Lord no, if you do this, we’re likely to have six pages defining ambush. Yes, shots were fired, coming from the Panthers’ side first according to the cops. Cleaver admits attacking them.
So if these guys were black they would have gotten shot?:dubious:
Did this guy ever come back?
Absent some other crime (like fraud), we don’t even stick you in jail for failure to pay your taxes. They might get a lien on your home and everything you own but they don’t throw you in jail to get youto pay. If you lie then they throw you in jail no matter how much you pay (or at least they’re supposed to but rich people seem to operate under a different set of rules these days).
Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting.
Because we are discussing the government reaction to the yahoos who showed up with guns.
If you show up armed to a confrontation with the federal government, you are not so much showing a willingness to kill but a willingness to die. You don’t “win” a shootout with the feds.
Its still pretty stupid.
If they came with non-peaceful intentions then why didn’t they show up and open fire? I didn’t read that even a single round was fired. These guys are 90% bluster and 10% “if you back me into a corner I might fire rather than drop my weapon and throw my hands in the air”
A good example is this one relatively well known gun rights guy on youtube that started talking about taking people out if they came for his guns. The state of Tennessee[?] saw the video and determined that he was not fit to have firearms so they came and took his weapons. He meekly gave them up and issued “aww shucks I didn’t mean it” sort of apologies on youtube and eventually got his guns back.
Why does only one side have any business being armed?
And why would you only assign a degree of blame?
They probably didn’t even know he was there.
He has a quad rail. It is 4 picatinny rails that enclose the barrel and you can use install accessories using the little notches as an anchor. It looks like he has attached a flashlight to the bottom rail
Trying to stop government actions by force.
Because federal agents have the right to be armed. The clueless protesters that showed up to defend the deadbeat thief were just there to stir up trouble. They could just as easily have been unarmed and spewing the same nonsense and they wouldn’t have put anyone in danger.
I would only assign a degree of blame because the protesters had no business showing up packing heat.
"Because American citizens have the right to be armed. The clueless federal agents that showed up to harass a rancher were just there to stir up trouble. They could just as easily have been unarmed and spewing the same bluster and they would’t have put anyone in danger.
I would only assign a degree of blame because the agents had no business showing up packing heat."
Now I don’t necessarily agree with that. But you’re still basing your argument on the idea that government agents have more of a right to be armed than citizens. And that’s simply not the case.
The Bureau of Land Management should be armed? I don’t agree with the sovereign citizen movement, but when we’re arming EPA agents and giving the Dept. of Education a SWAT team, it’s going to get some people justifiably concerned about the government’s intentions.
Or, one could just say that the government fears the citizenry, which is the way things are supposed to be I guess.
Considering someone’s been setting off pipe bombs at BLM offices I don’t blame BLM agents weaponing up. All this gun nuttery is why we can expect various government agencies developing their own paramilitary units.
I suppose they deal with hostile parties on a regular basis and thus should be armed.
Even though the latest Supreme Court ruling went the other way, I don’t subscribe to the idea that the individual has the right to be armed.
The basis for the government being armed isn’t protection, it’s enforcement, and the federal government lacks a general police power, meaning its non-military agents have no particular right to be armed.
You can justify arming them for self-protection, but if they have that right, so does everyone else.
FBI, Secret Service, ATF, DEA, Federal Marshall’s, etc…
These are not examples of federal police power?
Just because you have a right to something doesn’t mean you should do something.
I have to side with Martin Hyde on this one. A firefight between the Feds and protesters would be the worst possible outcome for the Government. They would gain little and lose a hell of a lot. They would lose from a political standpoint, from a PR standpoint, from an economic standpoint (how many millions would be spent fighting god knows how many lawsuits?).
It was a lose-lose situation for the feds. And stupid, as better remedies have already posted in this thread.
Lack of a general police power does not equate to lack of any police power. The BLM, for example, administers federal property, and…
Which derives from the Constitution:
Specific police powers. Not general police power.
Re:
and:
Sorry if this has already been mentioned; I’ve only read through Post #120 or so.
There are photos of the protesters aiming.
Article in Washington Post with photo.
Article on Breitbartunmasked (Sorting through the mess he left behind) site. Scroll down a ways for photo.
So, they just block I-15 NB, and people think it is OK? People just wandering around on the freeway? How was this handled by the state patrol?
Well, that one guy was aiming, anyway…not sure he counts as “the protestors”. Anyhoo, it’s completely unacceptable, and criminal, to do what that guy was doing. That doesn’t make it any more true that bearing arms, as opposed to brandishing them, is a death threat.
Were any of the people around him trying to talk him out of it? Did any of them run away from this “lone gunman”? Did any of those people standing around him call 911?
That would only define whether they were accomplices or witnesses, not whether or not what he was doing was illegal.
I’ve no idea…the photo in the second link, which is the same man from a different angle, just shows a lot of people taking his picture, and no other protestors in his immediate area (unless the photographers were protestors instead of journalists, which seems unlikely). The first article gave his name, some light Googling didn’t turn up answers to any of your questions.
If he was trolling to get his picture everywhere, and some street cred in the patriot/militia/asshole movement, he succeeded.
Just because this particular media foible amuses me…
To the media, any rifle that’s black and has a pistol grip is an AR-15. Parker was actually weilding an AK of some kind, or a Saiga.
“Police power” has nothing to do with arming officials.