whole, not the arm that does the grabbing.
Bang! Knock, knock…er, sorry, wrong house
The police do a difficult and dangerous job, and it is completely understandable that they do not wish to be outgunned by bad guys. A big show of force can sometimes deter criminals from starting a fight. And police departments are right to spend generously on defensive equipment such as body armour, which increases the chance that officers will come home alive.
Nonetheless, the militarisation of American law enforcement is alarming. The police are not soldiers. Armies are trained to kill the enemy; the police are supposed to uphold the law and protect citizens. They should use the minimum force necessary to accomplish those goals.
That does not mean getting rid of SWAT teams entirely. But it does mean restricting their use to situations where there are solid grounds to believe that the suspect involved is armed and dangerous. They should not be used to serve search warrants on non-violent offenders, or to make sure that strip joints are code-compliant, or in any circumstance where a knock on the door from a regular cop would suffice. The “war on drugs” is supposed to be a metaphor, not a real war.