As the culture breaks down, half of the country desperately begs government to intervene with more law: legislation, regulation, litigation, or taxation.  Government is only too happy to expand its authority.

Overlooked is this dangerous fact: every law creates one more point of enforcement contact between with government’s enforcers, whether that law is criminal, civil, or administrative.

Now, even a 911 medical emergency call may open your doors to the over-policed state. Paramedics arrived to help this man, and police arrived close behind.  I am not writing to side with the citizen, or to judge the officers.  The operative facts here are:

• The man committed no crime that summoned the police;
• The police had neither warrant nor reasonable suspicion that he had committed a crime, which are the constitutional precedent requirements for entering the home without permission, and for arrest;
• Without reasonable suspicion of him having committed a crime, the man was free to revoke any consent to enter the home;
• Most salient to we gun-owners, the presence of a gun, the verbalized hint of a presence of a gun, or loose “gun-talk” may justify the police in dispatching armed officers to search your home, to take you into custody and to tase you if you do not want to go.

Prosecutorial discretion and liberty work well where citizens are normally, generally, well-behaved on their own–a self-regulated culture.  In the Idiocracy, government gives little grace, even as it envelopes more of daily life, like The Blob, consuming and growing as it consumes.

Conclusion: Far too many behaviors are criminalized; there are far too many malum prohibitum crimes.  Malum prohibitum crimes are behaviors made criminal because a legislated public policy prohibits the behavior, not because the behavior is immoral (malum in se).  Murder is evil; it is malum in se, but gun bans are malum prohibitum crimes.  Of course, in the Idiocracy, some clamor that merely possessing a gun is a deranged act, justifying making it criminal–malum in se–bad in and of itself.

It is disturbing that these officers lacked a warrant, lacked reasonable suspicion, but presumed authority to enter the home, demand the man accompany them (That is an arrest.) and tased him not for fighting them, but for refusing to go.