Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Cracked: Blaming the victim for Police Abuse.

So a man gets wrongly raided by the police for the actions of a relative who was not even home.

His life is nearly ruined.

And cracked takes a "well it was her fault for wearing such a short skirt" stance.

Well that's not entirely fair.  Cracked does blame the cops in a "both parties are bad" view.

Think I'm kidding?

Let's go with some quotes:

Much of America fiercely believes that A) every citizen should have the right to defend their own home with deadly force, and B) that police should kick in the door of any residence that might have drugs inside. You know, to keep our children safe.

What about those of us that are against the War on Drugs?
But note the whole "well both sides..." apologia starts.

The police stormed the home, but, like roughly half of Texans, Rosas was a legal gun owner. He responded to his window exploding by opening fire on the source of said explosion. If that response sounds crazy to you, it should be noted that Rosas had been the victim of drive-by shootings before. It was that kind of neighborhood, and he had previously testified against a local gangbanger (meaning he had been expecting retaliation). 

So... the article does a good point of showing that Rosas wasn't crazy for his reaction.

The combined amount of drugs seized in these cases could fit in your pockets. Question: Have we as a society lost our fucking minds?
Note... that Cracked here isn't talking about just the "War on Drugs"

In fairness the next few points show just how insane the War on Drugs is and the dangers of no-knock raids.   And how much more forgiving the system is to police abuses  and how the legal system grinds people down.

So before you think this is a plea for drug legalization, or  reforming police abuses....


In the 1980s, the U.S. saw roughly 3,000 SWAT raids per year. Now we're at 50-80,000 raids per year (that's the whole "militarization of police" thing you've been hearing about). This means that in the U.S., a couple of hundred homes are raided every single day, in a country with 300 million privately owned guns. All because this fierce cultural defense of one freedom (to own a firearm) doesn't seem to translate to any other. It wasn't Magee's ownership of an AR-10 assault that made him dangerous to the state, but his growing of several plants.

If you don't care about the lives of drug users or dealers (and we know for a fact that lots of people don't), then what about the lives of police officers? Or bystanders? How easily could this have ended tragically for Rosas' mother, or Kori White, or her unborn baby? Or are their lives also worthless due to proximity?

If you think so, can you please stop and ask yourself the same question we raised earlier: Have we lost our fucking minds?




Emphasis added.     One could generous with the article going "Well they call gun ownership a freedom"  but reading in the cited context.   They writers are clearly just as angry that the guy owned a gun, as they are that the police were abusive.

The twisted parts is that.  Cracked routinely (in fact that's the bread and butter of this very blog)  lobbies for gun control.     Do they think that the Police seriously pushing Australia style gun control measures wouldn't end up with things just like this?



And by pure coincidence....  Hawaiian police are using their gun registry to demand medical marijuaana patients give up their guns.