“This is the sort of thing that should never, ever happen in a free society,” says Quin Hillyer at the Center for Individual Freedom site.
By “this … sort of thing” Hillyer means pre-dawn raids in which “thuggish bureaucrats … burst into a man’s home and handcuff him in front of his children because his estranged wife is late on student loan payments.”
I’ve already commented on this vicious and stupid Department-of-Education-sponsored raid. I return to the story to echo Hillyer’s suggestions for reform.
He observes that such baseless assaults on innocent citizens are “an increasing problem.… [A] horrific number of similar stories [show] that we are all subject, at the whim of idiots without any good reason to carry arms, to tactics reminiscent of a terrible police state.” More and more commonly, agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Railroad Retirement Board, which have no business having armed agents, nevertheless do.
Hillyer suggests that the SWAT-like raid teams and the people who order them should both be subject to imprisonment for these flagrant abuses of power. He also wants Congress to stop criminalizing mere clerical errors and to “de-arm federal agents.” The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, concurs, saying he’d “like to see some Tea Party members of Congress pass bills to disarm all non-law-enforcement agencies.”
Yes. Let the congressmen openly debate and vote whether rampant, arbitrary, armed raids of innocent citizens should or should not continue.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.