Anyone who’s ever been civically active in a small town, can tell you that Borough Council meetings are often flypaper for the drunk, crazy, or attention starved. Usually switching off their mic is enough to get them to go away and/or sober up. Security can be an issue for Borough meetings, but generally the presence of a few officers, who would be there anyway, is generally regarded by most small Boroughs as sufficient for keeping order.
That is, of course, unless you’re a small borough in New Jersey, in which case nothing less than H&K submachine guns will suffice. I have to agree with Tam this won’t end well.
Of course such would happen in New Jersey to protect the public from whatever. Here in Pennsylvania, I routinely open carried a handgun at borough council meetings, both as a borough councilman and as a spectator. Police presence? Rare.
Sounds like somebody is making one hell of a stretch to justify the “need” for some really cool toys.
I’d have had more respect for them if they said “Because they’re cool and we can” rather than coming up with some phony-baloney made-up ‘reason’.
Gun Control is for the people not the Gun Control advocates.
Oh, come now. Didn’t you learn in Civics Class that “they work for us?”
Why, in 2012, do we still allow these fiefdoms to exist? There would be such a huge economy of scale savings if we eliminated 2/3s of these small towns.
No, no a thousand times no!
Look at the example of anarcho-tyranny when NuLabour under Tony Blair had control of the U.K. (the Westminster parliamentary system, which we explicitly avoided, gives a monolog on executive and legislative power to the winning party or coalition). Most of the police protection was withdrawn from disfavored areas, rural in particular where Blair is on record as wanting to destroy Britain’s rural culture, and the results have been very nasty.
Our system of Federalism makes this simply impossible, although in all fairness this part of anarcho-tyranny works best on disarmed people where effective self-defense itself is problematic (it was judicially nullified in the U.K. in the ’50s).
Yeah, our system allows for some appalling extremes, there’s a case not too far from me where the very small establishment pretty much are bandits towards the remnant of the population that couldn’t or didn’t move away, but the cure you propose, which includes less accountability, is much worse than the disease.
Consider just this one specific case. There’s a chance, now that this idiocy has been exposed, that the citizenry will confront the person writing the check and the government will be forced to admit their mistake and reverse the decision. That’s somewhat likely to happen if the people showing up at your office or public meeting to complain live next door to you or coach your kid’s little league team or stopped to chat with you outside the grocery store while they were buying Girl Scout cookies from your daughter. The likelihood of it happening decreases as the size of a community increases and the government has less of a personal connection with the governed.
Because Freedom of Association and I want the legal governmental entity most likely to irritate me (zoning, etc) as small as possible?
Dayum. I don’t think our late Ambassador in Benghazi had that much firepower protecting him.