{"id":47557,"date":"2014-10-01T05:00:36","date_gmt":"2014-10-01T10:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=47557"},"modified":"2014-09-30T19:45:50","modified_gmt":"2014-10-01T00:45:50","slug":"because-im-here-to-solve-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=47557","title":{"rendered":"Because I’m Here To Solve Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Police departments – at least, some that Mother Jones <\/em>talked with – are ostensibly\u00a0trying to get rid of surplus military gear<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Even before police militarization made the news, hundreds of police departments were finding that grenade launchers, military firearms, and armored vehicles aren’t very useful to community policing. When Chelan County police officers requested one armored car in 2000\u2014the request that landed them three tanks\u2014they pictured a vehicle that could withstand bullets, not land mines. Law enforcement agencies across the country have quietly returned more than 6,000 unwanted or unusable items to the Pentagon in the last 10 years, according to Defense Department data provided to Mother Jones by a spokeswoman for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who has spearheaded a Senate investigation of the Pentagon program that is arming local police. Thousands more unwanted items have been transferred to other police departments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The catch?\u00a0 The Pentagon doesn’t really want it all back.\u00a0 It’s cheaper to let local cops maintain it than to keep it in Federal storage.<\/p>\n

Which is vexing some cops:<\/p>\n

In reality, however, police departments may find the returns process slow, mystifying, or nonfunctional. Online law enforcement message boards brim with complaints that the Pentagon refuses to take back unwanted guns and vehicles\u2014like this one, about a pair of M14 rifles that have survived attempts by two sheriffs to get rid of them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve got an obvious answer – one that’ll make cops, the Pentagon and <\/em>citizens (the right ones, anyway) happy:\u00a0sell it to private citizens.\u00a0 Or at least the private citizens that pass the\u00a0same background check that\u00a0qualifies them for a state carry permit.\u00a0 It’ll\u00a0save government money, and make the country safer by making Real Americans better-armed.<\/p>\n

Facetious?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Halfway.\u00a0\u00a0A fair chunk of this equipment could, and should <\/em>by all rights, be going into the “Civilian Marksmanship Program”.\u00a0 But Barack Obama has been sandbagging the CMP for the past six years – which is why the price of surplus\u00a0M-1 Garand rifles (from WW2 and the Korean War) is so very high these days.<\/p>\n

But I\u00a0digress.<\/p>\n

And I’m about to digress some more; it’d seem we have some real powderpuffs in uniform (empasis added):<\/p>\n

[Hillsborough NC police lieutenant Davis] Trimmer has twice requested permission to return three M14 rifles that are too heavy for practical use<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Too heavy for practical use?”\u00a0 They weight eight pounds<\/em>.\u00a0 Our troops lugged them all over Vietnam, for crying out loud.<\/p>\n

Maybe the lieutenant was referring to carrying all three of them together?<\/p>\n

Turn them over to me, if that’d help…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Police departments – at least, some that Mother Jones talked with – are ostensibly\u00a0trying to get rid of surplus military gear: Even before police militarization made the news, hundreds of police departments were finding that grenade launchers, military firearms, and armored vehicles aren’t very useful to community policing. When Chelan County police officers requested one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,286],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery","category-police-powers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47557"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47587,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47557\/revisions\/47587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}