"Please keep your hands out of your pockets"

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 14 Apr 2007 23:05:34 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

themilitia-org at ar15.com - I was bored, so I traipsed on over to arfcom. Found a 15-page thread asking what authority the police have to ask you to take your hands out of your pockets. I commented:

Thank you to Flakchak, for finally reminding people that cops, operating in their official capacity as the enforcement arm of the state, have no rights whatsoever. They operate under explicitly granted authority. If it ain't explicitly authorized, they may not legally do it. Ours is a government of enumerated powers. It was designed to have only powers explicitly granted by the Constitution. Of course anyone who's paying attention knows that the reality is more like what shotar espouses: anything that isn't explicitly permitted ist verboten.

As far as I'm concerned, anything a cop asks me to while he's on duty is a command, not a request. If I think he has the authority to demand whatever it is, or if I just don't think it's worth a fight, i.e. most of the time, I'll comply. Otherwise, I'll squash it, like a bug. But the latter is a hard row to hoe. The police are a large, very well armed & trained, and incredibly vindictive gang. Mess with someone wearing their colors, and you've made an enemy of them all, no matter how in the wrong the perp-with-a-badge happened to be.

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Comments (2):

Wrong link?

Submitted by Ken Hagler on Sun, 15 Apr 2007 09:12:47 GMT

I think the link is going to the wrong thread--I couldn't find your remark or anything related to it there. Just a whole bunch of really unpleasant characters demonstrating why I don't read that site... :-/

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I fixed the link

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 15 Apr 2007 09:41:22 GMT

I fixed the link, pretty early this morning. Maybe the RSS didn't get properly updated, though. Anyway, it's at: http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=566320

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