"But Gardner, like nearly everybody else in his line of work, believes that his job is not to protect the public, but to make it submit to the supposed authority of the State. Which is why, when Massey quite reasonably decided he was no longer going to play the role in which Gardner had cast him, the UHP officer committed the crime of assault with a deadly weapon by shooting Massey with his Taser.
This was done while Massey was walking away from Gardner. His behavior was non-cooperative, but also non-threatening. The UHP's policy governing the use of a Taser does not permit an officer to use it against someone who is merely non-cooperative; the subject must pose some kind of threat to himself, the officer, or innocent bystanders in order for a Taser attack to be justified. The problem here is that Gardner, a 14-year veteran of the UHP, was about to lose bladder control (an affliction common to geldings), so frightened had he become by Massey's non-threatening behavior. As the hero explained to a colleague a few minutes later, Massey was "making me nervous as hell" by his insistence on being treated as a reasonable adult, rather than behaving like a timid child. "I was like, nah, we ain't playing this game," Gardner boasted to the second officer by way of justifying the Taser strike. "Good," gloated the second tax-fed parasite. "Good for you." Bear in mind here that it was Gardner who was playing a "game" by needlessly escalating an unpleasant situation. If he had been genuinely concerned about his personal safety, why did he order Massey from the car, rather than simply handing him the citation and walking away, when there was no reason for an arrest? Why commit an armed assault on a husband and father in front of his family, and then threatening the wife with arrest for objecting to her husband's treatment? This was undisguised, needless aggression fueled by an adolescent need on Gardner's part to assert dominance over someone who wasn't part of his club. Which is why his behavior received the immediate and unqualified approval of another member of that gang. We are incessantly hectored about the supposedly indispensable role played by police in protecting us from the anarchic violence that would prevail in their absence. Yet every single day - thanks, in no small measure, to the advent of on-line video - we see how police themselves have become the most dangerous predators we face. Through his literary creation Screwtape, C.S. Lewis once warned (I paraphrase) that one of the Devil's most effective tricks is to rivet the public mind on the danger posed by a vice that is the exact opposite of the one currently in vogue. For example, where gluttony is ubiquitous, the Devil tempts people to condemn the vanity of those who strive to remain thin. In like manner, we are always and ever admonished about the evils of anarchy at a time when the State and its agents are, with ever-increasing brazenness, imposing unalloyed tyranny on our society. We are treated to pious homilies about the need for citizens to respect the law when those exercising government power are becoming entirely emancipated from any restraints on their discretionary use of lethal violence. We are instructed to ruminate on the manifold hypothetical outrages that could be committed in the name of anarchy, even as the very tangible atrocities committed by State agents accumulate. In his valuable new book A Nation of Sheep, retired federal Judge Andrew Napolitano describes how our society - both the Regime ruling us and far too many of the ruled - has succumbed to positivism, a legal perspective in which "the law is whatever those in power say it is.... Under positivism, whoever or whatever controls the government, whether a majority or a minority, always rules and always gets its way." As Napolitano explains, positivism "is perhaps the most primitive legal theory, having evolved only slightly from the sort of justification that could be offered for following the demands of a tribal chieftain or general-turned-dictator. The theory promotes fear rather than respect.... The problem today in America, the greatest and gravest threat to personal freedom in this country, is that the positivists are carrying the day." During the 14 years he has been a State Trooper - meaning that he has been cared for at the expense of better people who make an honest living - John Gardner has been deeply marinated in positivism. While he's clearly too dim to expatiate the theoretical concepts, Gardner's behavior indicates that he has an instinctive understanding of positivism in practice. As someone clad in a State-issued costume, given a gun and a Taser and expansive discretion in using those implements of violence, Gardner clearly behaves he doesn't have to play any "games" with those who aren't part of his tribe. "What the hell is wrong with you?" exclaimed Massey as Gardner, his face contorted with primal rage, threatened him with a Taser. That's a useful question. A better one is this: What the hell is wrong with the rest of us, that we are willing to live under a system of the sort that rules us? _____ *authoritah (n.) -- The conceit that people clad in ridiculous State-issued costumes are owed some kind of reflexive deference by the decent, law-abiding citizenry upon whom such tax-feeders inflict themselves. Dum spiro, pugno! http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/11/pistol-packing-positivists-our-enemy-in.html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
