The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said Wednesday that chapters in 23 states have filed over 255 open records requests pertaining to the militarization of local police departments around the country since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in what the group is calling its most concentrated effort yet to assess the growth of America’s police state.The Raw Story
You will probably want to read the whole piece. It is short and suggests how out of hand this is getting, especially with the assertion of the AG that drones can be used to assassinate Americans on US soil. So much for Obama as constitutional law professor. He joins John Yoo as a traitor to constitutional law.
It's no wonder that advocates of Second Amendment rights are so vocal. This is not just paranoia, even though there may be a lot of paranoia involved, too.
Miguel Caballero has been making bullet-proof clothes for politicians and other bigwigs for 20 years, but not for kids. The latest US school massacre has changed that.This year he plans a line for children — T-shirts, vests, and combination backpack-vests — and geared toward the US market.
Caballero has made good money in his 22-year-old business with a factory on the outskirts of Bogota. He sells around 50,000 garments a year that go for about $2,000 a piece, but the US market had been tough to crack.Then, after a lone and deranged gunman killed 20 small children and six staffers at Sandy Hook Elementary School last month in Newtown, Connecticut, he started getting orders from very worried parents.
“We would answer that we do not make clothes for kids. But the emails kept coming,” Caballero said.
So, in just a week, he designed garments and subjected them to ballistic tests. Now his factory is fitted to churn out a first lot of 1,800 bullet-proof garments for children and is waiting for firm orders.
The peculiar part of this overreaction is it says that banks and government officials see peaceful protests as a threat to their hold on power. It’s odd that they see their position as precarious, unless they have convinced themselves of their vulnerability as an excuse for clamping down even harder on the rest of us.Naked Capitalism
In a Salon piece titled “Why Psychiatrists Can't Predict Mass Murderers,” McNally addresses the reasonable urge to make sense of the senseless and to learn from this incident. While many in the media have been recounting Loughner’s troubled past and wondering why authorities seemingly failed, time and again, to take action in ways that could have prevented this tragedy from occurring, McNally explains the difficulty of such intervention:
Let's assume that we've identified a set of characteristics often exhibited by mass murderers. What does that buy us? It enables us to answer the question, “Given that someone is a mass murderer, what characteristics is he likely to exhibit?” That's an interesting question, but it's not the one we want to answer. Rather, the question we really want to answer is, “Given that someone exhibits this profile of characteristics, how likely is he to commit mass murder?” Answering this question is extremely difficult because the predictors are invariably far more common than the event we hope to predict, and mass murder is very rare. Although mass murderers often do exhibit bizarre behavior, most people who exhibit bizarre behavior do not commit mass murder.
Despite the difficulties presented, McNally accepts for science the need to learn from incidents like the Arizona shooting. “The consequences of missing a future mass murderer in our midst are appalling, and the enormity of such a mistake fuels the hope that someday science will overcome the daunting challenge of distinguishing the truly dangerous from the merely odd.”Balkanization
