There is a lot of chatter amongst conservative “2nd Amendment cops” and military folks about how they will not obey the orders when the grand pronouncement is made to take guns. It will be a cop sit out. What will really happen is quite different. Your Republican cop or military buddy will gladly and patriotically take your guns.
Gun grabs and grabs of anything else – children, money, real estate, raw milk – don’t come down the chain of command as such. There is not an edict that comes out saying:
Obama Executive Order 666:
All federal, state, and local law enforcement officers and all active duty military personnel are hereby ordered and required to seize firearms from all persons whose only crime is non-compliance with the firearms transfer provisions contained in the Children’s and Puppies’ Omnibus Health and Safety Act of 2014. Operation Patriot Crush will commence at midnight on June 1, 2014. All will be required to participate from that date forward and to actively engage in door-to-door gun seizure operations against fellow Americans. Constitutional objections by officers will not be recognized and are hereby deemed meritless.
Fortunately, your buddy gets to be in on the action the day that the door kicking is done. It will be cool. It’s like black ops. It’s like a video game. It’s like a military adventure against the ferreted-out scum of society. It’s exciting and he gets to be there. He can meet his cop pals at Pizza Hut later on for lunch and brag about how he punched a guy who “had an attitude” and made him throw up and said, “How’d you like that home boy? Get used to that. You are going to get a lot more of that in the joint, if you’re lucky!” Before the raid, he is already getting a few comic one liners ready to go with the catchy punch lines to be thrown in later describing something like how a perp soiled himself when your cop buddy demonstrated his manhood by pointing an M4 at his forehead. These guys are scum and he has to get his licks in and deal firmly with them before those pansies in the courts get ahold of them and dismiss everything on some technicality.
On the day of the raid, there are lots of cops milling around until the master of ceremonies begins the sermon. The M.C. is someone who is praiseworthy due to rank; somebody like the Chief of Police. A general tirade slowly builds from the orator about what various scum infiltrators have done to our communities. Veiled references to politics are made. It is mentioned how “the current administration, I won’t name names” is mollycoddling the crooks and not keeping our children safe. Then a hush of silence comes over the room as the M.C. introduces the plain clothes detective, investigator, or case agent.
The detective, in a dramatic almost whispering voice, says that no details can be given to the mass of assembled cops. People are in deep. There are sensitive infiltrators inserted in the group that need their identities protected, “So we can’t talk in detail but, just let it be known that these people we are going after today are the worst. They walk amongst our families at the mall. They go to school with your kids. They are a thorn in our side.” He looks over at the Chief of Police and begins a reciprocated round of suggestive head nodding, like yeah boy, I hear that. The uniformed crowd stays silent in awe of the plain clothes guy who has risen in the ranks to the point where he can sleuth together paper cases, even when no crimes are apparent, and bust down doors with another piece of paper. The detective says, “Seize computers, papers, and containers. Take cell phones and address books. Take reading material like gun magazines so we can show the judge where these people’s heads are at. Separate the subjects and get down incriminating statements. If there are any minors present, we have social services on standby to take the kids.”
The detective continues, “These folks have been given the chance to work things out and they refused to cooperate. They have been approached and would not comply. They were blatantly hostile. They very likely have it in for us. They didn’t say so in so many words but, we are dealing with fringe people here folks, so assume that their intentions are hostile to be on the safe side. We have people posted watching this place and there is not a lot of movement over there. They are lying low. That is not normal. These people have something to hide. We don’t have any arrest warrants but, we may file charges depending on what we find today.”
None of this is defined by the detective. This is a pre-game pep talk. Specifics will get in the way. Details are not given concerning how mama met the cops at the door one day holding her baby and said, “I do not consent to any searches” when they asked her to open the door and let them in. Why were they there? Well, that doesn’t matter for purposes of the briefing either. The family had returned a vaccination consent form to the school unsigned. The cops, responding to a request by a social worker who had been contacted by the school, were making a “welfare check.” In other words, they were going to snoop around and try to have a lengthy coerced conversation and get some juicy quotes for somebody’s collectivist social agenda. No one had observed a crime but, these people must be brought in line.
When the cops got snubbed at the door, they got there hackles up. So they went to their in-house detective, Al, who punched his password into the post-9/11 Regional Fusion Center website and asked for a full profile on the address, the residents, and the license plates. Good thing because, although the reports came back with pages of N/A, suspect Bob had bought a gun.
The detective then went to the gun store where the gun was sold. When he looked at the store’s records, he found out that Bob had bought another gun there. Detective Al always wanted to be a federal agent, so he had an excuse to drop by the ATF office, talk to the feds, and ask them to run a check. He left ATF giddy because he now had some new buzzwords to impress his bosses and co-workers.
He proudly proclaimed back at the office, “We bounced his name off of e-trace. Yup, he’s in there boys. The ATF has this guy’s number. His name is in their system. The computer lit up like a Christmas tree when we ran his name. We bounced him off of Operation Gunrunner too.” That was another database the detective heard mentioned while over at ATF. There was nothing in there for Bob, the guy he was snooping on but, the words sounded cool. Detective Al told his bosses that “ATF is all like, yeah, we are all over this guy but, they said we could deal with him.”
So, long story short, Bob filled out ATF forms when he bought a couple of guns and the information from those forms was put in a computer saying that he had bought those guns. Period. But, Detective Al needed to make some hay to get his next promotion so, he latched on to whatever was passing under his nose right then. To put the icing on the cake, the detective got some federal DHS funds from the sergeant in his department that controlled Operation Stonegarden funds and decided he would do something that would excite the bosses; send a snitch in to have a recorded talk with Bob and grab some good sound bites. Detective Al was rolling in glory now; federal funds, federal databases, and now getting in good with his bosses by sending a snitch in to throw out some ideas to a suspect.
The snitch posed as a landscape guy and offered to mow Bob’s lawn. Bob said, “No thanks. I mow my own lawn.” The snitch made a few more failed attempts to try to sell him some stuff out of the trunk of his car. Bob got suspicious and called 911. The police station went into Defcon 1.
The Chief called in Detective Al and said, “Shut the door. We got a call from your target’s house. Your man on the inside is compromised. We’ve got to move on this now, pronto, ASAP!!
Al didn’t want to admit that he had nothing, so he alternately shook and nodded his head to the chief, and mumbled, “That scum bag. Man this guy is trying to mess with us. I’m going to get paper on him.”
“Do it!! The Chief yelled. Do it yesterday!! Get this piece of garbage out of this town. Call the paper so they can have a reporter at the raid briefing that can snap some cop pictures without faces, except mine. Ted down at the Gazette is good for that. He will hold the story ‘til we round up the perps. Get a news release roughed out about how potential school shooting violence was averted, etc.”
