A government that aims gun barrels at Amish dairy farmers is capable of the unimaginable.

A U.S. Department of Education SWAT force burst into Kenneth Wright’s Stockton, Calif., home in June 2011. “I look out of my window, and I see 15 police officers,” Wright told KXTV. Wright said one officer forced him by the neck onto the front lawn. “He had his knee on my back, and I had no idea why they were there.” While officers searched his house, Wright said, “They put me in handcuffs in a hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” then ages 3, 7, and 11.

 

The feds sought Wright’s estranged wife, apparently for suspected financial-aid fraud. However, she had moved away a year earlier. Regardless, such a mobilization seems unnecessary to probe someone for possibly swindling scholarship money.

I have always been supportive of the police, knowing that they had dangerous jobs and dealt with a host of unsavory characters.  But there comes a time when the generic support of law enforcement in the face of contrary evidence makes me pause.

Perhaps it’s the new media which brings these injustices to an unwary public, or perhaps it’s because there is really a different attitude on the part of some police forces. But the stand-by assumption that the police are there to protect us needs re-evaluation.

Why does the National Park Service; the Postal Inspection Service; the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Labor, and Veterans Affairs; the Bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Fish and Wildlife Service; the Small Business Administration and Railroad Retirement Board need armed agents?

Which brings me to the current drive on the part of the government to disarm the civilian population. Just maybe they would prefer there to be no resistance when the Small Business Administration kicks down your door in the middle of the night and hogties you at the point of their assault weapons.  Is crime so rampant that we need 160 SWAT Team raids per day?   Or is the sense of power from the use of military weapons irresistible to the police?

Other than geography, what is the difference between the secret police of any fascist or communist dictatorship run for the benefit of the ruling class and the examples – the very recent examples –of crimes against civilians that were recounted in the article in National Review. Isn’t it telling that one of the leading Conservative publications should question whether citizens of this country should be wary of the police and their government?

Glenn Reynolds wrote a column for USA Today Americans are losing trust in government. There are more and more reasons for that, and not because the government does so many things badly. It's also because people that work for the government, the people that we once called "public servants" now have the attitude expressed in the following vignette.

When financial questions arose regarding the Mountain Pure Water Company, Washington did not send a few staffers to inspect documents. Instead, last spring, some 50 armed Treasury agents breached Mountain Pure’s headquarters in Little Rock, Ark. They seized 82 boxes of records, herded employees into the cafeteria, snatched their cell phones, and refused to let them consult attorneys.

“We’re the federal government,” Mountain Pure’s comptroller, Jerry Miller, says one pistol-packing fed told him. “We can do what we want, when we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The Diplomad 2.0 (who has a wonderful way with words) gives the back of his hand to the Gang of Blue

Lots about this crazed ex-LAPD cop Dorner who has been on a killing spree and has disappeared. The wonderfully trained and always dedicated public servants in Southern California's police forces have responded to the presence of a deranged colleague by taking a page from their colleagues in the NYPD: they have been shooting up innocent people and showing, once again, that increasingly cops in America are out of control. They are poorly trained, brutish, cowardly, and overpaid bureaucratic bullies to whom we have ceded extraordinary power and give exaggerated deference. I am not saying that all cops are this way, but most, yes, most are or will become that way after a couple of years of service in the Gang of Blue.