Subject: Already had my Tea Party with MP-5's and a Full Tactical Team
I already had my tea party last night, approximately 20:00 hours. (8:00 PM, and I missed Sig Hanson fishing crabs too...) It featured roughly eight squads of Brooklyn Park police with MP-5's breaking up my porkchop picnic, cuffing me, my son, and son-in-law, and kneeling us down in my driveway in front of the garage, while my little grandkids cried and thought we were on an episode of Cops.
(The garage door was OPEN Mr. Mayor. Open.)
My son-in-law went into Falluja when they cleaned it out a couple of years back with the Marines and is now returning to Iraq with the Oklahoma National Guard. He's up dropping off the kids so he can go back down to Oklahoma for extended training before deployment. (My daughter, also a former Marine and Iraq vetran, is also now in the Oklahoma National Guard and so they have to go to training together and have to leave the kids with us a while.) In the course of the festivities last night, my son-in-law asked to have a look at the new rifle my son bought, and we also brought out an exotic Italian target pistol. Some arse-headed squealer driving past decided that we were threatening the neighborhood with our evil guns, sauteed mushrooms, chicken legs and pork products.
Of course, the rifle in question was an AK-47, which was ironically bought just down the street in Brooklyn Park at Mills Fleet Farm. AK's are evil to Mysterians, so obviously just seeing one in the neighborhood is cause in their minds to send out the cops for a full strip search and thorough beating of the owners. The dufus who tattled probably called in a panicked and highly inflated report of festering terrorism. I went by for the police report this morning to find the BPPD was all over the parking lot of the station apparently in the middle of some week-long FBI/Homeland Security based training. Hmm––wonder who instigated all that?
As we sat out in front of the garage last night, I had just barely got done listening to the old Mayor talk about that same issue on GL. We all had a laugh over it as I took a bite of porkchop. And gee, suddenly we noticed some earnest-looking cop taking a prone position with an assault rifle in my neighbor's bushes and some other cops pointing assault weapons at me from my mom's driveway on the other side of the yard.
The only possible rationale I can see for this extreme action is that by policy, Chief Davis of the Brooklyn Park Police Department treats the simple ownership of a firearm as probable cause for any sort of search or detention he cares to take up. If you can see a gun on the property, through a window, through the back woods, in the garage, in the back of the pickup, that's good enough to go in and jerk the resident of said abode around. Hell, you wouldn't even have to see one. You could just say you saw one and especially if you knew the residents were gun owners, you could send the Brooklyn Park SWAT Team over and roust the household. I bet they'd just turn the place over till they found some––and then what? Oh, yeah, sorry you're not a felon or wife beater and you can have a gun. Oh but you'll have to prove that to me in handcuffs any time I see you have one...or if some Obamite claims you have one.
What this means in practice, in spite of it being entirely legal to carry, pack, own, store, display firearms especially on your own property, any arsehole neighbor can call the police and they will obligingly threaten to kill you (which is what they are doing when they tell you to put your hands up and point a gun at your head by the way) and attempt to humiliate you in your own driveway on the pretext that just maybe you're a crack dealer or terrorist or something. Or worse yet, a Republican. The premise is simply that only criminals have guns. It's that simple. Basically, alleged gun possession is considered by the Brooklyn Park Police to be probable cause for search and seizure and detention. Whether that comes out of Chief Davis or through some new Homeland Security initiative is unclear.
I've something of a Rightie reputation in the neighborhood and my daughter and actually two sons-in-law are all ex Marines now in the Army Guard. (One son-in-law wasn't at the party because he's from St Paul and was already packing to head out with the Red Bull for Iraq today and we had his parties already.) So maybe it's just a convergence of all my war-vetran-in-the-window memorabilia combined with my known evil conservatism that targets me for such abuse. In that case it's obviously alright. Obviously I brought it all upon myself. I should hide my gun ownership like the dangerous mental defectives all gun owners are. It's the smart thing to do. Lay low. Maybe they'll take the Jews first and leave me alone...
But seriously. We have our rapidly-dissapointing-me president, Barack O'Bummer and his band of gun-and-conservative-hating-buttheads now running Homeland Security issuing instructions to guys like Chief Davis to be on the lookout for violent, radical Right Wing militias recruiting Iraq veterans into hate-cult death squads. Obviously, we domestic terrorists conduct these recruitment drives through the influence of Miller Lite and a good barbeque in plain sight of the public. We focus our efforts in clandestine hotbeds of citizen's militia activity, like Brooklyn Park.
Say what you will, but I never had a tactical team cuff me in my own driveway and take my guns away just on a lark when GW was running Homeland Security. See, that's what I call an actual abuse of power, not some theoretical possibility of totalitarianism I kept hearing George Bush was eventually going to get up to. Obama hasn't surrendered one lick of all that Imperial power the hateful Lefties kept crying about when they claimed ol' W was amassing it. He's just redirecting it. Face it. They hate guns. They hate conservatives. They hate people with religious convictions, and I mean absolutely hate. This whole Homeland Security farce, this fabrication, this demented, hand-wringing Wellstonite ultra-liberal paranoid delusion about some fabricated rise in hate groups with militant whiteboy gun squads killing off their beloved Barack Obama is entirely concocted from their own disturbed, partisan mental states. The "facts" they support this contention with are dummied up by the Obama administration far more gratuitously than the "evidence" for weapons of mass destruction ever was by Bush's CIA.
Mr. President. Has anyone pointed out that it's not the fat old Norskies showing off their gun toys at the family cookout who brought down those buildings in New York? Criminals don't let you know they have guns. Lawful citizens are the ones who have no reason to hide them. You've got it ass-backwards.
Which gives me pause to think:
A really cool Right Wing nutcase protest would be to have everyone sit in their front yard with a legal gun in plain view. Maybe we can pick a day like Memorial day. Leave the ammo inside. Don't weild it at anyone or anything. Just show us your guns ladies. They only have so many cops out there, and they can't roust the entire state without any probable cause just because some fuzzy peacenik neighbor doesn't like knowing someone in the hood has firearms. It would be like fireworks. And those are illegal. Sure, the little old granny-lefties will keep calling in those reports. But you can only chase down so many Roman candles.
The final irony however, was coming back in the house after it was over and finding the donation pledge for the Fraternal Order of Police I'd been filling out before the wife told me I had to start the grill. I'm still debating whether or not to put that check in the mail. Oh well. They were pretty gentle. And we talked guns a while after they took the cuffs off. They really thought this one was cool:
[Edited on 4/15/2009]
They're here...