Powderman said:
The cops in this incident were armed with six shot revolvers and pump shotguns. The criminals were armed with an AR-15, a HK 91, other firearms and LOTS of ammunition.
It was a tiny town. Would you expect every sheriff's dept. in the country to be equipped with rifles in 1980? A criminal gang can always get more and better weapons than the police can get on short notice. Give the police FALs, and criminals can still procure grenades and rocket launchers if they're well organized enough.
I totally agree that LE "militarization" is driven by increasing threats. What's missing from the equation seems to be a decrease in actual violent shootouts that all these militarization measures are designed to combat. What good is police militarization against psychotic office workers shooting up their former workplace, or psychotic students shooting their classmates? LE never has a problem swarming the area with LEOs after it's clear that something bad is going on. And the militarization efforts don't seem to help the last (or is it first) mile. Where's the training that a LEO needs to hit a VC with a rifle from 150 yds away? Only one LEO in a generation might ever need to do something like that, but those are the kinds of skills that, IMHO, would prevent history from being made by some psychotic jackass who would otherwise end up killing 5 people over the course of a botched, prolonged getaway chase.
Things have changed in some ways; cops and deputies today should have handguns, shotguns, and rifles available to them... and for the most part, they do. However, there have always been gunfights and there will always be gunfights until/unless something replaces guns as an effective fight-stopper. LE almost never loses fights, but there will continue to be some where the cost in casualties is high. There's also only so much that can be done on the LE side. You can't have officers walking around in Dragon Skin all day, even if the departments could fund that, because the officers would quit.
(this is a fairly interesting, but quite limited, list of historical shootouts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shootout )
Another factor was the widespread consumption of drugs that affected the mood and disposition of the user.
Millions of people take all sorts of drugs without robbing banks and shooting at people. Why not turn that around? Maybe if drugs were legal, the Columbine killers would have been too busy getting high (on coke or heroin or something, not PCP or Meth) to go on a psychotic rampage.
I just don't
care anymore whether cops are giving dogs hand signals, or whether there are drug dogs sniffing cars at DUI checkpoints. Those are mere artifacts of the flailing about of Law Enforcement as they try to do something about the "drug problem."
Society has simply run off its tracks. It's easy to blame cops or the courts or Federal Congress or state legislatures for drug laws, but a majority of the people want some sorts of drugs banned. They don't care about the Federal or State Constitutions; they don't care about the disparity in banning drugs legislatively when banning alcohol required a constitutional amendment. Principles don't seem to matter anymore. Something bad happens to someone, or someone abuses drugs, and all of a sudden some of his/her friends/relatives go on a crusade -- not to help
the person in question, necessarily, but to "help" all the
other people that the friends/relatives
imagine must be having the same sorts of problems.
Is it any surprise that Congress and the Courts reflect that popular sentiment? The Republican form of government doesn't guarantee rights that are under attack by the majority; it only makes the government slightly resistant to mob rule.
