Shooting Kids and how cops get away with it.

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Shooting Kids and how cops get away with it.

Post by MGuy »

Ok so the Tamir Rice thing has been a topic of discussion within my family and on my Facebook for a while now (along with allegations that Bill Cosby's thing is small potatoes in comparison and not as deserving of spotlight). So there's a lot of hoo haw about what happened during the hearing. Does anyone know exactly what bit of info actually allowed the perpetrators of 'this' particular cop on child slaughter to get off with no fair trial?
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Post by Prak »

It seems that it was ruled "a bunch of fuck ups." Somehow, but thankfully, I guess, there is no law against being really shitty at your job. Though there should be one for people whose job involves carrying a fucking murder tool.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... tamir-rice

I don't know how the cop and the 911 call taker didn't wind up being charged with Criminal Negligence and Manslaughter, though. (Well, other than the fact that Tamir was black and the cop is white, I mean)
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Post by MGuy »

It may be that I'm just incredulous but a series of fuck ups does not sound to me like a legitimate excuse even from a cop killing. What I get from the article you shared is the same thing that my family and I had already assumed, that the prosecutor played defense attorney for them.
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Post by Prak »

Yeah, I don't agree with it, certainly. Basically, I think it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the cop would get off scott free, because thin blue line and all that bullshit.
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Post by MGuy »

Prak wrote:Yeah, I don't agree with it, certainly. Basically, I think it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the cop would get off scott free, because thin blue line and all that bullshit.
I'd had some hope this time around. It was on tape and very thing. Little kid. Gunned down. On camera. Police trying to lie to cover it up. All the elements that made me believe this would be one of the few times the cops get handled.
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Post by Mechalich »

This has to do with how the legal standards for deadly force are conducted in the US. What is legally permissible is not equivalent to what is commonly considered moral and what a civilians judgement is based on media reports is not what the legal judgment is going to be based on the boundaries of use of force doctrine.

The biggest reason for no indictment is that Tamir Rice was carrying a replica airsoft weapon with the orange tip removed. Once you remove that orange tip, carrying that thing around is the same, legally speaking, as carrying an actual firearm. Fail to drop it immediately upon command and that's a deadly force situation and people get shot.

Keep in mind that under current self-defense laws in most states, if anyone, regardless of age, brandishes a replica airsoft gun with the safety tip removed, any armed civilian could draw and fire and would be considered justified.

The responding 911 operator and the responding officers did fuck up - by failing to relay information and by approaching way too close - but the law doesn't care about that, at least not in regard to a manslaughter charge (criminal negligence...maybe), since use of force situations are judged in the moment and not on the totality of events due to a number of supreme court precedents.

Why the prosecutor conducted the grand jury in the way he did is unclear - it seems foolish and it looks bad, but a conviction at trial was extremely unlikely. US self-defense laws are extremely permissive - no matter how fucked-up your decision making process in getting into a situation, if you can reasonably claim fear for your life for even a moment, then you're in the clear.

The Rice family is almost certain to win a large wrongful death settlement (because the standard of proof is lower in civil court) and hopefully there will be strong administrative action (like firing both f them) taken against Loehmann and Garmback, though this is less likely because the competence of law enforcement administrators is almost universally low.
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Post by Kaelik »

Mechalich wrote:Why the prosecutor conducted the grand jury in the way he did is unclear - it seems foolish and it looks bad, but a conviction at trial was extremely unlikely. US self-defense laws are extremely permissive - no matter how fucked-up your decision making process in getting into a situation, if you can reasonably claim fear for your life for even a moment, then you're in the clear.
In almost all cases the Prosecution is allowed to just not bring an indictment if they think there is no real case.

The only possible reason to have a grand jury proceeding and then spend it defending the cop is to pretend you are treating cops like regular people while emphatically not doing that.

It's basically just wasting time and money to lie to the public. Or literally the opposite of your job if you are a prosecutor.
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Post by tussock »

Mechalich wrote:The biggest reason for no indictment is that Tamir Rice was that
That Tamir Rice was black.

Really, if the cop had leapt out of his almost-stopped car and immediately shot some middle aged white guy because he pulled his shirt up and they saw something that might have been a gun in his belt, that would be murder 2, every time.

Mechalich, read the wikipedia article, dude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice

The gun was not presented, the barrel was hidden from view so the orange thing is bullshit, 911 was obsessed with knowing if it was a black person or not, the cop got sacked by his trainers for being a nutcase and hired by the guys next door with no further training, his senior partner has a history of abusing black people for no reason at all, ...

