At 11:23 PM -0700 5/22/97, Kent Crispin wrote:
On Thu, May 22, 1997 at 09:04:15PM -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
Do police have any civil rights not endowed to a individual citizen?
No. But on the job, doing their state assigned duties, they have access to instrumentalities not available to private citizens or off-duty police. "On" and "off" duty may sometimes be a little fuzzy in practice, but the principle is clear. It isn't a big deal, and it's not a matter of civil rights. A license to practice medicine gives you the ability to prescribe morphine. A certain class of drivers license lets you drive a school bus full of children.
There is a current case involving a cop who is on the verge of losing his ability to be a cop because he pled "nolo contendre" to a domestic abuse charge a decade or so ago. The local law says that anyone in this situation may not have a gun, period. Thus, now that the law has caught up with him (no details on how and why this was not known until recently) he may not have a gun and thus may well lose his job. This would seem to support Jim Choate's general position. (Though I have my own skepticism that many jurisdictions think it is true.) I have no problem with the notion that there is no weapon, no technology which certain government officials or police may have but which civilians are *not* allowed to have. I don't think the Founders envisioned any such circumstances. The usual cited case is of private ownership of nuclear weapons. For an interesting treatment of this, see Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned." I'm not persuaded that the extreme cases of nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers have much to do with anything. I certainly think "assault weapons" are perfectly fine for individuals to own...even machine guns, which friends of mine have owned. (The Founders didn't know about nuclear weapons and biological weapons, but they surely knew about various other deadly compounds, including deadly poisons and the like. And yet there is no mention in the Constitution or related papers that some of these substances may be owned by the police but not by citizens. "Forbidden knowledge" is the relevant concept here. Of course, what do you expect from a system which outlaws gambling but then has the State running gambling operations?) --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."