Remember the Battle of Athens? Looks like the local sheriff in McMinn County is getting ready for another.
McMinn County is located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It boasts beautiful scenery, but its sheriff’s department can boast something else. The department received more military surplus guns than any other local department in the state last year. “We actually reconfigured the whole armory to accommodate all of this,” said Sheriff Joe Guy. Sheriff Guy oversees 31 officers and investigators, but his department received 161 army rifles and pistols, including 71 M16 rifles and 71 .45-caliber pistols.
Now I'm on record that this is a goodness thing, since it takes military assets and puts them out in the hinterlands where the armed citizenry can get their hands on it if, as and when. So I say, procure away!
7 comments:
Wha Hae! A public armory full of public weapons.
... and in a known location.
Sweet!
III
Contrary to what many who live and play in the freedom movement believe; the vast, VAST majority of Deputies and Police are hard working, dependable, conservative patriots.
LEO
III
Most interesting - and encouraging - is that the CBS affiliate in Nashville is reporting this, and actually interviewed Radley Balko about the militarization of police departments.
Newschannel 5 has also covered "drug interdiction for fun and profit" on I-40, noting how such stops were of westbound traffic, indicating LEO's were much more interested in confiscation of cash than drugs.
Small hope of the media turning the corner, but even a little bit of truth helps.
III N TN
If the sheriff is any kind of a "good guy", he should start auctioning off the surplus weapons. After all, even stockpiled weapons need maintenance, which is a drain on the budget. So it's a three-fer. By selling the surp weapons, that reduces the maintenance, increases the budget, and get highly desirable weapons into the hands of freedom loving citizens.
The rest is just details and paperwork.
B Woodman
III-per
If that were true LEO, then the War on Drugs and the police state as we know it would simply NOT EXIST.
You cannot honor your oath to the constitution and then violate people's right to self ownership and right to be secure in their persons by searching them for "officer safety" or to stop them from ingesting a substance of their choosing or searching them in an attempt to provide temporal security from things like extremely unlikely terrorist attack, etc.
These weapons cannot be legally disposed of by the Police Dept. other than returning them to the Federal Government. They are basically a long term loan from the Department of Defense.
LEO wrote...
Contrary to what many who live and play in the freedom movement believe; the vast, VAST majority of Deputies and Police are hard working, dependable, conservative patriots.
My experiences in the past few years would disagree with that assessment. In my experience, increasingly more and more of LEOs could properly be described as being either hard working, dependable, conservative or patriots. Increasingly, they look upon those of us whom they refer to as "civilians" (a misnomer as they are not, themselves, members of the armed forces) and look upon all such as "the enemy". They, in my experience, lump all "civilians" together as criminals whether or not we have done anything unlawful at all. Personally, while I believe that there remain individual LEOs who could be termed as above, I do not believe them even to be in the majority; much less "the vast, VAST majority". I suspect, in point of fact, that we are approaching the point where Sturgeon's Law ("ninety percent of everything is crap") obtains. When police are executing no-knock warrants for trivial offenses, killing innocent homeowners in their own homes and shrugging it off as "sh*t happens" or laughing about getting a paid vacation for their actions, one would be hard pressed to defend such a thesis.
Look at it this way. When even a confirmed, died-in-the-wool leftist such as Bill Mahr proclaims that we are living in a police state, things have to be well and truly going to the dogs.
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