Bryan Malinowski, executive director of Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, was fatally wounded in a shootout as ATF agents tried to serve a search warrant at his home.
Bryan Malinowski, executive director of Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, was fatally wounded in a shootout as ATF agents tried to serve a search warrant at his home.
An executive for the Little Rock, Arkansas, airport who was killed in a shootout with federal agents this week had been under investigation over gun sales, search warrant records unsealed Thursday show.
Bryan Malinowski, 53, who was executive director of Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, was shot after he opened fire at federal agents who arrived to serve a warrant Tuesday morning, officials said.
They is an important lesson in this. Taking up arms against the government has two possible outcomes.
You end up in prison.
You and up dead.
You are one person with a small number of consumer firearms. The government can show up with a virtually unlimited number of people, with bigger guns, and weapons up to and including tanks, helicopters, and precision guided bombs.
Whatever collective fantasy you have about you and a group of friends overthrowing the government with your AR15s end up with you in prison or dead.
That's not how revolutions work...a large chunk of people will need to be basically homeless, hungry and jobless for everything to kick off. So long as people can still get their chicken nuggets and iPhones and they have a place to sleep, there will be no revolution. It's ignorant to say that small arms can't do anything, it's how we lost Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan. All small arms, because bombs cannot patrol street corners, and if you start killing Americans, you're going to just feed a revolution, remember you probably live right next to one of these so called gun nuts ...and bombs don't give a shit if his house explodes and showers yours with flaming debris.
It's also not what the revolutionaries need. A revolution in America would need to target power actors (owner class, politicians would just get you more politicians paid for by the same billionaires), precisely and relatively quickly.
Bombs and heavy or indiscriminate weapons would only harm that cause by turning the people against you. Honestly small fire arms and poisons would probably be the most effective weapon in a revolution that could actually lead to any real change.
You say that but Clive Bundy, who had a stand off with the federal government because he didn't feel like paying grazing fees on land that was not his, had his trial dismissed. His son, anarchist Ammon Bundy, who had an armed standoff against the federal government in Malheur Wildlife Refuge which resulted in a death, was acquitted.
If the government had wanted him and his people dead they would have been dead. The only reason they weren't was that the government showed restraint. If you think they could have won had the government decided to end them you are delusional.
Taking up arms against the government has two possible outcomes.
Dunno, my grand-grandparents ended up old Bolsheviks with party membership since 1919.
You are one person with a small number of consumer firearms. The government can show up with a virtually unlimited number of people, with bigger guns, and weapons up to and including tanks, helicopters, and precision guided bombs.
Which is why taking up arms against the government should be approached like an engineering task and not like some impulsive action from Hollywood movies. But it sometimes happens.
And what you are saying wasn't very different even in 14xx-s, to be frank.
In the 14xxs the balance of power was fairly even. They didn't have B52s dropping ninja bombs or A10s or helicopters with mini guns. Gravy Seals will die if they take on the government.
Beyond your point, I always felt that the Second Amendment, ostensibly for the purpose of overthrowing the government, is completely redundant. That is to say, if you’re plotting to overthrow the government by force of arms, whether your firearm is constitutionally protected is kind of moot by that point. Ergo, the 2A should have no relevance with regards to holding government tyranny in check.
2A for overthrow purposes means you and your militia buddies can build up an armory that the government can't take away. Pre-overthrow you're lawful citizens doing perfectly fine civilian stuff. It's a just in case, probably not even going to be used. Once you're rebels, sure, laws don't matter, but if they make preparing yourself to be credible rebels illegal, then the rebellion never gets off the ground.
2A is all about government tyranny - it was a concession to the slave states so they could have local organizations (militias) to prevent/eliminate slave uprisings and to pursue runaway slaves.
The balance of power is dramatically different now.
Then the people had long sticks with sharp points, the government had long sticks with sharp points.
Now the people have AR15s, the government had B52s that can drop Ninja bombs from 40,000 feet and kill you while you're having a cigarette on your balcony.
