Obama orders review of US police use of military hardware

As far as I know, local police aren't getting attack helicopters or artillery units. I don't think the equipment needs to be "kept under lock and key" except for a very few things.

Edit: You can see a list of the most distributed stuff here: http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/08/21/most-p...

Or the full data here: https://github.com/TheUpshot/Military-Surplus-Gear

He was a practicing civil rights attorney, taught constitutional law and was president of Harvard Law Review.

You may not like him, but to say that someone who has that level of professional legal experience doesn't have any experience in law enforcement, would seem ridiculous.

Politicians should be generalists not specialists. What they should do is surround themselves with experts is specific fields, and consider the advice they give.

Unfortunately, in many nations the politicians more frequently listen to the distorted scare and panic the media has created that week and base their policies on that instead.

The natural incentives for police aren't necessarily what's good for society. A policeman will naturally want to keep himself alive and catch the bad guy at almost any cost. False convictions, injuries to innocent bystanders, dead suspects, and other such things aren't inherently something police care too much about. We make them care by imposing a framework where they have a reason to avoid these things, but left to their own devices they naturally worry about their own lives and their goal of catching criminals.

The police are certainly the ones to ask about how best to effectively combat criminals and similar things, but they're not the ones to ask about the correct tradeoff between police and civilian lives, the rate at which criminals should be allowed to get away (not zero!), and overall public safety from police, not just public safety by police.

In terms of how you phrased it, I think police are good ones to ask about effective law enforcement, but not necessarily about appropriate law enforcement.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I care more about not having a militarized police force than I care about the police being able to shoot the 1 in 1,000,000 well-equipped robber with a 50 cal/machine gun/40mm launcher/whatever they are getting these days.

Sorry for putting the rights of the civilian population (political concerns) over being able to kill any conceivable criminal ("effective" law enforcement).

The local sheriff's experience in law enforcement doesn't lend him any great advantage over me in deciding whether jay walkers should spend time in jail (or whatever other stupid example you want to use).

He probably has developed a better intuition about what sorts of people will escalate their lawbreaking, but that still doesn't give him an advantage in deciding what steps are appropriate in dealing with such a problem.

Somewhere along the line, that got lost.

In my opinion it was a very keen observation on which the above excerpt is based. That is that people on equal footing are far more likely to engage to resolve disputes in a civil manner than those where one group is sufficiently and strategically in a favorable position. Take any sufficiently one-sided argument anywhere in the news and show me where the weaker group prevailed?

To draw a parallel to technology. We don't architect our systems for the best case scenario. For critical infrastructure we plan for the worst and hope for the best. I think that gets to the essence of the above interpretation of 2nd amendment. I think we can draw a parallel to real world and the architecture of our government. For critical infrastructure of our government, where basic human rights are at stake, it behooves us to plan for the worst and hope for the best.

There can be no argument in favor of nuclear weapons used for individual, or even small group or very localized, self-defense. In fact, I'd argue there can never be a valid argument in favor of nuclear weapons for self-defense (with emphasis on self).

For defending a larger population base, the police have no reason to have nuclear weapons because they are not in charge of national defense or national security. That is left to the military, which does have nuclear weapons.

There can be no precise or selective targeting with nuclear weapons, in the sense of shooting a bad guy and not shooting an unarmed civilian near by. Nuclear weapons also do not function to defend against individual crime, which is something a gun can defend against. In any act of attempting to defend yourself from a localized attack by using a nuke, you will kill yourself and countless civilians nearby. There's an exceptionally long list of reasons why the floated nuclear weapons counter makes absolutely no sense.

Ultimately you can tell the nuclear arms argument is irrational, because if you follow the logic behind it to the proper conclusion, no person ever has a right to self-defense under any circumstances: because you should thus never be allowed to wield any weapons, including a knife or baseball bat in self-defense. It's the ultimate argument in ridiculousness: if you can't be allowed to do X very extreme thing, then you can't be allowed to do X drastically less extreme thing. A scale comparison would be, if I'm allowed to drive a car - cars kill 30,000 people per year in the US - then why can't I 'drive' an aircraft carrier.

Will they explode if someone else tries to use them and fire several different voice activated rounds? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawgiver_%28Judge_Dredd%29