A policeman was

premeditatedly shot dead today.

Now, I don’t regard shooting a policeman as the worst possible

crime — indeed, I can easily imagine circumstances under which I

would do it myself. If he were committing illegal violence — or

even officially legal violence during the enforcement of an unjust

law. Supposing a policeman were criminally threatening someone’s

life, say. Or suppose that he had been ordered under an act of

government to round up all the Jews in the neighborhood, or confiscate

all the pornography or computers or guns. Under those circumstances,

it would be not merely my right but my duty to shoot the

policeman.

But this policeman was harming nobody. He was shot down in

cold blood as he was refueling his cruiser. His murderer subsequently

announced the act on a public website.

The murderer said he was “protesting police-state tactics”. If

that were his goal, however, then the correct and appropriate

expression of it would have been to kill a BATF thug in the process of

invading his home, or an airport security screener, or some other

person who was actively and at the time of the protest implementing

police-state tactics.

Killings of policemen in those circumstances are a defensible

social good, pour encourager les autres. It is right and proper

that the police and military should fear for their lives when they

trespass on the liberty of honest citizens; that is part of the

balance of power that maintains a free society, and the very reason

our Constitution has a Second Amendment.

But this policeman was refueling his car. Nothing in the

shooter’s justification carried any suggestion that the shooter’s

civil rights had ever been violated by the victim, or that the

murderer had standing to act for any other individual person whose

rights had been violated by the victim. This killing was not

self-defense.

There are circumstances under which general warfare against the

police would be justified. In his indymedia post The

Declaration of a Renewed American Independence the shooter utters

a scathing, and (it must be said) largely justified indictment of

police abuses. If the political system had broken down sufficiently

that there were no reasonable hope of rectifying those abuses, then I

would be among the first to cry havoc.

Under those circumstances, it would be my duty as a free human

being under the U.S. Constitution not merely to shoot individual

policemen, but to make revolutionary war on the police. As Abraham Lincoln

said, “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people

who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing

government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending

it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow

it.”

But the United States of America has not yet reached the point at

which the political mechanisms for the defense of freedom have broken

down. This judgment is not a matter of theory but one of practice.

There are not yet police at our door with legal orders to round up the

Jews, or confiscate pornography or computers or guns.

Civil society has not yet been fatally vitiated by tyranny. Under

these circumstances, the only possible reaction is to condemn. This

was a crime. This was murder. And I would cheerfully shoot not the

policeman but the murderer dead. (There would be no question

of guilt or due process, since the murderer publicly boasted of his

crime.)

But that this shooter was wrong does not mean that

everyone who shoots a policeman in the future will also be wrong. A

single Andrew McCrae, at this time, is a criminal and should be

condemned as a criminal. But his case against the police and the

system behind them is not without merit. Therefore let him be a

warning as well.

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