Christopher Cantwell wrote this on his blog:
I wonder when the next similar type cop shooting will be?
You know, I can't say I don't understand his point. I'd at least be contemplating a "not guilty" vote in any such case (I'd have a tough time with it though because there's no way I can know the person in question is actually an ideological libertarian as opposed to somebody who just wanted to kill somebody.)
That said, I have a couple of issues with Cantwell's argument.
First of all, simply the method by which the police get paid isn't relevant. If you know somebody is in college via Federal financial aid, is that just cause to kill them? Can we justifiably break into an IRS building and shoot all of its employees? We've had a few robberies of veterans mentioned on these forums, were they actually not crimes? After all, "veterans" volunteered to kill for the State, does that now make any crime that one would want to commit against them justified? Or are cops special for some reason? Is it only cops that we can target 24/7, or any government worker?
Another issue I have with it, from a moral perspective, is that I don't think most cops realize how evil what they are doing is. That isn't an excuse for them, but it does make me not want to kill them. I feel differently about people who clearly know what they are doing is heinously wrong. Take the case of those prison guards who burned some mentally ill prisoner to death. There's no way society has been conditioned to the point where anyone seriously thought that was OK, and if anyone had been, we could easily make the argument that they are little more than animals at that point. But with regular policing actions, most people have just been conditioned into thinking those things are OK. If you're the victim, that certainly doesn't deny you the right to defend yourself. But if you don't want to, does some other random person have the right to do it on their behalf? If I get pulled over by a cop, and I know I'm effectively being temporarily kidnapped, but I decide to comply with his extortion rather than take his life, do you have a right to just go kill him because he bullied me, even though I decided to allow it to happen precisely because I did not want to end that man's life?
Mind you, I agree with Cantwell that there is no such thing as a "good cop." I do think that there are decent and otherwise likeable people who are cops and who don't understand the wickedness of what they do. I'd rather not kill them if at all possible. I feel a little differently about the blatantly corrupt ones who actively seek out opportunites to bully other people. Eric Peters once described "three categories" of cops. I forget what he called them, but I'll rename them here as drones, sociopaths, and the nice old guy. The drones basically just do what they're told. They assume that the law is right because its the law. They don't show much mercy as far as the law is concerned, but they don't go beyond it either. They're cogs in the machine, not even critically thinking about what they are doing. The sociopaths, by contrast, enjoy being able to hold massive amounts of control over other people, being able to rob, assault, and murder people at will. Eric describes these guys as the ones who would likely lead the charge in implementing America's version of the Holocaust. Those guys don't care about "the law" so much as they just care about their own control. Then there's the nice old guy cop, who's probably actually old, who's back from the old days before the police state, gives you breaks when he can, and is mostly just waiting around until he can retire.
Cantwell would probably just say that all of those guys are aggressors. And he's right. But I see a difference between the sociopaths and the other types. I see a difference, from a moral perspective, between somebody who knowingly does wicked things and somebody who does wicked things thinking they are good.
With all that said, I don't really know all the answers. There's no way I can justify shooting cops who are sitting there eating lunch, even though they might partake in aggressive action at a later date. A big part of the problem is that, while cops do indeed bully the innocent, that's not ALL they do. There are some real crimes that they arrest people for as well. And those real crimes make it easy for them to deceive themselves into thinking that "law enforcement" is generally a good thing, whereas most of it really isn't.
That said, I do think Cantwell is asking the right questions (And I think its cool to see someone who's more radical than me, I guess it just shows that I'm not totally nuts
). I just can't quite go along with his answers.
