Do you believe the FBI and NSA when they say more than 50 plots were foiled by NSA surveillance?

[Savannahmann]

90. A pretty reasonable response?

So the police prepared for this reasonable response, by making sure that everyone on the force had military battle fatigues, military grade automatic weapons, military grade ballistic armor, and then there are the tanks. That seems reasonable to you? Again we aren't talking about a handful of guys who are strolling about with this emergency gear in their trunks. We're talking enough cops to swamp Boston and Watertown armed and equipped like a special forces team assaulting an enemy compound. Nothing about that raises little red flags anywhere in your world view?

There was a time not too long ago that the popular fiction had it that a cop faced a less than 10% probability that he/she would ever discharge their weapon in the line of duty. Now, there is a less than 10% chance they don't have a machine gun. Why do they need machine guns? Why do they need fully automatic machine guns to enforce the law and carry on the image that they are protecting the population? How many bad guys have fully automatic machine guns that make the police feel they need the advantage of all that crap?

Reasonable response? It is reasonable in your mind that people come to your door, and point guns at you, and tell you that you must evacuate your house with your hands visible while they go inside searching for a bad guy who is probably not there?

True story, a police officer ran into my yard and asked if I'd seen a guy run past. I said no, and walked into the house alerted the wife that the cops lost another one. Then I sat down on my porch with my door locked. Two more asked if I'd seen anything, I answered the same way, and continued to sit there. Nobody was going into my house to search for anything, they had a right to ask me, but not enter my house without either a warrant, or probable cause, and they had neither.

Again your answer brings us back to the same argument. Because the residents, or citizens, thought that it was OK, does that make it right? Your argument seems to be yes. But was that argument enough to save Mussolini? The Italian people loved him, and Fascism started in Italy. The trains all ran on time, and the Government took care of the people, providing services for the people. The Residents and citizens loved it, so who were we to argue that it was wrong?

The people of Jonestown loved Jim Jones. The Branch Dividians thought that David Koresh was the reincarnation of the Lord. The majority of people in Alabama thought it was just fine and dandy to have the African-American's segregated. Shall I continue? I can for some time now where the majority within a smaller set thought that something was fine, and history shows it was not.

We come from two points of view. One that the ends justifies the means. The other is that the rules apply always, and without those rules, the Constitution does not contain civil rights that are set within stone, but is written if not in pencil, something with a lot of white out. History shows that paramilitary police is always the tool of the authoritarian state. Perhaps I am wrong, and this will be a first. But from what I've seen so far, we are well on the path. Perhaps it won't happen under President Obama, and it might not happen under whomever comes next, but it will happen eventually.

The time to stop it with minimal bloodshed is not when the boot stomps, but long before. We are a representative republic, and that means that we choose people to represent, and answer to us. To be represented, we must be informed, and we must understand that the rules matter always. If we don't, if we aren't informed, or we don't object when the Government takes a little more of our civil rights, eventually we end up as subjects.