McTag wrote:
I don't envisage anytime soon taking up arms against Her Majesty's Armed Forces. :wink:
Picture this. Sometimes it's just one stupid law or one stupid official the people need to take up arms against and not her Majesty's entire government.
The idea of the "no knock raid" arose under Nixon's administration due to paranoia concerning drugs. A worse law is not even imaginable.
It quickly became a favorite passtime amongst people who knew no better to finger people they didn't like as drug dealers (anonymous calls) and sit back and watch the excitement as the cops broke down the victims doors and ransacked their domiciles at two or three AM in the morning, without bothering to knock.
Now, all of that flies in the face of the very oldest tenet of AngloSaxon common law, i.e. the idea that a man's home is his castle and, in the United States at least, a person is legally entitled to shoot and kill anybody doing such a thing, whether they happen to be government agents or police or whatever.
Naturally enough, somewhere back in the mid to late seventies before the internet age, out around western Maryland, the situation got out of hand. There was a salesman whose entire life consisted of salesmanship, farmers daughters, and pistol contests, and somebody fingered this guy as a drug dealer because he was sleeping with a farm girl the fingerer thought was his, and the guy was lying asleep in a hotel room with a 44 magnum caliber pistol he'd been working on that night lying on a night table when five police and federal agents broke his door down at 3 AM in the morning. Only the salesman survived.
At the ensuing trial, the salesman's lawyer correctly pointed out that Al Capone's employees had been dressed as cops for the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929 and that, when people break your door down at three in the morning, their manner of dress is basically irrelevant, and you have to assume the worst. The jury took fifteen minutes to reach a decision to acquit.
I kind of like that, and view it as a benefit of having an armed society. It tends to keep assholes in positions of authority in check somewhat.
It went for years afterwards and you never heard about "no knock" raids again and, unfortunately, lessons like that do not tend to stay learned forever and you're starting to read about no knock raids again, but I assume it will only be another year or so and some similar case will materialize, and the no knock idea will be gone for another twenty or thirty years at least and hopefully somebody will figure the whole thing out and ban the idea.
