United Liberty

New York Mayor Michael “Ban the Big Gulp” Bloomberg is at it again.  This time, he’s voicing some ideas that are, quite frankly, beyond the idiocy he routinely spouts off.  This time, he told CNN’s Piers Morgan that he thinks police officers should go on strike until guns are outlawed.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told CNN’s Piers Morgan last night that he doesn’t “understand why police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say we’re going to go on strike, we’re not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.”

First, Bloomberg is actually asking law enforcement officers - you know, the people who can actually arrest criminals, take them to jail, and all that - to go on strike to affect political change in this country?  Really? That’s just downright terrifying…if any police officers were willing to actually do it.

The reason that it’s scary is that many people obey laws simply because of a fear of going to prison.  If there are no police due to a strike, then that deterent is no longer there.  Welcome to downright anarchy.  Bloomberg isn’t a complete idiot, despite his comments.  He knows this.  What he’s basically asking is that police use extortion techniques on the American people to affect change in gun laws.  Extortion happens to be a crime that police arrest people for!

But I’m sure Mayor Bloomberg won’t let that stop him.

Luckily, this isn’t likely to happen.  You see, a large number of law enforcement officers in this country are supporters of the Second Amendment.  They know that there is only so much they can do.  When they roll up on the scene of a shooting, they much perfer learning that the dead guy is some scumbag who thought your life didn’t matter as opposed to it being a married mother of two who had stopped for tacos.

The above linked Reason article contains a lot of examples of police officers doing bad things.  I’m not a fan of the view that cop = bad.  I was raised by a police officer, and there are organizations like LEAP that take a strong pro-liberty stance on a key issue.  There are police officers, like I mentioned, who support the Second Amendment.  You don’t hear about them because the police chiefs set the tone for what gets said to the press, and they are political appointees.  As one officer puts it on his website, Second Amenment P.D.:

I don’t think I’d be talking out of school if I complained that the political policeman doesn’t speak for us all…… The political Chief of Police, as a matter of fact, no more represents the beat cop than Lee Iacocca represents the auto worker!

However, such facts don’t sway someone like Bloomberg.  After all, it’s far sexier to pretend that statist efforts to disarm private citizens are about “officer safety” than to admit that bad people are going to do bad things and it’s better that citizens have the means to protect themselves.