A common argument against carrying or using a gun to defend your life is that the person you draw down on might take it and use it against you. Turns out that street goes both ways.

Don’t ever give up.

This really seems like it should be an Onion article. Something along the lines of

Animal Rights Group Surprised When Slow Moving Drone Shot Down By Pigeon Shooters

Orangeburg, SC — SHARK, a group that opposes the “barbaric” sport of pigeon shooting was flabbergasted Friday when their attempt to surveil a pigeon shoot was cut short when their quadrotor drone took fire from the shoot participants. Pigeon shooting, prized for its challenge of hitting erratic, fast moving birds, “is apparently pretty good training for shooting down our $5,000 drone, ” said one SHARK member.

Maybe all is not lost:

• In Carrboro, a protest group calling itself Carrboro Commune occupied a building that has been sold to CVS, because they wanted it to become a “community center” instead. Par for the course in Carrboro. But then:
  

  Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton went to the site and asked the trespassers, who had built a table and were carrying in containers of food, to leave peacefully.

  …

  “I make barely above minimum wage. The only thing between me and getting evicted is two months’ rent,” a man who identified himself as Johnny Moran told Chilton. “I’m sick of living in a society like this.”

  When Moran described the police as an army between hungry people and the food in the grocery store, Chilton told him, “You’re full of crap.”

  Protesters being told they’re full of crap — in Carrboro.

• In Cary, the town government has once again been asked to consider lifting its ban on allowing residents to own chickens. But this time, the request is coming from a councilman who previously supported the ban. He’s changed his mind:
  

  “It just came down to: Who the heck am I to tell other folks what they can or can’t do if it’s not going to hurt me?” Frantz said.

  Libertarian principles — in Cary.

Hope and change?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Hardcore History, it’s that humans, or at least warrior males, really love to sack things. Cities, villages, countries, whatever.

So it’s not really surprising that SWAT teams, when given the chance to tear up an apartment sack the shit out of it:

When Corrigan returned to his apartment 16 days after being seized, he found that [the fifteen SWAT officers] had left the front door unlocked and unsecured, had left the electric stove on, had cut open every zipped bag, had dumped every box and drawer, had broken locked boxes from under the bed and the closet, and emptied shelves into piles in each room. All his tropical fish in his 150 gallon aquarium were dead.”

It’s really not so different from an army storming the gates of a castle and laying waste to it because the people there aren’t really people: they’re the enemy. That includes leaving the stove on, the modern version of setting buildings on fire just to watch them burn.

Remember in 1998 when Tom Clancy wrote Rainbow Six about a single elite counter-terrorist team that could be anywhere in the world in a matter of hours to deal with violent threats instead of every town, village, and shack having their own SWAT team? Yeah, neither do they. Even NASA has a SWAT team.