I hope I’m not the only one bothered by this. Any Presidential candidate who cracks down on the sale of military weapons to local law enforcement would get my vote.
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I hope I’m not the only one bothered by this. Any Presidential candidate who cracks down on the sale of military weapons to local law enforcement would get my vote.
Comments are closed.
The article doesn’t say where the Sheriff’s department got the funds for the APC, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that it was a federal grant program, probably related to “homeland security”. Funds from federal law enforcement programs typically come with strings attached that prohibit them from being used for mundane police gear. In light of that, we don’t really need a “crackdown” on this sort of purchase; we just need the feds to stop encouraging it.
Still, local problems are best solved with local solutions. What that town really needs is for someone to go up strong against the idiot sheriff in the next election. The return on investment to local law enforcement for military gear is terrible. There is never an opportunity to use the thing for real (imagine the public relations nightmare), so it mostly gets used for weekend warrior exercises that allow inbred rednecks to pretend to be soldiers for a day without having to get deployed overseas, shot at by unfriendlies, or any of the other stuff that separates real soldiering from a weekend at a hunting retreat.