But having a maybe-gun in your pants with your hands nowhere near it, as a kid, not running, not making sudden moves, that's not a reasonable use for force. At all. Unless the victim is black.
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Post by Prak »

Apparently, the cops though Tamir "looked like an adult," a common problem that black people face, they're seen as older than they are.

Ohio is an open carry state. So the police had literally no reason to shoot him based on their impression of things either.

But of course, open carry is only for white people.
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Post by maglag »

Mechalich wrote: Why the prosecutor conducted the grand jury in the way he did is unclear - it seems foolish and it looks bad, but a conviction at trial was extremely unlikely. US self-defense laws are extremely permissive - no matter how fucked-up your decision making process in getting into a situation, if you can reasonably claim fear for your life for even a moment, then you're in the clear.
Then, how is anyone ever condemned for murder in the USA? You can basically always claim you were "afraid" for your life:

"That person had clothes on! They could be hiding a gun! Bombs! I had to shoot him!"

"That guy was naked, but he clearly was about to kill me with his bare hands! Like that Trayvon Martin dude! I had to shoot him!"

Seems like the only situation where you cannot claim you were afraid is if the guy you shot was comatose and chained to a bed or something like that.

Or is the situation so bad in the USA that 12 year olds regularly go in murder shooting sprees? All this "shoot first, never ask questions" is setting an awful series of precedents.
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Post by Mechalich »

maglag wrote:Then, how is anyone ever condemned for murder in the USA? You can basically always claim you were "afraid" for your life:
The standard for fearing for one's life is based on reasonability - you have to be able to claim that a reasonable person placed in the same situation would fear for their life.

And yes, its very broad. George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, based his defense on this principle and it was upheld. If a person is armed, appears to be armed, or engages in a physical altercation sufficient to rise to a deadly force situation, then yeah, based on Stand Your Ground self-defense doctrines you can kill them and face no criminal repercussions.

Where it wouldn't apply is if you've deliberately sought out this person with intent - ex. in a drug deal - but law enforcement officers on duty are sent into such situations as part of their jobs and therefore have greater leeway.
Tussock wrote:That Tamir Rice was black.

Really, if the cop had leapt out of his almost-stopped car and immediately shot some middle aged white guy because he pulled his shirt up and they saw something that might have been a gun in his belt, that would be murder 2, every time.
This is an oversimplification and is unhelpful. Law enforcement officers kill people of all races and very rarely face charges in any of those situations. They kill black people disproportionately and some component of that is probably racially motivated while some is due to structural factors, however it is extremely difficult to claim racial animus as a primary motivational factor in any specific case. In this case, because the incident happened so rapidly the only biases in play would be unconscious ones, which don't mean much in court.

The legal structure governing the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers in the US is extremely favorable to the officers. To prove criminal charges beyond reasonable doubt is extremely difficult - the evidence in this case is suggestive but it almost certainly would not meet that standard if put to a jury trial (again, the family will most likely receive a large civil settlement for wrongful death).

Preventing these tragedies is a matter of changing the law and altering the entire use of force framework used by US law enforcement agencies. It's also a matter of changing administrative accountability so that low-quality officers are disciplined and if necessary fired before tragic incidents happen which is a complicated issue that involves changing promotional structures so that different personality types enter management positions and a matter of reforming the police bureaucracy.

Regrettably even if this incident was racially motivated making that piont generally doesn't help, because unless an investigation can find a systemic pattern of racist incidents sufficient to warrant a Department of Justice action to directly intervene in departmental management (which actually happened in Ferguson) it just means a few people get fired, there's a round of sensitivity training that everyone sleepwalks through and then subsequently ignores (not a response unique to law enforcement by any means) and nothing changes.
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Post by maglag »

Mechalich wrote:
maglag wrote:Then, how is anyone ever condemned for murder in the USA? You can basically always claim you were "afraid" for your life:
The standard for fearing for one's life is based on reasonability - you have to be able to claim that a reasonable person placed in the same situation would fear for their life.

And yes, its very broad. George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, based his defense on this principle and it was upheld. If a person is armed, appears to be armed, or engages in a physical altercation sufficient to rise to a deadly force situation, then yeah, based on Stand Your Ground self-defense doctrines you can kill them and face no criminal repercussions.

Where it wouldn't apply is if you've deliberately sought out this person with intent - ex. in a drug deal - but law enforcement officers on duty are sent into such situations as part of their jobs and therefore have greater leeway.
That last bit is false, since George Zimmerman's murderer was out for blood that night, a self-styled vigilant that wanted to score a kill, stalking people in the darkness with gun in hand.

