Thinking about my comments below, I realized that Clint Smith of Thunder Ranch said it perfectly:
“You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work.”

I appended the Smoak family story below as an example of why we needed to think carefully about passing laws that make us all violators. It has generated a fair amount of traffic and comment, so I ought to make my stance on this specific incident more clear.
I’m typically a friend to cops; literally in may cases. I often train with them in firearms, first aid, and martial arts, and I’ve gotten to know a few pretty well.
So my reaction to this story is broken into three distinct parts.
First, I think the cops did a mediocre job, but my guess is that they don’t do a lot of felony stops there, and it’s not like they get sent to Bitchen Cop School on a small town’s budget. One broader issue is the fact that small town forces get grants for equipment to gear their troops up like the SWAT guys we see in the movies, then tickets to the movies are most of the training the town fathers spring for.
I wasn’t there, have only watched the (full-length) video and read the local accounts, etc. etc. But it certainly seems more than a few things could certainly have been done differently once the decision was made to make this a felony stop. But even in saying that, I’m second-guessing on very limited information. The reported laughter of the officer who shot the dog could have been the kind of laughter you get after you’ve been scared to death and had an adrenalin dump (it’s happened to me), or the cruel laughter of an asshole with a gun who’s just murdered a pet. I don’t know, but it’s going to be investigated to death and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about it on Court TV for a while. I think the cops acted badly, but not necessarily criminally and will withhold judgment in favor of those who will study this incident harder than I will.
Second, the dumb but critically important fact is that any time guns come out, the potential for tragedy is there. As soon as this became a felony stop (where the responding police draw weapons in advance, and generally act as though the people being stopped are True Bad Guys), the door to a tragedy was opened. Officers have negligently (I never use the term ‘accidental discharge’ in talking about guns; it is a ‘negligent discharge’) shot the people they were handcuffing, or themselves, or their partners. The people who are stopped sometimes are uncompliant and do things which make the officers believe that a gun is being drawn. There are a million ways for this to end badly, and on the scale of those things, this one went poorly but not tragically.
The issue here is the overall police pattern of behavior that overuses felony stops and dynamic entries (the whole banging the door down in the middle of the night by SWAT teams thing). Because they are so inherently dangerous, their use needs to be judicious, and right now, it isn’t; this is from a mixture of legitimate ‘officer safety first’ strategies and a pure cowboy mentality. It’s certainly more fun to be SWAT than to be Barney Fife.
But Andy and Barney managed to get stuff done, we should remember. And officer safety is most of all impacted by the respect and connection that the overall community has for the police. It’s certainly possible to make officers act in a way that makes every interaction with citizens less risky for the officer, but nonetheless raises the overall level of risk by creating a greater number of hostile interactions.
Finally, it raises the issue of communication between citizen/witnesses and the police. One of the most valuable skills a great police officer can have, I’ve been told, is the ability to stop, listen and figure out a situation, rather than constantly trying to make a situation fit into a preconceived pattern.
I wasn’t opposed to something like TIPS, if it was about teaching citizens what to look for, giving them someplace to communicate what they see, and having someone on the other end of the phone who knows how to listen.
It’s not clear whether any of those was present in this incident.
I like and respect cops. Most of them are great people who work damn hard to help keep me and mine safe at night. I appreciate what they do, and hate to see something like this that damages their profession so badly.

Here’re two stories that neatly capture much of what’s wrong with contemporary liberalism. Both from this morning’s L.A. Times (intrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’):
First, this story on the UN AIDS bureaucracy:

A U.N. special envoy on AIDS warned Wednesday that a war against Iraq would eclipse humanitarian efforts around the world, and 29.4 million Africans with the disease would be among those suffering the most.
“Wars divert attention, wars consume resources, wars ride roughshod over external calamities,” said Stephen Lewis, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s representative for AIDS issues in Africa. “People with HIV/AIDS are in a race against time. What they never imagined was that over and above the virus itself, there would be a new adversary, and that adversary would be war.”
…
Lewis said that perhaps only a month remained for the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a consortium of nations and nongovernmental organizations supported by the U.N., to raise the estimated $7 billion it needs for this year and 2004.
“The response to the fund has been abysmal,” he said. “It is inexplicable and terribly disappointing. We haven’t had a contribution to the fund since Germany gave $50 million last July.”
…
“What is required is a combination of political will and resources,” he said. “You will forgive me for the strong language. But … the time for polite, even agitated entreaties is over. This pandemic cannot be allowed to continue, and those who watch it unfold with a kind of pathological equanimity must be held to account.
“There may yet come a day,” Lewis said, “when we have peacetime tribunals to deal with this particular version of crimes against humanity.”

