re: #54 Maxwell Not So Smart

Vehicles like the one in the photo are a sort of self fulfilled prophecy. First you get wing-nuts who load up with overpowered firearms that hate/fear the police (or name agency that protects people from crazies with too many firearms and a lack of common sense). Then you get police that need vehicles like these to protect themselves from those wing-nuts when they flip out.

Which isn’t actually how they got the vehicles. They got them in two ways: as part of the bullshit ‘war on drugs’ which does nothing but harvest crops of drug dealers and gangsters, not in the least bit addressing the circumstances they germinate from. Or they get them from part of the bullshit ‘war on terror’. The government handed out huge money for anti-terrorism shit after 9/11, and it wasn’t spent wisely. It wasn’t even allowed to be spent, most of the time, on stuff like increased manpower, it had to buy something, training or vehicles, right then.

The militarization of the police was not because of the wingnuts.