For all we know, George Zimmerman had only the choice to try to knock down the gun maniac or be shot in the back while trying to run away. And the USA law fully supported the one who wanted the most cold bodies on the floor.

This is, there's little surprise there's mass shootings every other month in the USA when the law itself teaches "Kill them all is the only safe solution". It means that people are rewarded for shooting first and never asking questions. The faster you shoot, the better chances you can argue it was out of fear.

I just dunno, in my country the regular police are trained to solve problems without sacrificing lifes, and the military/SWAT is what you call for when things get dicey. And thanks to that people don't randomly go into schools and start shooting everything that moves. Because they've been taught that there's other solutions to fear besides buying a gun and unloading all your ammo.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

maglag wrote: This is, there's little surprise there's mass shootings every other month in the USA.
The actual figure is pretty close to daily

Even limiting it to "shootings with three or more fatalities", we still have such tragedies occurring multiple times each and every month.
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Post by Chamomile »

maglag wrote:That last bit is false, since George Zimmerman's murderer was out for blood that night, a self-styled vigilant that wanted to score a kill, stalking people in the darkness with gun in hand.
George Zimmerman was the killer. Treyvon Martin was killed.
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Post by Kaelik »

maglag wrote:That last bit is false, since George Zimmerman's murderer was out for blood that night, a self-styled vigilant that wanted to score a kill, stalking people in the darkness with gun in hand.

For all we know, George Zimmerman had only the choice to try to knock down the gun maniac or be shot in the back while trying to run away. And the USA law fully supported the one who wanted the most cold bodies on the floor.
Uhhh.... You are so many different kinds of wrong that I'm definitely confused by how wrong you are.

1) George Zimmerman is alive.
2) He specifically used the example of Zimmerman going after Travon Martin, which you'll note, did not involve Martin being a vigilante, or having a gun at all.
3) Later in a completely unrelated incident* that no one is talking about no one died at all and Zimmerman didn't tackle anyone he drove away.

*Except to the extent that the later incident involved someone at least allegedly mad about Martin
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Post by tussock »

This is an oversimplification and is unhelpful. Law enforcement officers kill people of all races and very rarely face charges in any of those situations.
Do you know how sampling works? How hard it is to accidentally keep getting the same colour marble over hundreds of "random" choices?
They kill black people disproportionately and some component of that is probably racially motivated while some is due to structural factors, however it is extremely difficult to claim racial animus as a primary motivational factor in any specific case.
Police in the US kill black people at nearly three times the rate they kill white or hispanic people. That means on the order of 2 in every 3 black people killed by the police where killed because they were black.

Unless you can identify a single factor other than the starkly obvious racism in that, you might want to go and get fucked. Like in this specific case, the police killed a kid because he had a toy gun in his belt, because he was black, and because they were mentally disturbed and violent racists. That's not hard to point out, it's the basic facts of the case.

Violent criminals usually have histories like that, even though the vast majority of people with histories like that do not become violent criminals. Indicative but not predictive.
In this case, because the incident happened so rapidly the only biases in play would be unconscious ones, which don't mean much in court.
So 911 had to ask three times if the kid was black, that was the most important thing for them to know, from their own perspective. That's obviously conscious.

The police were informed a black man was waving a gun around and went to confront said black man, which is obviously conscious.

Their response to a black man waving a gun around was to shoot him immediately, even though he wasn't anything like big enough to be a man and wasn't waving the gun around when they got there at all. They just confirmed it was him by getting him to show them where he had the gun, and then shot him. You might debate if people continue to make conscious choices when they have a pre-conceived plan to shoot whoever it is "just to be safe", but the laws regarding murder don't give a shit.

Then they lied about it repeatedly, said he raised the gun at them, because that's what the law requires for self defence to be a thing. Which is obviously a conscious choice and demonstrates they didn't think the real story was up to scratch at all.

See, Mechalich, the police who shot the guy didn't think they had a valid defence. They knew you can't just drive up and shoot a kid who isn't even doing anything.


And then the prosecutor lied to the grand jury about how the law works so that they'd go free, because prosecutors have to work with the police all the fucking time or can't function, and so have their back in order to maintain the relationship. Which isn't specifically racist except that they probably wouldn't have done that if it was a rich white kid got killed, and cops do know that black lives don't matter.
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Post by Kaelik »

tussock wrote:Police in the US kill black people at nearly three times the rate they kill white or hispanic people. That means on the order of 2 in every 3 black people killed by the police where killed because they were black.
That is only true if you assume that police deal with minorities in the exact same circumstances that they deal with white people in the same proportions. Which is almost certainly not true, for reasons almost entirely relating to racism, but, and this is important, some of that is the racism of people who are not the cops.

