When drones are outlawed, only outlaws will still be droning on about the drones
Star Wars will have to wait, at least here in Seattle.
I was really looking forward to being followed from building to building downtown by little flying semirobotic cell phones. Or boarding a bus only to have the drone that’s shadowing me follow me onto the bus and hover in the aisle next to me, keeping its camera pointed at the top of my head.
Think of the street cred that would get you. Everyone on the bus would go, “Ooh, he must be really bad. He must be a regular Jedi Knight.”
But no, our steady march into the future has again been sidetracked, this time by Mayor Mike “Make it not so” McGinn. We can’t ever have any cool toys around here.
I was especially looking forward to the day when police officers finally figured out that the costs of all their fancy gear and futuristic gadgetry ultimately come out of their pay and their children’s educations. Now we might have to wait another 20 years for that dawn.
Of course, this is only Seattle, and we can still enjoy watching the police apocalypses happening in other cities, from a relatively safe distance.
Is LA awesome or what? Some version of the Christopher Dorner story is sure to be on the fall lineup of HBO. In case you’ve missed it, Dorner is a fired LAPD officer who has declared war, in his own words, on his former police department and former fellow officers. Sort of a Dirty Harry on bath salts. Dirty Dorner wants revenge on them all for having better jobs than him, and families.
That would make for tragic headlines. Here’s a good real-world example: “California searched for ex-cop suspected of killing 3.” But the LAPD goes the extra mile and provides us with the drama we crave, by flushing out and shooting innocent people in the course of searching for Dorner.
Two women were shot while delivering newspapers, for the crime of driving a vehicle similar to the one Dorner is known to be driving. Apparently no one checked the license plate before opening fire.
Planning a road trip to the Los Angeles area in your gray 2005 Nissan Titan pickup? Get a new paint job first, if you want to live through it. Oh, wait, never mind, they found the truck burned out. You’re safe again from the LA police.
Thus we have brought our karma home. Americans are now collateral damage in their own country at the hands of their own armed security.
What do you think? Maybe Christopher Dorner is to the LAPD as Osama bin Laden was to the whole U.S., so it makes sense to hunt him down the same way, with the same callous disregard for the safety of innocent people. After all, Dorner calls it war, therefore, it’s war. It’s whatever he says it is. The LAPD is only being accommodating.
All the LAPD is doing is taking our national values to heart and applying them to their own security concerns. They’ve been threatened by an avowed terrorist who says he’ll kill them and their family members indiscriminately and without warning, so they, the LAPD, are justified in using whatever force is necessary to stop him and if a few innocent people get gunned down in the process, it’s only the price paid for security.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and a few inconvenient dead bodies of people who manage to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Don’t get me wrong. I think the LAPD is completely righteous and justified in going all last-man-standing and kick-ass on California over this. They absolutely should be expected to want to kill everything that moves until Dorner is dead.
But that only explains their raging wild animal mama bear on the loose rampage, it doesn’t make it good for the rest of us. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t rein them in.
Now, how do we do that? Who has a tranquilizer gun that big?