That was perfect.

I believe that we are hearing more about these cases because people are not as embarrassed as they might once have been to admit to being attached to their animals. Additionally, the Internet makes it possible for news to spread quickly and broadly. The Internet also creates the possibility for us to embarrass agencies that behave this way with publicity just as this blog does with many abuses by law enforcement.

As I have followed the issue of dogs being shot by police, I have been horrified to learn how often human beings are killed by the police with just as little or even less justification than when animals are killed. It seems that people are quick to assume that if the police shoot a human being they are justified in doing so, while more of us are willing to give a dog the benefit of the doubt (unless the dog is identified as a “Pit Bull”).

I came to understand this following the comments about a local situation in which an off-duty copy hunted down and killed a young man whom he thought was stealing a car in his neighborhood. It turned out that the young man was helping a friend change a tire. The comments on the story were shocking during the period when people assumed the young man was stealing a car. “Well he won’t steal any more cars” and comments to that effect. These kinds of attitudes allow this kind of unjustified violence to continue. The tone of the comments changed considerably once it became known he was not stealing.

One other factor is that when law enforcement officers kill dogs, they don’t necessarily know whether the dog belongs to someone they consider a “bad guy” or to an “upstanding citizen” and they kill dogs from all parts of society. That means that even people who would ordinarily have little or no contact with law enforcement have a reason to fear that their dog will be shot. There are too many who do not accept the rationale that “it’s just a dog.”

I hope that if enough dog guardians join together to succeed in changing law enforcement’s practices and policies dealing with dogs, this would have a positive effect on how they deal with shooting human beings. It seems to me it would be difficult to legally justify a standard for shooting humans that is more permissive than the standard for shooting dogs. I can only hope.

http://www.policemag.com/_Images/articles/M_ShotsFired_9.jpg

do any of you military veterans remember him from tours of duty or boot camp?

I spent nearly 8 years in the Army from early 2003 to mid 2010. From personal experience, the ratio of psychopaths to non-psychopaths steadily increased with each deployment. The sane Soldiers who could do other, more productive things, fled the ranks. When I first joined it was unheard of for a Staff Sergeant (E-6) with 7 plus years in not to re-enlist. Now, because years of un-winnable wars with poorly defined goals the military has been reduced to people who cannot do much else and psychopaths. 5-6 years ago I would have sided with tarran. But the military that you served in during the first Gulf War no longer exists.

That’s no more or less necessarily principled and no more or less necessarily tied to emotions. Statements like this remind me of conservative Christians who puzzle themselves over how atheists (or liberals, or just about anyone) can possibly have moral beliefs or standards. Just because someone believes in principles that you don’t, or rejects some principle that you hold, doesn’t mean their position is unprincipled.

The problem with these lunatic cops is not that they’re not obeying the rules of engagement. It’s that they are. Incidentally, that’s also the biggest problem with the military (i.e. imperial police).

I’d point you to the numerous arguments I had with Eric Dondero where he accused me of hating vets, but it’s not worth the trouble. After all, you’ve read my “numerous” posts without actually noticing my cynicism towards the military and my contempt towards the pro-military idolatry practiced by many of my countrymen.

To the people theorizing about war-zones, feral dogs, and Muslim culture; frankly that’s immaterial to the issue. What matters is that it was someone’s dog, not that it was a dog. I understand culturally it will tug on Westerner’s heart strings because of our affinity for the canine, but that’s not a principled stance. What is, is objecting to the destruction of private property, that because it is an animal is singularly unique and as such irreplaceable to the owner, by agents of the state, without due process of the law.

It’s a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.

Yes, I know you have a bias in this area. Have read your comments for a long time.

Like I said, watch Collateral Murder. Then come back and tell us what a bunch of reasonable and balanced sweetie pies the soldiers are.

They’re just not. Vet worship is good for you, but it is not good for us.

I was an office in the Navy who deployed to the Persian Gulf. The best man in my wedding was an Army enlisted man whose unit saw combat in Iraq. My best friend at the place I was working in 2011 was an ex army sergeant with a wonderful set of scars from the time her convoy got ambushed and she got sprayed with shrapnel. My personal experience, the anecdotes my friends tell, the things that acquaintances from libertarian blogs that are in the military all agree.

1) Active Duty soldiers get very good training in boot-camp about fire discipline and the geneva convention and the need to obey rules of engagement.

2) Active Duty soldiers – particularly in their early years are far more disciplined than the reservists.

3) The military faces consequences (lost battles, lost wars, death) from mistakes that don’t exist for law enforcement.

4) I have repeatedly heard complaints from people who took part in the unpleasantnesses in Iraq and Afghanistan that reservists who were cops tended to be really trigger happy.

5) The Abu Ghraib scandal had – at its heart – a bunch of MP’s who were prison guards from Pennsylvania who were applying their initiative to carry out the orders coming from General Sanchez’s office to abuse prisoners to get intel.

Now, I am not the sort of person who idolizes the military, far from it – I can write at length about the twisted incentives and psychological problems that inevitably arise out of the way governments organize & control their soldiers – but the fact is that the notion of vets that were brutalized and turned into amoral killing machines by fighting overseas is really the product of movies and is actually quite rare.

The problems with police brutality here in the U.S. is that over the past 130 years, various factions and movements inside the U.S. have supported it or turned a blind eye to it, while building an apparatus that increased government intrusion into the lives of people because it served their aims to keep eastern europeans from drinking, or white women from sleeping with black jazz musicans, or keeping white people from hiring black people etc. The problems started long before Reagan had the War Department fob off surplus weapons to the police. And trying to blame the nice little police state that the progressives and conservatives have colluded to construct on the military will result in you completely missing the mark.

Did does Officer Thomas Griffin, a two year veteran of the Austin PD, the guy who exited his car with his gun drawn and then shot Cisco — that Officer Thomas Griffin — was he in the military?

How about the ones who shot the dogs in Columbia?

Or Cheye Calvo’s dogs?

People want to believe that its military, as a class, is better than regular people. They are not. And when it comes to inflicting violence, they are worse. They have big heads because they get way too much hero worship for suffering relatively small discomforts and taking relatively small risks.

Want to know what the modern American soldier is like? Watch the Collateral Murder video. It tells you all you need to know about their attitudes. The attitudes are NOT what you have been told they are, Tarran. You have been “fed a bunch of BS.” Stop swallowing for goodness sakes.

This just highlights the need for a national tracking database.

Database should have not just the dogshooter’s name, but also his military training history.