Charlie Pierce recounts the news of the Las Vegas cop-killing and then asks where are the cops?
Why are there not a million police officers on the National Mall right now, today, demanding that the Congress and the rest of the political elite take even the most gingerly steps toward disenthralling the country from its insane devotion to its firearms? Why are police officers not walking off their jobs in protest? Why are their professional organizations not raising holy hell about this? They’re on the very vanguard of what’s happening in this country. They’re not simply first-responders any more. They’re primary targets, for god’s sake. In Las Vegas, two of their brethren were specifically sought out and executed in a pizza joint.
[snip]
where’s the public pressure from the people in blue against the people who now actively hunt them down, and against the people whose livelihoods — political and otherwise — depends on the cultural and social climate that sustains the people who now are stalking cops in order to kill them at lunch? There’s been some movement, but do you know where some of them are? Spectacularly, some of them are on the other side.
The thought that Vermont’s top law officers might publicly oppose gun restrictions isn’t a novel idea. Sheriffs in Colorado are refusing to enforce that state’s new background checks and ban on high-capacity magazines.
Tragically, the paranoid gun culture nurtured by the NRA, GOAL, and their pet politicians has leached into the law enforcement apparatus, especially at the level of the local sheriffs’ offices. Put plainly, after the events of the past five days, any police officer who drives himself home at night in the family sedan with the NRA sticker in the back window is a traitor to the uniform, and is demonstrating a profound lack of respect for the brother officers who were killed in Las Vegas for the crime of being cast in the role of some Redcoats in the Bunker Hill fantasies of two murderous loons.
The only thing I might add to that is that police forces in this country have been greatly weaponized and militarized since September 11, 2001 at cut-rate prices, and the collective judgment of those cops toward the civilians they’re ostensibly supposed to “serve and protect” has become sadly impaired.