What I find the most disturbing about the Oakland PD's use of rubber
bullets, wooden bullets and everything else they lobbed at protesters
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0407-06.htm was the fact that they were shooting these things into the crowds for
more than two hours!
A recent Democracy Now! report has them coming in with their riot gear,
and clearly none of the riot cops were prepared to arrest anyone. No one
saw beltloops full of plastic handcuffs or busses or anything throughout the
entire demonstration.
http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20030408.html Back to the two hours. These cops are being assured that their weapons
are non-lethal. (I believe the real term is sub-lethal)
If you hit someone 5 or 6 times with this crap, there's a good chance the
person is going to die!
And that's not my biggest problem with this particular event. If you spend
two hours shooting these people rapid-fire like that, non-stop; where does
your memory play into this. Where do your fantasies play into this.
40 years from now, when a few hundred of these riot cops have alzheimers,
they are going to firmly believe that they shot to kill over and over and over
again. They are going to be unable (or at least have great difficulty) to sort
out anyone in their previous military career they killed and any protesters in
the US they maimed in "battle."
When you point a weapon at someone you have conducted a heinous act
of violence, when you pull the trigger it's even worse. I don't care if it's a
tumbler round inside, a tiny cylander of wood, a beanbag or a blank. I don't
care if it's in the act of raping or pillaging, defending yourself or your loved
ones, or "liberating" an enemy's nation. Justified and rationalized or not, it
will still have been a heinous act of violence.
I know someone who killed a child molester. He will be the first to tell you,
he did the wrong thing for all the right reasons. He lives with that for the
rest of his days. He takes 50 minutes of therapy every week. He will probably
never stop.
My three years in the army, I had to ask over 300 chaplains before I found
one single one willing to tell me that firing a weapon at someone to kill them
is wrong, period, end of paragraph.
Again, whether justified or not, whether following orders or not. It's never
right.
Never right.
Never right.
Pointing a weapon at someone is wrong.
Shooting it is worse.
To any law enforcement who might be reading this as a forward:
GET HELP.
THE FIRST STEP IS ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.
We've been militarizing the police forces drastically since as early as 1996,
near as I can tell, and it only got hundreds percent worse after 9-11. We now
live in very dangerous times.
And seeing cops fantasizing about dead protesters for two friggin' hours
scares the shit out of me. Especially knowing what video games they're
likely playing in ALL OF THEIR SPARE TIME and what military units they
came from before becoming cops when they couldn't score high enough
on the police exams without the extra ten VA points.
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/04/1597037.php