Scum Will Side With Scum

     Imagine the following interview / conversation between a screener for a police academy and a candidate for admission:

Interviewer: Let’s talk about some typical police-response situations. Here’s one: A school has been invaded by a shooter who’s already taken several lives when your team gets there. You expect that when you get there, you’ll rush in and take the killer down, but your commander tells you to wait. What do you do?
Candidate: Shoot the commander.

Interviewer: WHAT? You’d deliberately cripple or kill the designated on-scene commander?
Candidate: Well, of course! He’s just sided with the killer – to let the killer keep on killing without hindrance. That makes his life less important than the lives of the kids in the school, so I would disable him and go in. A wound to his calf would do it.

Interviewer: What about your duty to obey the orders of your superiors?
Candidate: An order to allow a killer to keep killing when we’re there to stop him is a clearly illegal order. I have neither the legal nor the moral duty to obey it.

     What would this candidate’s prospects for admission be?

     The incidents in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, and most recently Uvalde, Texas have parents agog from coast to coast. The shocking, cowardly behavior of the police strikes many as worse than the behavior of the clearly insane murderer. Of particular significance was the on-scene commander’s attempts to prevent anyone else from trying to deal with the shooter as the police stood idly by. The police even handcuffed a woman who intended to do so, before she could make the attempt.

     Supposedly, the decision to stand by for nearly an hour while Salvador Ramos continued to terrorize and kill came from the on-site commander. Cops today seldom disregard an order from “higher authority.” Add that they probably placed their own well-being above that of the kids. The combination produced some tragic consequences: twenty-one lives lost, nineteen of them children.

     But the BORTAC officers who arrived disregarded the commander. They went in and killed Ramos. Did the commander try to impede them with anything but words? I haven’t encountered any report of such. Whatever the case, they acted and ended the atrocity.

     However, if any of those officers were to apply for entry into the Uvalde, Texas police force, I wouldn’t rate their prospects any higher than that of the hypothetical academy candidate in the previous segment. Authoritarians dislike those who defy authority. They purely hate being told “where to shove it,” especially by men willing to run toward the sound of the guns.

     The type of character we’d prefer to have in our police forces is far less likely to be admitted than him who pledges to slavishly follow orders. As this recognition penetrates, it will have severe consequences the “authorities” won’t like.

     Just yesterday, the New York State Legislature passed a radical gun-licensing bill by resounding majorities. Governor Kathy Hochul, who is rabidly, violently opposed to firearms in the hands of private citizens, will surely sign it into law. The cluster of armed men who protect her won’t have any problems acquiring guns, of course. Moreover, they’ll be guns We the Formerly Free won’t be permitted to own.

     Politicians in both parties, not only in New York but throughout the nation, want to take our guns away from us. They fear that we might one day decide that we’ve had enough of them. The sole antidote to that fear is to disarm us. Democrat, Republican, or whatever, they’re all for “keeping us safe,” though “from whom?” is a question they prefer not to answer.

     There isn’t one of them who’s sincerely “anti-gun.” What they want is a gun monopoly: all the guns in hands that answer to them and no one else. That would make them feel safe. As for the rest of us, what of it? Criminals will never surrender their weapons. Given the increasingly craven nature of “law enforcement,” we’ll have to defend ourselves with platitudes.

     Politicians – the great majority of them, anyway – are scum. Federal, state, and local; they’re cut from the same cloth. Scum will side with scum; their interests tend to be compatible. The remainder of this exercise in logic, I leave to my Gentle Readers.