COP AMBER GUYGER IS ONE REASON WE NEED PRIVATE GUN OWNERSHIP
Ryan McMaken
Mises.org
09/12/2018
When advocates of gun confiscation complain about “guns” and say “no one needs a gun for x” all they are really saying — whether they understand it or not — is “I want only cops and soldiers to have guns.”
While gun control advocates often claim to be suspicious of police power, logic dictates that the gun-confiscation position is simply the position that only government employees should have guns. Similarly, more mild gun-regulation positions are designed to increase the coercive power of government over the taxpaying citizenry, and to lessen access to private sources of self-defense — thus increasing private-sector dependence on government police for “protection.” The gun-regulation position is premised on the idea that only the police can really be trusted with gun ownership.
And what a terrible position that is.
Richard Black could tell us more about this. Were he still alive today. After Black killed a home intruder in self-defense, he called the police. Sometime later, the police showed up and shot Black dead in his own home.
The dead victims of the school shooting in Parkland could tell us more also. When sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson — who was specifically supposed to provide security at the school — was faced with an armed intruder, he ran away and hid.
And now we hear about the case of Amber Guyger. Guyger is the police officer who confused another man’s apartment for her own. She trespassed on the man’s property, saw his “silhouette” and then open fired. Her victim, Botham Shem Jean, died.
A Double Standard
In cases like these, police could not be counted on to use firearms appropriately — or they failed to use them to defend the innocent.
Moreover, this latest case serves to illustrate, yet again, the enormous double standard that is employed when police behave in ways that any private citizen would be roundly and viciously denounced for. Were a private citizen to do what Guyger did, his actions would be provided as more evidence that private ownership of guns ought to be curtailed.
Guyger has claimed in her defense that she “gave verbal commands” to her victim before she shot him.
That this should even be considered any sort of “defense” requires a special kind of deference to government. But this is how police officers and their defenders think. If a normal person is woken or surprised in the middle of the night by an intruder with a badge, the victim is supposed to know — by magic, apparently — that the intruder is a police officer and then do what you’re told. Never mind that the person might just be claiming to be a police officer.
For police of course, private citizens are always supposed to respond calmly and obediently when screamed at by multiple police officers. Often, the victims receive conflicting orders from police.
Similar rules do not apply to police. Police — we are told — “must make split-second decisions under extreme pressure. “In other words, if the police make a poor decision under pressure, they’re heroes who did what had to be done. If a private-sector taxpayer like Richard Black makes the “wrong” decision? He deserved to die.
The Rest…HEREhttps://mises.org/power-market/cop-amber-guyger-one-reason-we-need-private-gun-ownership
