No-Knock Warrants, Pussies, and Illegal Drugs

The Supreme Court recently upheld the legality of "No-Knock" brand search warrants. The police, when executing a search warrant, do not now necessarily need to knock. No more polite chit-chat, and "Yes, ma'am, we do have a warrant, so if you excuse us, we'll be searching your home now." Just bust down the door and commence to trashing the place.

Now, first, a word or two about warrants in general, and, as promised, pussies. By pussies, I mean those chicken-shits, who as Ben Franklin said "...would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety," and thus, "deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Now, I'm a huge fan of warrants, in general. They are the essential fulcrum between Liberty and Safety. They allow us to achieve a balance between the anarchy of complete freedom and the tyranny necessary for complete safety. They are the answer to the pussies who think that the only way we can fight terrorists is to give up our freedom. Because I'm glad to have the police search whoever they want, as long as they have a warrant. And all they need to do to get a warrant is convince a judge they have probable cause. Not iron-clad evidence of a crime, just a reasonable expectation that there's going to be something there. And judges tend to be old white men. So, contrary to what conservative talk-radio hosts would have us believe, they're not going to be crazy liberal hippies who only want us to burn flags and get gay-married. Judges want to fight crime and evil and terrorists as much as anyone. Only a huge fan of fascism would have a problem with warrants.

OK then, so on to our ostensible main topic, "No-Knock" warrants. In theory, they make sense. There are times that giving a probable criminal the courtesy of a knock and some chit-chat would give him enough time to destroy the evidence. But they are also very problematic. There have been cases where old women in the wrong apartment, listed wrongly on the warrant, get accidentally killed. Worse, there was a case where the surprised occupant of a house killed a police officer. In that case, it was proved that the killer may not have been very surprised, and he was found guilty of murder, and he sits on death row. But imagine the following. A dude sits in his house. An upstanding, law-abiding citizen. He is, like all freedom lovers, a Second Amendment enthusiasts. He sits, ready to defend his home, his property, and his family with a duly-licensed handgun. Meanwhile, a clerk at the courthouse has mistakenly typed a seven instead of a two on a no-knock warrant. Armed police officers, without knocking, burst into the house. The wrong house. It's dark, and our citizen, half-asleep, sees only armed men invading his bedroom. He shoots and kills a policeman. Is it murder or self-defense? Is it possible that no-knock warrants add an extra element of unpredictability to the job of the police? Their job is dangerous enough. Are no-knock warrants worth the risk?

And, of course, our sub-topic of illegal drugs. We quickly mentioned above the idea of "time to destroy evidence." We forgot to mention that the only type of crime that this really applies to is drug crime. Other evidence, either you're smart enough to get rid of it on the way home, or you're not smart enough to immediately destroy it when you hear a knock at the door. You can't flush or burn a gun. "No-knock" warrants are useful, really, only for drug crime. And they're dangerous, for both citizens and police. I don't think that they're entirely indefensible, but they tend to settle a little too much toward the fascist end of the scale for me. And if it weren't for the prohibition of drugs we wouldn't need them at all. So we can add that to the rise of organized crime, gangs, prison overcrowding and general wasting of law-enforcement resources on the list of things we get from the "War on Drugs."

Note: I don't use illegal drugs, never have, and I think it's stupid to keep a loaded gun in the house; you're more likely to shoot a family member than a burglar. But freedom is the right to be stupid, and I support that right for everybody. All drugs should be legal, and you should be able to own as many guns as you want.