Listen carefully. If you don’t support his efforts, you aren’t wrong, you aren’t misinformed, you aren’t even immorally callous. You’re guilty of crimes against humanity, just like those tried and convicted at Nuremberg.
And then this gem about anti-smoking activists who intend to use their leverage against poor people by denying them housing unless they ‘behave’:

The Los Angeles City Council, which pioneered smoking bans by prohibiting people from lighting up in restaurants, theaters and workplaces, was urged Wednesday by a group of health activists to ban smoking in half of the new affordable apartment buildings subsidized by the city.
With the city launching an effort to provide $100 million a year to subsidize the construction of affordable housing, council members assured representatives of the Task Force for Smoke Free Housing that they would hold a hearing on the proposal next month.
“A person who smokes can live in the building. It’s just that they don’t smoke in the building, in the same way we have smokers who eat in our restaurants. They just don’t smoke there,” said Esther Schiller, executive director of Smokefree Air For Everyone.
…
Under the proposal made by the activists, the city would award housing trust funds to affordable apartment projects based on the requirement that there be an equal number of units that allow smoking and that do not allow smoking.
The city already prohibits some substances in housing such as lead-based paint, said Marisol Romero, executive director of the Hispanic/Latino Tobacco Education Network.
“Smoke-free buildings are not about evicting people who are smokers,” Romero said. “Smoke-free buildings really are about giving people options, and letting people know in advance that if they plan to live in a certain building that this building is smoke-free.”

Look, I hate smoking. My father died of vascular disease doubtless made worse by the cigarettes he smoked for twenty years. After I was divorced, I convinced my sons to put on a campaign to pressure their mom to quit. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. But damn, this is offensive.
Liberalism doesn’t have to be this way, I’m positive. It is possible for government to help people without tribunals and pecksniffery.
I just haven’t managed to articulate how it would work yet…

David Adesnik over at OxBlog has decided that learning to hunt might be a good idea.

I was thinking of taking up hunting. Not because I support the NRA (which I don’t), but because I think it is important to recognize that animals do not simply become food.

Damn right, and good for him.

I’ve been pornblogged!! Check out ErosBlog Sex Blog’s response to my stance for sex and against porn.
Lots of folks have been discussing this, apparently, but I’ve been so freaking busy that I’ve just done some (at best) half-assed blogging and haven’t finished two important posts.

Coming up the 405 freeway on my motorcycle, I changed into the carpool lane at least 40 feet in front of the legal entrance (here in SoCal, we block most of the carpool lanes with double yellow lines); once in the carpool lane, I (along with the dozen or so cars in front and back of me) averaged about 80 – 85 for several miles, in an area where the legal speed limit is 55.
When I bought gas, I illegally held the vapor recover hood back, because the old-style hoods don’t work with motorcycle gas tanks.
Pulling out of the gas station, I had to cross a solid white line to exit the right turn lane that blocks the entire front of the driveway and continue straight on the road I was on.
Heading up Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, my cohort of vehicles averaged 65 in the marked 45 mile per hour zone. There was a Sheriff’s car in the pack, moving up and down and checking out the traffic. I was watching him as he fell in behind me, and slowed by 5 mph to show him I was paying attention.
…and so on.
What’s my point?
That we write laws that no one has any intention of obeying, and that it then becomes a kind of dance in which the legislators get political credit for ‘dealing’ with the problem, the various enforcers (police, zoning staff, etc.) get a lot of discretionary power … my Sheriff this morning has the absolute power to pull over any one of the ten or so cars in our little pod.
And, since the laws are seldom enforced, most of us don’t mind.
If speed laws were absolutely enforced…with GATSO’s (radar cameras), aggressive police enforcement etc.. how long do you think we’d tolerate them? How politically challenging would it be to pass them. But because most of these laws are of the ‘wink and a nudge’ variety, they meet with little opposition.
Here’s another example. In a neighborhood where I lived before moving to Southern Calfiornia’s Mayberry, we had a crazy neighbor. He used to get into fistfights with several of the neighbors, harass and threaten the neighborhood kids, and was subject to a bunch of restraining orders. Then he came up with a new plan. He got a copy of the zoning standards, and went on a campaign to get exact compliance on a house-by-house basis.
Much hilarity ensued, until I went over to his duplex with a copy of the zoning code, a building inspector, and the local city councilwoman, who on reviewing the voluminous file, told the city staff to just stop answering his mail.
In the case below, what’s happening isn’t concentrated enforcement against known gang members, parole violators, people under restraining orders, or in general people who have a high likelihood of committing one of the violent crimes that are the real subject of concern.
So here are two sets of facts:
I have a gun safe in my garage (which I do), and a neighbor looks in one day as I’m putting a gun in or taking it out, and sees an assault rifle (in reality I don’t own one; I’ve trained with them and they’re fun to shoot, but since I don’t have apocalyptic fantasies, I never saw the utility for a civilian…plus I have a bunch of LEO and firearms trainer friends who will let me shoot theirs if I want). On the other hand, my ex-crazy neighbor takes to parading up and down his driveway with a shotgun.
In the second case, there is a legitimate concern. I’m not so clear on what the legitimate concern is in the first, or that there is a legitimate concern that rises to the level of a policed sweep.
This goes to the core of the gun-management debate. On one hand, some people (including me) tend to believe that the issue is the people who commit the crimes; others see the tool used as the issue. To me, it’s a fruitless argument, since no one on either side is going to change sides anytime soon.
But this issue is one that we need to broaden as we talk about the bureaucratic state, and about expanding the power of that bureaucracy in response to 9/11.
And as we expand the scope of citizen paranoia (I know I was and am ambivalent about TIPS, I’ll explain more soon), we wind up with stories like this:

