The shooting of Andy Lopez for the “crime” of carrying an airsoft toy gun in California is interesting for several reasons. One, the shooter is an acquaintance whom I know through the Firing Line forum and regard favorably, largely thanks to his pro-RKBA stance on gun rights. The confluence of ability, opportunity and jeopardy will be decided by the court, but that being California, I have little doubt that they would side with police. While the airsoft rifle did look very much like a real AK47, the kid carrying it wasn’t threatening anyone and so the court would likely center the investigation on whether or not he had acted aggressively.
Everything that he ever did or wrote is getting pulled up for examination. That’s important to know for those who grandstand on the internet — even things a person wrote years ago and no longer believes would still be publicized as relevant.
One side note is that carrying a real gun would have made the kid safer than carrying an airsoft — at least he would have been able to return fire when ambushed! Even more useful would have been carrying the rifle in a case to avoid scaring the skittish locals into calling police. I’d like to think that shooting at people just walking around with rifles — airsoft or real — isn’t the regular approach in normal American states (crazy places like CA, NY or NJ don’t count). Either way, I have long been working on an article talking about reasonable conduct while armed, should try to finish and post it soon.
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a Neenah Wisc. PD officers was just caught on tape telling two men open carrying (one a rifle slung on his back, one a holstered pistol) that if they’d walked into a restaurant with a rifle slung on his back, he’d “shoot them right in the head. Nothing personal.”
Open carry of long arms in Wisconsin has, since its inception in 18xx, been lawful. Cops have no excuse to threaten to murder citizens for walking around with Bibles, slung long arms, or any other lawful item.
You’d have to have been there, I’m sure.
The only thing I’d say at this point is that the “freak out market” (media hype) (psychological warfare) regarding firearms has been fed to us for so long that a lot of people are conditioned to, well, freak out at the sight of one. You see people go nuts over something enough times, for long enough, and you’ll pick up the diease (dis ease) to some extent.
The other thing I’d say, and this is going to piss some people off, is that when you sign up to be a cop you’re declaring that you’re ready to die before you’d violate someone’s rights or harm innocents, and if you don’t like that proposition then stay the hell away from law enforcement.
When I got pulled over for having studded tires on after the deadline, and the cop found out I had guns in the vehicle, he went into a mild form of freak-out mode, calling for backup. What would have been a five minute stop turned into a half hour or more, with one cop on each side of my truck, hands on their guns, doing the “fellon stop” routine on a local business owner, carry permit holder, and decades long resident. This was after they verified all that. So yeah; I know first hand what the cop, freak-right-the-fuck-out-over-nothing, culture can do to a person.
And it is a culture. And you don’t change an entrenched culture like that other than to wipe the slate clean, and I mean completely clean right down to firing the janitor in the cop shop, and start anew, with a whole new cop school staffed with new people who understand the reason blood was spilled to found this country. And if that pisses someone off then I”d say (nothing personal) that that person has the disease and needs to seek treatment.
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This is one of the reasons that I avoid posting comments under my own name.
“Sir, is it true that you clandestinely posted numerous comments under the false name of Abraham Lincoln to avoid responsibility for said comments after an action as notorious as the one you perpetrated upon my client?“
Imagining how an enterprising attorney might pervert anything you posted is a good reason for using TOR and observing operational security – not using real names, places etc in your posts and never mixing the two.
So he gets shot six times with two ‘fatal wounds'(How fatal, like instant fatal or fatal in a half hour) and then they handcuff his maybe already dead body? Is it regular to handcuff a seriously injured suspect when such an action may contribute to their death? Can someone get LawDog in here?