. . . muttered the ogre

This ought to surprise nobody. (Another link from Kopel; search for “April 2”.) I’m pleased that Mr Harper had the good sense to shoot at the robbers even though they claimed to be police. If it happens more often, maybe some of the police will speak up about the foolishness of the War On Some Drugs.

Hey, I can dream, can’t I? But more likely they’ll ask for further police-statist legislation to make such violations of the Fourth Amendment safer for the violators.

Someone (forgot who) recounted a conversation with a cop during the siege of Waco: the cop agreed that BATF was in the wrong, but still wanted the Davidians to be smacked down hard, because resistance cannot be tolerated.

A few years ago, Massad Ayoob’s column in one of the gun magazines invited us to weep for the wife and small child of a policeman who was shot dead during a “dynamic entry”, police euphemism for breaking into a home at night to terrorize the occupants. Ayoob (himself a cop) hoped the killer would be sentenced to death. I was delighted to see that the next issue’s letters disagreed with Ayoob in the strongest terms, and later a jury rejected the murder charge: even a trader in contraband (I believe he was convicted on that count) has a right of self-defense.

Dave Kopel wrote on April 7:

The Boston Globe reports that gun sales in Israel are skyrocketing, “particularly since an Israeli shoe salesman used his own weapon to fatally shoot a 46-year-old Palestinian who had opened fire in a Tel Aviv restaurant March 5 and killed three Israelis. The Interior Ministry says applications for licenses have tripled during the past month, overwhelming its staff and forcing it to shift employees from other departments to handle the deluge. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has moved to ease once-tight restrictions on owning a gun . . .” More Guns, Less Terrorism.

This surprised me. I had the impression that a large fraction of Israëlis were already armed.