But by all means, get out your AR15s and give it a go.
You're not even comparing apples and oranges here; it's more like apples and Apple computers.
He wasn't part of a revolutionary army, he was an untrained lone gunman who was seriously outnumbered.
Also, pretty much every successful revolution has had some outside force bearing down on the Establishment. Washington had the French Navy; the Viet Cong had Russia and China; Lenin had WW1 chaos on his side.
But they also questioned why the ATF conducted what they characterized as a dawn raid on a private home that led to the gunfire.
“Even if the allegations in the affidavit are true, they don’t begin to justify what happened,” the family said in the statement, released by an attorney acting as their spokesperson.
Yuuup. Shitty gun nut giving guns to people without any sort of checks, but showing up at dawn doesn't do anyone any good. There were so many other ways to handle this that didn't invite chaos.
I wouldn't trust what the ATF has said yet. They fabricated evidence that people at Waco were selling machine guns and explosives to justify their standoff and raid there, turns out all of that was a lie.
They have all the incentive to take control of this story now so public opinion takes their side. Not unsurprisingly, they did the same thing after Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Even if everything the ATF said here is proven completely true, I agree - fuck the ATF, there was no reason to surround this person's house and start shooting. We should all expect much more out of our government than this. Disband these thugs.
Never trust any cop's version of a shooting. They lie, all the time, and then when they're caught lying they "initiate an investigation" and then just wait for people to forget about it.
Wait, serving a warrant needs to be done during business hours now? Do you all hear yourselves? When cops knock on your door, pulling a gun on them will always result in you getting shot at, be it at dawn, afternoon, or evening.
Maybe just don't pull a gun on the cops at your door and this doesn't happen. Just a thought.
What benefit does a dawn raid provide over just showing up when he's expected to be out of the house? It's worse at protecting evidence, a harder tactical situation for the cops (entering a building where the target can ambush, easily access weaponry, and shoot from cover), and worse for the target making rational decisions (like not shooting at cops). Ignore the target, because you presumably think he got what he deserved. One of the agents got shot and they didn't have to.
This wasn't an imminent danger situation where if they didn't get him at 6 am he was going to set off a dirty bomb at 7 and disappear into the wind. He was going to go to work and then come home later to do the same slow and steady crime he'd been doing for months.
When folks in black armor show up with guns at the crack of dawn (or the middle of the night, see Breonna Taylor), either pounding on the door or knocking it down, I think I'd be in a very weird headspace. Scared, angry, confused, maybe violent too idk. Whether they say they're police, whether they actually are, and whether I'd be able to understand them screaming at me is all questionable.
You know how in the USA you're supposedly innocent until PROVEN guilty? Yeah well being shot to death in your own house while being innocent in accordance of the law says you have no rights at all.
He could have been guilty. We don't know. He was never tried. He was executed in cold blood as an innocent man.
I am usually against gun violence in general but it's hard to sympathise when you're the first one to shoot someone. At least that has been the report so far and from what little his family had shared, it is likely the truth. He wasn't executed but died to his own stupidity based on what we know as of now.
The ATF said that people at Waco and Ruby Ridge shot first too, turns out that was a lie.
We shouldn't believe a word they say about this case yet, wait for an investigation to take place. For some ungodly reason, they have a track record of fabricating gun charges against people, surrounding their home with armed men, and claiming they were shot at first when stories like this hit the news.
Did Breonna Taylor die for her boyfriends "stupidity"? Police raids are often indistinguishable from a criminal invasion to a groggy target. "What we know right now" doesn't tell us anything about the actions of the cops leading up to the shooting..
Rednecks fought for the right to shoot an intruder in your house. It doesn't matter if he was stupid or guilty. He shot someone breaking into his house with his legally acquired weapons while a completely innocent man.
If that's no longer allowed then let's make it law. Because now, it's just hypocrisy