Originally Posted by
TheTrevor
In my personal experience, the vast majority of the "citizens don't need guns" LE are career admin types, or those headed that way. There is a VERY high correlation between being pro-citizen-disarmament and either being in an appointed position, or reporting directly to someone who serves at the pleasure of the local politicians.
The problem is that these are the same folks who make and promulgate policy, however diluted or ignored it may be by the time it gets to the street, and they're the ones who get to set the message to the media.
I know through direct personal experience that the message they put out doesn't reflect the sentiments of the folks out there doing good work. The problem is that most gun owners hear the same civilian-disarmament message repeated by X different police chiefs, and Y different mayors, and Z different DAs, and then they see the carve-outs and special exceptions baldly set forth in the very laws that are strangling their rights.
When the rank-and-file are required by the chain of command to stand silent while their leadership enthusiastically supports these infringements, it's all too easy for Joe Gun Owner to assume that they support it as well. And that's a problem, because that leads directly to the assumption that those same folks working the street will rigidly enforce anything they're told to enforce, up to and including confiscation.
I have a problem with the knighthood being granted a monopoly on force through decree of the rulers. I'm a long-time student of the samurai era in Japan, and I know how well that works for the vast majority who are not members of the warrior class. While I'm not LE, I have far too many friends and relatives who are to believe that the vast majority of LE want a feudal system in which a knighthood class is elevated above the folks they serve and protect, yet that's the direction I've seen things heading for the last 20 years.
The answer, friends, is equality under the law. No carve-outs for LE, because we are all treated with equal respect, and receive equal rights -- right up until someone goes over the line, and then the violation of the social contract means their rights get restricted. As a specific example, if I can pass the same background check as a local LEO and demonstrate competency, I should be able to own the same suppressed SBR M4 with the giggle switch that the tac team uses. Period.
Just as I support Ruger's recent actions to force judicial action on the unconstitutionality of the hated Roster here in CA, I support companies refusing to make agency-level sales into states restricting the rights of ordinary law-abiding citizens to force the issue. Sales to individual LE in NYS? Cool. Agency sales to NYPD or NYSP? Nope.
I'm supporting the fight against this wretched idiocy, as one of the other folks here puts it, from "behind the redwood curtain". I'm not above buying non-Roster guns from LE friends, yet I recognize that this is also subtle corruption of a kind, making me an extension of the privileged class. Exercising my constitutional and civil rights should not require asking favors of an exempt class, yet that is what I am reduced to in order to buy a gun that residents of other states can purchase at any LGS. For that reason, if nothing else, the divide between legislatively-created classes of "knighthood" and "subject" must be obliterated nationwide and this tide of infringements rolled back.
It make take 10 years, or 20, but it CAN and WILL happen in my lifetime.
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. Snarky and easily butt hurt. Favorite animal is the Cape Buffalo....likely indicative of a personality disorder.
