If God Is Pro-War – He Lied

I have a question to ask you. I would then like you to ask it of others, particularly of Christians:

How many innocent people would you be willing to kill – purely to defend yourself?

For example, let’s say you are well armed and an armed robber is shooting at you – but the robber is holding a hostage directly in front of him.

Or, suppose someone is shooting at you from within a crowd. Maybe some in the crowd don’t like you. Let’s push it even further and say that most of them hate you, and sympathize with the attacker. To shoot back, you would be aiming at the attacker, but you know you would also hit others.

I repeat:

How many of them would you be willing to kill, even absolutely and purely in self-defense?

I asked this question of someone fairly high up in military intelligence recently. I had to press the point as he beat around the bush for a while. His (eventual) response? "I’m not sure I know the answer to that question." Well, at least he was thinking about it.

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The Las Vegas Police Beat: Officer-Involved

• Officers William Mosher, Joshua Stark, and Thomas Mendiola. Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Last weekend, at the Costco in Summerlin, Erik Scott got into an argument with some workers at the store. A Costco employee noticed that he was carrying a handgun in his waistband, so they freaked out and called the cops, then evacuated the store. Three Las Vegas Metro police officers — William Mosher, Joshua Stark, and Thomas Mendiola — rolled up and waited outside the store. When they saw Scott walking out of the store, they came up behind him and grabbed him on the shoulder and screamed at him to get down. He turned around and obeyed less than instantaneously, so the cops opened fire and stone cold gunned him down in the parking lot. The cops claimed that before they lit him up with 7 shots, Scott had reached for his gun in his waistband. Then, later, they claimed that he refused orders [sic] and instead withdrew a handgun and pointed at them.. Most of the witnesses, including a friend who was standing right next to Scott when the police gunned him down, say that he never did. A few witnesses differ — they say they did see him take out his gun but that he never pointed it at the cops. Metro said that Scott was ripping merchandise apart, kind of going berserk, and that they had received numerous 911 calls for his erratic behavior and reporting he was carrying a gun. Turns out that what actually happened is that another customer saw Scott opening up a box of aluminum water bottles putting some in his cart and some on the floor, in order to find out how many would fit in his cooler; when store security tried to confront him about it, Scott’s voice got elevated. A number of later 911 calls, provoked by the store’s panicky evacuation, recorded parts of the cop’s confrontation with Scott; the police have refused to release the 911 tapes. The Costco has surveillance cameras on the parking lot; the police took the tapes, but claim that they haven’t looked at them yet because of technical issues. The investigation of this police shooting by Las Vegas Metro is, of course, being handled by more police from Las Vegas Metro. There will almost certainly never be any kind of public trial; a coroner’s inquest hasn’t been scheduled, but will probably happen sometime in September. (There has been only 1 Clark County coroner’s inquest in 34 years that ever found any Metro police shooting to be neither justified nor excusable.) Meanwhile, the three cops who gunned down Erik Scott have been given a paid vacation from their jobs. The local newsmedia has been all over this story, mainly because Scott shops in Summerlin and used to be a tank commander in the United States government’s Army. Bill Scott, Erik’s father, has said that he hopes this case will draw attention to how many people Metro has gunned down: There are a lot of people who have been killed in Las Vegas, a lot of them by the police. They didn’t have a voice. This time, quote me: they killed the wrong guy.

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More on Tazering Granny, and Similar Atrocities

Lona Varner, the 86-year-old grandmother who was shot twice with a Taser after 10 police officers swarmed her apartment last December 22, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and reportedly told the police that she wanted to die, reported the El Reno Tribune.

According to El Reno Police Chief Ed Brown, Varner– who was confined to a bed and tethered to an oxygen tank — ordered the police to leave. She then reportedly grabbed a kitchen knife and stated that “She was in control of her life.”

It was this “aggressive” gesture that supposedly made it necessary for the police to cut off the elderly woman’s oxygen supply and shoot her twice with a Taser.

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Lethal force

By now you’ve probably seen the video of the SWAT stormtrooper raid in Columbia, Missouri, during which a gang of heavily-armed cops violently stormed a house in order to serve a search warrant on a suspected possible nonviolent marijuana user. Turned out that his partner and 7 year old child were also there at the time; so were their two dogs, which the cops went ahead to shoot and kill. After murdering pets, they repeatedly lied about their actions to neighbors and the press, and the story has only come out because the video has been released on the Internet. In any case, if you haven’t read it, Radley Balko’s commentary on the story is mostly right on.

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Diffusion and Confusion

So once again someone has sent an airborne explosive device into a building that supposedly housed the “enemy” organization, and innocent people were killed and injured as part of the collateral damage.
 
And then it is discovered that the attacker had a “manifesto” of sorts that purports to explain the rationale for the strike. The four page “screed” begins "We the People…" and the full text can be found here.

 
What’s that? No, no, I’m not referring to Joe Stack piloting his airplane into the Echelon building in Austin, Texas. I’m referring to a missile that recently blew up a house, its intended target, in Afghanistan. Along with whatever “enemies” that were eliminated, twelve civilians—including six children—were also killed.
 

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Resistance

Imperial impunity: Samurai in feudal Japan were invested with Kiri sute-gomen, "authorization to cut and leave" -- a literal license to kill. Yet they were actually more accountable than police in contemporary America.

Imperial impunity: Samurai in feudal Japan were invested with Kiri sute-gomen, “authorization to cut and leave” — a literal license to kill. Yet they were actually more accountable than police in contemporary America.

“Time to end this! Enough is enough!” With those words, Officer Troy Meade of the Everett, Washington Police Department fired seven rounds into the body of Niles Meservey, killing him instantly. At the time, Meservey was stupefied by alcohol and sitting behind the wheel of his Corvette. The car was completely boxed in by other vehicles and a chain-link fence. According to several eyewitnesses — including another police officer — the 51-year-old man wasn’t going anywhere, and posed no threat to anyone. Meade shot the drunken man not because of any threat to himself or others; he did it because he was angry and frustrated over Meservey's non-compliance.

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Running on Empty

Conservative, n.: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

~ Ambrose Bierce

It is not surprising that, when culture is in collapse, so too is the level of thinking upon which it is based. This is doubtless the social equivalent of the proposition that water can never rise higher than its source. For a civilization to be creative and to thrive, it must have a substructure capable of producing the values that can sustain it. Our present civilization is dying because it no longer has such a base of support.

Western society has become so thoroughly politicized that it is difficult to imagine any area of human activity that can be said to be beyond the reach of the state. People’s diets, weight levels, child-raising practices, treatment of pets, how he can express anger, whether one can make alterations to his/her home – including replacing a lawn with rocks or plants: these are but a handful of private decisions intruded upon by the state. Other than complaints voiced by those directly affected by the state’s intervention, there are few who consistently defend the liberty of individuals to live as they choose.

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