I’m just trying to gauge your approximate depth of life experience. A 54 year old is more likely to have a different perspective that a 16 year old, and it will be different than when he was 16.
But Democrat politicians are not lefty liberals. It’s a cliche stereotype that liberals are always complaining about and criticizing the police on the issues you mentioned. The only other bloc who complains as much are civil libertarians, but they don’t generally oppose open carry.
Pst. pkbites. I don’t think that’s common knowledge. Hollywood doesn’t tell you about that and most have only tangential exposure to LE. The NRA does remind their membership of this fact pretty much all the time, but most people aren’t NRA members.
You have to realize that these issues aren’t really on most people’s radar. That’s the curse of professionalism I suppose: pros assume without thinking that everyone knows at least the basics of their line of work. They don’t. Maybe it’s a variant of what the brits call wishful nonthinking.
As I see it, the moral for non-professionals in a given field (eg me, JesterX) is to give the pros (eg pkbites, Bricker, Little Nemo) due respect and a fair hearing, even if you disagree with them. (A given field broadly defined.)
Sorry, but that’s not going to wash. If you want to write out Hillary or the blue dogs, that’s fair, but excluding Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Dennis Kucinich, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, etc. as “not lefty liberals” is a game of “no true Scotsman.” Sanders is a self-described socialist, FFS.
I want to add that here in Wisconsin things are even tighter for a LEO:
*State supreme court ruled in Hamden that open carry was protected by the right to bear arms clause in the state constitution.
*The Wisconsin Attorney General issued an opinion that open carry was not illegal and not an arrestable offense.
*The state disorderly conduct statute was changed to read that openly carrying a weapon is NOT disorderly conduct.
*Wisconsins concealed carry law includes a clause codifying open carry and acknowledging it’s legality.
*Wisconsin law prohibits localities from having ordinances that are more stringent than state law.
*There have been several cases where LEO’s have stopped/arrested open carriers. Every case has resulted in that agency losing a lawsuit and paying out big bucks.
All of this pertains to all firearms, not just pistols.
Considering this, would the likes of some on these boards still have me stop someone who is doing nothing more than walking down the sidewalk carrying a rifle? I certainly can talk to them, but if they keep walking there is nothing I can do. Ontop of Terry constraints I have the constraints of what is going on in my state. Under what justification could I detain said person?
“People don’t like it, it makes them pee pee” isn’t going to fly.
Sure, I never claimed that people carrying guns are the only dangerous people out there. But if carrying a gun is one of the things that makes other people potentially dangerous, then it would be silly for me to automatically assume that anybody I see carrying a gun must not be dangerous.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
I would guess that like me, the majority of carry advocates believe in being “porcupines”: harmless if left alone, painful if molested.
[/QUOTE]
I find that guess eminently reasonable and plausible. But even if it is true, I still have no way of knowing whether any particular random stranger carrying a gun happens to belong to that rational “porcupine” majority.
(Nor do I have any way of knowing whether such a random stranger, even one who believes in being a “porcupine”, is competent enough to avoid causing harm unintentionally.)
As you can see from my post above, “suspicious,” is not enough. An inchoate, unparticularized suspicion that someone might violate some law doesn’t meet the Terry standard. The officer must be able to point to specific facts that support a particular suspicion that a specific crime is involved.
I don’t know if those politicians have raised the issues you mentioned. I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t, given the authoritarian nature of the government in general and the Democratic party in particular. I’m more curious why you think libs don’t criticize the police on the issues you mentioned, along with many others, such as civil forfeiture, private prisons, racial/class disparities in arrests and sentencing, the entire drug war, and so on. Disdain for police and “the Man” might make a top five list of lib stereotypes. It’s a common theme of lib blogs, books, lectures, and comments sections.
When you say they don’t that raises the question: who is criticizing the police, then? On this board and on the internet in general? How did libs get this reputation as police bashers, soft on crime, soft on drugs – is it propaganda from law and order conservatives? Anarcho-syndicalists pretending to be lib? I don’t think Daily Kos, Think Progress, or TYT have been infiltrated by libertarians.
the only person in my community shot and killed with an AR-15 was killed by a police officer. I’m not hugely impressed by the uniform and consider any officer with a gun drawn a serious risk to the public at large. They are trained to take down a suspect who doesn’t respond to police commands and that is not my idea of serving the community.