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Comment by bestcoder69 | Hacker News Reader

Well, that's because we have to protect ourselves from SWAT teams!

Indiana just enshrined that right into law.

https://theweek.com/articles/474702/indiana-law-that-lets-ci...

Good? As a Californian who doesn't own a gun and hasn't fired one in 20 years, I'm unlikely to take advantage of that law, but I appreciate that it exists. A SWAT assault that isn't preceded by presenting a valid warrant is just a heavily-armed home invasion, and home owners absolutely should be able to respond to those. That was presumably already legal, but if "enshrining" it into law as you put it makes it pointedly obvious to the police that they can be legally shot dead if they don't follow a safe, legal procedure, great. Maybe swatting will be less of a thing then...

Edit: wow, just saw this part:

> Why did Indiana push this law? The state Supreme Court had previously ruled that citizens had no legal right to resist police officers, even in a case of unlawful entry

What a crazy ruling. I guess this law is checks and balances in action in two ways...

If you think about it in practical terms, I don’t think this is a good law. What’s going to happen if a house owner is opening fire at a heavily armed police team that is conducting an illegal raid. Is the police going to stand down and reassess the legality of their entry? Or are they going to shoot back? And what’s the likely outcome? Dead owner and dead police. Great.

Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the police from making illegal raids, make them liable for all damages, slap on penalties and put the burden of proof on them. Police entered and cannot prove it was legal? Pay fine, repair damage. At the same time lower the bar for personal liability for the officers: Can’t demonstrate that they did at least the basic due diligence? Pay out of their own pocket.

> Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the police from making illegal raids...

Why not both?

I don't think it's necessarily wise for a homeowner to open fire when outnumbered like that, but it's their right to make that choice when armed intruders break into their home. (And really without the whole knock, announcement, warrant thing the home owner doesn't know the intruders are police.) Making this clear shouldn't exclude these other excellent ideas.

The police dont pay fines or repair anything - tax payers do. But cops do enter the houses where they might find someone that answers fire. Only the latter is a dissuasive.

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, "The only way to stop a bad guy from swatting you is a good guy with his own personal SWAT team."

Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.

There's evidence the framers of the Constitution intended for citizens to be able to own weapons that gave the federal government pause if the federal government decided to overstep its bounds.

Specifically, even in 1787 it was seeming likely that there was a good chance that at some point the federal government was going to abolish slavery by force, and the framers of the Constitution needed the southern states on board with the Constitution's stronger central government vs. the Articles of Confederation.

So, they probably intended weapons of some proportionate power compared to contemporary military weapons, but the ultimate underlying motivations are suspect.

On the other hand, I could imagine a world where in 1787 alcohol and/or marijuana were legal in some states and illegal in others and the framers were worried about federal troops imposing national drug policy on drugs that never crossed state lines. In that case, it seems more reasonable, which I guess lends respectability to their reasoning at a medium level of abstraction.

And yet those same people you mock, using only the tools you described, threw off the yoke of the largest world power at the time.

Amongst the reasons they did, were situations eerily similar to what we call "swatting" (and no-knock warrants), which were some motivations behind the fourth amendment.

An amendment that we have, through twisted legal interpretations and arguments for expediency, managed to largely de-fang (civil forfeiture, I'm looking at you).

He graduated top of his class in the Navy Seals and was involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, with over 300 confirmed kills. I think he knows what’s up.

> using only the tools you described

Well, that and the French navy.

Dear Diary,

Today the pasta was good.

The funny thing is, while "to protect yourself from government tyranny" is the favorite phrase of gun enthusiasts and gun lobbies in this country, whenever a citizen uses a gun in justifiable defense against police (the most recent notable one being Breonna Taylor's case) these same people side with the police every time.

This is inaccurate. I know many people on both sides of the gun debate and I don't know a single person who doesn't want police reform regarding no-knock raids. I don't know a single gun owner who supports the police in the Breonna Taylor incident.

The overwhelmingly vast majority of "protect yourself from government tyranny" types want to massively curtail police powers.

> The overwhelmingly vast majority of "protect yourself from government tyranny" types want to massively curtail police powers

I find this hard to believe. Back the blue, blue lives matter, thin blue line people are propagated by gun enthusiasts who use nice slogans like “government tyranny” to justify their positions in a shallow and emotional way. There’s no actual belief in government tyranny, otherwise they wouldn’t stand with the law enforcement arm of the government’s elevated agents.

You seem to be saying that if the majority of "back the blue" folks are gun enthusiasts, that means the majority of gun enthusiasts are "back the blue" folks. I'm not sure if either is true, but if it were, you still couldn't infer one from the other.

Weird that we can't vote for that then. Seems like you may be counting wrong.

Some politicians have staked themselves on this issue publicly. Can't recall the name, but a GOP candidate explicitly said that he would shoot the police if the entered with a no-knock warrant into his home.

One challenge is that citizens side with the police in court.

It doesn't even get to court very often, thanks to police investigating themselves, and DAs who are beholden to them one way or another.

> these same people side with the police every time.

Not all of us.

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