Of course we should ban assault weapons in the US, writes TCBH! journalist Dave Lindorff, but what about the cops? They should also be banned from having assault weapons as standard issue items.

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By Dave Lindorff

A few years ago, I contacted my local police department asking them to send an officer over to put down a doe that had been hit by a car on the street in front of my house. She had suffered a left front and right rear leg break but had somehow flopped herself well into the yard and was on the ground suffering. When a cop arrived, and began to approach her with his pistol I warned him off, saying the deer would hurt herself more trying to get away.

"Oh," he replied. "Okay, I'll get a rifle." He returned to his SUV, and pulled out, to my astonishment, an AR-4, a military-style assault rifle, which he then used to shoot the deer with a clean shot between the eyes.

When I asked him about having that weapon available in his patrol vehicle, he replied matter-of-factly that all police in almost all departments in the country have them readily available.

Now for the record, I live in a suburban community where the only crimes we have are fights in or outside of bars, and the occasional breaking-and-entering burglary. This demonstrates to me that this country's police have completely lost any sense that they are supposed to be "peace officers," as we once called them (when's the last time you've heard that old-fashioned term?).

After the latest bloody slaughter of dozens of people by a whacko with an assault rifle in Orlando, there are the usual calls to ban assault weapons in the US. That makes perfect sense to me.

But what about the cops? It's worth noting that the Orlando Police admit that some of the dead in the recent Pulse nightclub mass shooting may have been shot by police who fired at Omar Mateen and some of his hostages through the hole that police busted into the outer wall of a lavatory in the building where he had been holed up. I don't know the details of that shooting spree, but knowing how police tend to all fire at a suspect when given the chance, and that the responding SWAT teams were armed with assault rifles themselves, that they did so with guns that were on at least semi-automatic settings...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3208

Authors Website: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net

Authors Bio:

Dave Lindorff, winner of a 2019 "Izzy" Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism from the Park Center for Independent Media in Ithaca, is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper www.thiscantbehappening.net. He is a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006).