It is almost certainly true that cops shoot black people where they wouldn't white people for racist reasons, but the sheer fact of kill rates without more is not conclusive evidence, and it would be better if you did not present it that way.
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Post by GreatGreyShrike »

This is important and true. For example, for the NYPD of 2011, we have this chart:

Image

which illustrates how roughly half of the people fired upon by police were black, and another third or so hispanic, but this fraction is lower than the fraction of racially identified criminal shooting suspects, or the rate of subjects who fired at police (though the latter is a very small sample size). It appears that for that year in New York, the cops were if anything slightly more hesitant to shoot blacks than whites (though this difference may not be statistically significant, with a fairly small sample size).

A while back Scott Alexander wrote a decent overview of the scientific literature of race and justice, which I recommend reading. His followup is also good.
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Post by Mechalich »

Slate has a pretty decent interview article up right now that explains the legal situation behind this case and how states could change it.
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Post by tussock »

@GGS

"Racially identified."

Man, there's black suspects, there's hispanic suspects, and there's suspects.

"Suspects" are not black or hispanic, because then they'd be black suspects or hispanic suspects, but they're also not "racially identified", so they're not on your surprisingly hard to read graph.

That one on the right is 8 black people and 4 hispanic people. It's not a percent because there's not anything like a hundred of them, and both 2010 and 2012 will be very different by the nature of such tiny samples. It's also about one in two hundred and fifty thousand black people (which is a very small proportion, even as an outlier).

Same for the 21 black people they shot at, and 12 black people they hit, it doesn't tell you anything because the variance is huge on tiny samples like that. The take-home there is that NYC cops shoot a lot of people in international terms, but not so as you'd notice as a proportion of the population.

Better note, black people are, about, 22 times more likely to be arrested than whites? That indicates an incredible over-abundance of police activity against blacks. You know that thing how black people can all talk about how often they get stopped by the police, and white people can't because most have never been stopped? That's what that is.


You could probably find weird stats like police are far more likely to kill a white suspect they interact with. Which would be true, but also deeply misleading about the situation on the ground.

Kaelik wrote:It is almost certainly true that cops shoot black people where they wouldn't white people for racist reasons, but the sheer fact of kill rates without more is not conclusive evidence, and it would be better if you did not present it that way.
Pfft. It doesn't isolate the bias factors at each step because that's a ludicrously large project, but the systematic racism of society as a whole on display there, as composed of individual actors on very many levels, is deeply racist. It can't really be otherwise.

Scott Alexander, as linked by GreatGreyShrike wrote:Once you do a multiple regression controlling for other factors, like previous record, income, area stopped, et cetera, half of that difference goes away, leaving an unexplained relative risk of 1.5x.
Like, yeh, the follow up touched on that, but still, if you "control for" police massively over-policing poor black neighbourhoods and looking for mostly black crimes in a population that's over-represented in criminal statistics because they're black (and so poor, from black neighbourhoods, and committing black crimes, recursively), when looking for racism in the function of the police, you're going to get the wrong fucking answer.

Even when that answer is that there's still a whole lot of racism in the individual interactions of particular police officers with particular suspects for certain things.


I'm sure Ferguson, Missouri could tell you a tale of how they weren't very much racist once you accounted for neighbourhood and poverty and previous contact with the criminal justice system, but also the city was run on fining black people for nothing and then fining them more when they couldn't pay because you wouldn't let them and then putting them in prisons paid for with the fines they had already paid ten times over before going. But also, that cop in Ferguson obviously shot that guy because he was in particular being violently racist.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Prak wrote:Apparently, the cops though Tamir "looked like an adult," a common problem that black people face, they're seen as older than they are.
...because they start puberty sooner and mature faster.
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Post by DSMatticus »

GreatGreyShrike wrote:A while back Scott Alexander wrote a decent overview of the scientific literature of race and justice, which I recommend reading. His followup is also good.
You have quoted this guy before, and you really shouldn't, because it is some incredibly shoddy and misleading work.
A. Encounter Rate wrote:Therefore, blacks are about twice as likely to be searched as whites. Once you do a multiple regression controlling for other factors, like previous record, income, area stopped, et cetera, half of that difference goes away, leaving an unexplained relative risk of 1.5x.
C. Arrest Rates for Minor Crimes wrote:Further, blacks are more likely to live in the cities, where there is a heavy police shadow, and whites in the suburbs or country, where there is a lower one.
Hey, remember when the DoJ concluded that the Ferguson PD had been heavily overpolicing African American communities in order to generate revenue for the city from fines for petty offenses, i.e. essentially monetizing the harassment of minorities, and how they had reached this conclusion using not just the pattern of behavior exhibited by the FPD's policing but by internal correspondence between the city government and the FPD leadership? Do you know what happens if you examine this incredibly fucking racist practice after controlling for area stopped? It stops looking incredibly fucking racist while continuing to actually be incredibly fucking racist.

