Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (44954)	1/26/2006 5:38:17 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 90947

How could force exercised within the boundaries of the Constitutional framework be legally capricious unless the Constitution allows for capriciousness? The government may be empowered to act in a certain area, but that doesn't mean that specific actions in those constitutional areas might not be capricious. Also I would submit that the government is not always limited by the constitution. Sometimes it acts outside the constitution but courts let it get away with it. Other times the actions are never reviewed by courts. "Deadly force is only legally allowed in limited situations" I believe that was my position from square one, Tim. I was agreeing with that specific fact but not the implications and arguments you derived from it. I believe I made a point of noting that income tax evasion (for instance) does not merit the legal sanction of deadly force. Near the beginning of my part of this conversation I explicitly said that you are not shot as a punishment for tax evasion. I said that force, including deadly force, is a threat behind any enforcement. If you don't yield at any point force will be applied against you. That force may become deadly if you put up more than a token resistance. The fact that deadly force is not an explicit or official punishment for tax evasion or other crimes of equal severity does not mean that the threat of such force is not behind the enforcement of penalties or seizures based on these crimes. "Which is another way of saying that deadly force is behind the enforcement of laws" You are not using logic. Almost all laws may be violated without inviting deadly force. The law may be violated without deadly force being a direct and immediate response, or even a likely later response. However the threat of deadly force is behind the enforcement. If a cop comes to arrest me for a crime and I resist the enforcement than he may use deadly force. Deadly Force is used to PREVENT a probable act of illegality. It is NEVER used to enforce or to punish. It is used to prevent the probable occurrence of a calamitous assault. It is not the direct or official punishment, but its threat backs up all enforcement attempts. If the threat was taken away the enforcement attempts would be much weaker. For instance (in case you are still unclear on this), pretend that police attend to a house to arrest somebody for tax evasion. Pretend that the man puts a knife to the throat of his wife. Pretend that the SWAT team is called and manages to put a bullet through his head on the probable grounds that he is intending and likely to take her life. This is "deadly force". It has nothing at all to do with prosecuting the Income Tax laws. Nor does it have to do with punishing a convicted felon. It has to do with self defense and defense of others which is in the same category. Putting the knife to the wife's throat is more a new separate crime than it is a direct resistance to the enforcement attempt. You don't have to initiate deadly force or the immediate threat of deadly force for the cops to use force (including sometimes deadly force) against you. If you can resist very effectively without the direct application of deadly force (say you are a jujitsu master and when they try to restrain you, you neutralize the effort easily without any serious harm to anyone, and then when they try to hit you with a club you disarm them without hurting them), the cops might shoot you. Yes officially the crime that results in you being shot at is "resisting arrest" or "assaulting an officer", but you are shot at as part of the effort to enforce the tax laws. Your argument seems to be that deadly force is not an effort to enforce the law, because it is in response to a confrontation where the police feels that someone is threatened. But the confrontation was created by the attempt to enforce the law. The two are inherently tied together. Tim