It was the most traumatic experience the Smoak family of North Carolina has ever had, and it happened yesterday afternoon as they traveled through Cookeville on their way home from a vacation in Nashville.
Before their ordeal was over, three members of the family had been yanked out of their car and handcuffed on the side of Interstate 40 in downtown Cookeville, and their beloved dog, Patton, had been shot to death by a police officer as they watched.
…
“A lady in Davidson County had seen that wallet fly off our car and had seen money coming out of it and going all over the road, and somehow that became a felony and they made a felony stop, but no robbery or felony had happened,” Pamela Smoak said.
“Apparently, they had listened to some citizen with a cell phone and let her play detective down there,” said James Smoak.
…

I don’t completely trust Rev. Moon’s Washington Times, but this was making the rounds this weekend:

Montgomery County police said yesterday that they will use tens of thousands of tips from the October sniper hunt to track down those who violate Maryland gun laws.
“Our goal is to reduce illegal firearm possessions and violent crimes,” said Capt. Nancy Demme, spokeswoman for the Montgomery County Police Department. She also said the intensive crackdown would begin in the county in a few weeks.
…

I’ll talk a bit more about the nature of bureaucracy; but one problem is that it appears to be a one-way rachet. Given the information to combat a terrorist crisis, the managerial mindset can’t help but think of new ways to use the information.
In this case, they’re just gun owners…so I guess it’s OK.

From CNN:
Income Level: <$50K Tax Returns: 15.2 million Dividend Income: $26.9B Dividend $/Return: $1,769.74 Income Level: $50K - $100K Tax Returns: 10.0 million Dividend Income: $27.1B Dividend $/Return: $2,710.00 Income Level: $100K - $200K Tax Returns: 4.8 million Dividend Income: $23.8B Dividend $/Return: $4,958.33 Income Level: > $1 million
Tax Returns: 200,000
Dividend Income: $25.4B
Dividend $/Return: $127,000.00
Yup, that’s some stimulus alright. The politician-owning classes will be stimulated beyond all belief.
There will be trickle-down; perhaps I can get a job as a skipper on one of the new yachts.
And please spare me the ‘class warfare’ rhetoric. The proposal you see above is class warfare; by being so stupidly slanted, the GOP is opening the door to class warfare; their protests ring a bit hollow.
And for me, the biggest issue is that this takes a sharp serrated knife to the thin stands of legitimacy that most of us feel.

Go check out Penn Jillette’s account of dealing with airport security.
It’d be funny if it wasn’t for the fact that his celebrity status is what finally pulled the bureaucracy into check.
Somehow, I don’t think I’d be treated quite so well.
And aside from the overall question of whether x-raying my Bass Weejuns makes the flight any safer (it appears that in spite of the fact that Richard Ried was wearing Semtex hightops, people with sneakers are exempt from the shoe x-ray, but people with loafers aren’t), and of the overall rationality of the way we’re trying to do security…
…the bigger problem with this is the fact that for the average person, hiring a private jet in case they miss their flight, or taking two days out of their busy schedule to go to a court hearing that will probably end inconclusively isn’t an option. So you swallow your annoyance and just file on board.
Penn’s trying to figure out what to do. Go tell him…
[Update: DOOOH… a friend sent this over and I engaged in premature bloggage; didn’t check the date and see if there were followups, and haven’t been out on the blogs so didn’t realize the whole freakin’ world had dealt with this. The point is useful, but I still wasted bandwith and your time…sorry…]

Sorry for not responding to the comments below sooner; we went on a spontaneous (like 90 minute decision cycle spontaneous) weekend trip to the mountains with All Three Boys and Tenacious G. Much fun was had, I realized that I may or may not have succeeded in civilizing my sons, and we just got back late tonight.
I’ll present a more thoughtful response soon.
But a quick question for all the folks who I’ve pissed off…
…we all perform involuntary servitude for three or four months a year. We get a bundle of benefits for it. No one seems to be complaining about that…
We have, in order to meet crucial national goals, drafted young men and enforced draconian labor and consumption laws. It is questionable to me whether we would be here to have this discussion had we not.
So, to paraphrase Shaw, it’s a matter of price.
It’s often as amusing to me how many of my libertarian/anarchist friends have federally-insured home mortgages, and went to state universities, as it is how upset my Proudhon-spouting radical friends are when their stuff gets stolen or my socialist friends are when they run afoul of the zoning laws.
Our relationships with the state are and have been very complex here in America. They’re gonna get more so.