The fact is that our communities are heavily segregated, and police know this when choosing where to cast their metaphorical (and literal) shadows. By controlling for area, you are controlling for the influence of deliberate choices police have made about which neighborhoods to police and how aggressively to police those neighborhoods - choices which may be racially motivated, either at the level of the department's leadership or the individual officers or both.

"Controlling for potential racism, police found to not be racist." How very insightful.
C. Arrest Rates For Minor Crimes wrote:Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine.
I have no idea why anyone would bring this up as evidence against racism in the justice system. The reason rich white people drugs get you a slap on the wrist while poor black people drugs get you locked away for years is completely 100% deliberate, because the War on Drugs was part of the Southern Strategy, and the architects' explicit purpose was to institutionalize the fuckage of minorities by police.

You'll note that the question Scott Alexander set out to answer at the start of his essay was "does the criminal justice system treat African-Americans fairly?" The correct answer here is, "no, because in this instance the laws themselves have been written with demographics in mind to target them with more severe penalties for comparable offenses." But instead we get that exact same fact presented to us as a mitigating factor? What the fuck?

This also does a lot to hide the true extent of the sentencing disparity, which he discusses later. I won't repeat myself there, just remember that his conclusions on sentencing also understate the problem.
D. Police Shootings wrote:[This entire fucking section]
First off, you cannot make any conclusions comparing the third column to the fourth column. The difference between the fourth column matching the third column and not matching the third column is something like six data points. The statistical significance on that specific claim is very low, so fuck that noise.

But more importantly than that, we don't have any real data on police shootings. We just fucking don't. Every bit of police shooting data that has ever been released to the public has been released voluntarily. It is never authenticated or audited in anyway, and as a result it is often contradictory and full of errors.

Tamir Rice's shooting, the original subject of this thread, was not reported to the FBI database. Tamir Rice was a freebie - his death does not show up in any statistics on who police are and are not killing. Eric Garner's death was 1) not reported to the FBI database, and 2) not counted in the NYPD's internal statistics. Why? Because he wasn't shot, he was suffocated as a result of the method and position with which he was restrained. Eric Garner was a freebie - his death does not show up in any statistics on who police are and are not killing. Homicides by police often end up misclassified as civilian homicides with no indication that police were involved at all, meaning that while those deaths were technically reported they are also all freebies that don't make the police look bad in anyway. Fun fact, while we're talking about the NYPD, the last time it gave any numbers to the FBI at all (2006), the numbers it gave them inexplicably did not match their own internal records.

Every bit of data we have is voluntarily self-reported with no checks in place whatsoever. If you have embarrassing results, you can seriously just run them through the shredder and nobody cares. If you have embarrassing results but want to look good reporting them, there are paperwork loopholes big enough you could drive a bus full of dead black people through - and at the end it would still look like a genuine mistake (and might even be a genuine mistake). There is every reason to believe that the numbers we do have are next to worthless. They are not a random sampling. They are voluntary self-reports by police departments who may end up facing public scrutiny if the numbers in them make them look bad.


The story does not get any better when you take a more in-depth look at his sources. I have glanced through some - but not all - of them, and invariably what I find is "it looked racist, but then we controlled for a bunch of things which correlate with race and it stopped looking racist."

"Black people looked like they got harsher sentences, but then we realized that black people just happened to live in counties that were tougher on crime in general. Sure, it would be totally racist if a black person got a harsher sentence for being black. But it's totally not racist if a person from a predominantly black county gets a harsher sentence than a person from a predominantly white county. That's not racism, that's just bad luck. Bad luck that seems to happen to black people a hell of a lot of the time, let me tell you what. Woo boy. But totally not racism."
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Post by Kaelik »

While there are a number of things that can be said, mostly along the lines of what DSM was saying, I would like to point out that I never met a single law school student who didn't smoke pot during lawschool, and I went to lawschool in fucking Camden, NJ. I also know that lawschool students who were totally caught smoking pot many many many many times, just straight up did not get in trouble.

On the other hand, black people are arrested for possession and/or smoking in Camden every day. Almost like there are different parts of cities, and for some reason that can't possibly be explained, the cops look for the same crimes to different degrees in different parts of the city.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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