Parkland School Shooting Demands We Ask the Right Questions of Police, FBI

Following the Parkland school mass shooting, people seem very comfortable with the idea of a world where the only people entrusted with the right to use firearms are police officers. Everyone else would be disarmed and largely defenseless. It's an idea

worth exploring. Remember that many of these police officers are the same people who

• steal our property without any due process and call it civil asset forfeiture
• murder unarmed kids then plant toy guns on the bodies to call them accidental, justified shootings
• shoot the family dog and claim they felt threatened
• plant bags of coke in the homes and cars of innocent people to create crimes where there were none
• murder unarmed, defenseless people with their hands raised above their heads
• tackle old ladies and beat them with a club
• kill innocent Americans in their homes in no-knock raids then realize - oops, wrong house

If everyone is to be unarmed in this world except the police, then are these really the people we want to entrust with firearms? And, btw, the police aren't even legally responsible to protect anyone from anything per these court cases.

Then who is legally responsible for protecting our families? We are. Statistics suggest it's folly to think protection is at the other end of a 9-1-1 call. The average response time is 10 minutes (one hour in several cities). That's just enough time for the burglars to kill everyone, load up the truck with the new flatscreen, have a beer and get away unnoticed and unharmed. In other incidents, police officers responding to 9-1-1 calls arrived on the scene only to shoot the innocent people who called 9-1-1 in the first place.

We all have a natural right to protect ourselves in nearly any way we deem necessary along with a Constitutional right to own firearms. If the idea of a gun-free world relies on the police for safety and protection, and the seemingly incompetent FBI to catch the crooks after the fact, then I'll keep my right to bear arms, thank you.

From a review of a number of police interactions with ordinary American citizens, it's clear that many of today's police officers operate as hostile aggressors as standard procedure. In fact, police officers murder about 1,000 people in America per year with their firearms, and they shoot another 3,000 or so more people per year who survive the shooting. Then there are the growing number of cases where police officers rape women at ordinary traffic stops.

And these police officers are largely unaccountable. Of cases where police officers were charged with a crime, nearly every one of them has been acquitted. It's easy to demand that people with mental illness need to be barred from owning firearms but maybe we need to ask if it's really the police officers who need to be disarmed. In exploring a world where police officers are to be given a legalized monopoly on firearms when they already enjoy nearly 100% immunity from the law, what mechanism would check their increasingly brutal abuse against ordinary Americans from becoming standard procedure?
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FBI Our Greatest Domestic Terror Threat?

The FBI created a plot to blow up this bridge near Cleveland, Ohio then arrested the people they convinced to do the job. Photo courtesy Associated Press.

It seems every time a news story praises the FBI for foiling a domestic terror plot that it turns out the FBI actually created the terror plot just so they could stop it from happening and discredit people who protest against the rising police state. For the latest example, consider the Associated Press coverage of the plot (ABC has removed the AP story) to blow up the bridge near Cleveland. It presents the entire Occupy movement as dangerous anarchists and the FBI as heroes for tricking the would-be bombers into trying to blow up the bridge and exposing their extremism. A quote from an ACLU representative lends the illusion of another side to the story but nowhere does the issue of entrapment earn even a mention. This story provides more complete coverage of the exposed plot and the FBI involvement.

Remember how the FBI foiled this North Carolina terror cell? Here's what (YouTube has removed the video) happened according to ABC, which touted "7 Home-Grown Terrorists Arrested in North Carolina by FBI" (ABC should know not to start a sentence with a number unless written out...). ABC later admitted the FBI's role (ABC removed this) in the plot.

And how about, "F.B.I. Arrests Man in a Suspected Terrorist Plot Near U.S. Capitol bomber" per the New York Times from February? Again, the reporter praises the FBI for stopping a plot - though it otherwise may never have existed - and pushes the idea that we were never really in any danger so the whole operation is just fine.

This Guardian story questions the legality of what it plainly calls, "Fake terror plots" and reveals the extent of these fake FBI sting operations. All of these stories make it difficult to think of a terror plot that was actually real and makes one start to wonder if even the domestic terrorist poster child Timothy McVeigh wasn't somehow setup by or involved with a scheme to create the idea that white Americans are just as great a threat to our safety as anyone from overseas. This video (Video removed) presents information that I still can't completely process. Take a look and lmk what you think.
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